Pun Salad

Perhaps we should be happy that Harvard is determined to keep Claudine Gay as its president. Nothing could do more to focus attention on the institutional rot the university has been suffering for many years.

Professor William Jacobson contemplates here the harm that has been done to the “Harvard brand.”

He notes that Claudine Gay is a non-scholar whose academic publications wouldn’t get her tenure at a low-level college. Ah, but Harvard no longer cares about scholarship — it is clearly concerned only about having a leader who will push the “diversity” agenda full throttle. In that regard, she was in on the nasty attack on Professor Roland Fryer because he (a scholar of repute) wrote a paper that undermined the leftist narrative about race. He also writes that she plagiarized the work of (among others) Professor Carol Swain.

Jacobson writes, “Gay is a child of privilege who learned how to play the game among other elites — she stole from Swain and shut down Fryer on her path to the presidency.”

I write as one of the scholars whose work Ms. Gay plagiarized. She failed to credit me for sections from my 1993 book, “Black Faces, Black Interests: The Representation of African Americans in Congress” and an article I published in 1997, “Women and Blacks in Congress: 1870-1996.” The damage to me extends beyond the two instances of plagiarism identified by researchers Christopher Rufo and Christopher Brunet.

“Black Faces, Black Interests” received numerous accolades and recognitions. In 1994 it was selected one of Library Choice Journal’s seven outstanding academic books and won the Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award and the V.O. Key Award for political science. It won the D.B. Hardeman Prize for its scholarship on Congress in 1995. My book has been cited in court opinions, including by U.S. Supreme Court justices in Johnson v. De Grandy (1994) and Georgia v. Ashcroft (2003).

[…]

Harvard can’t condemn Ms. Gay because she is the product of an elite system that holds minorities of high pedigree to a lower standard. This harms academia as a whole, and it demeans Americans, of all races, who had to work for everything they earned.

When a student plagiarizes, it is often seen as a failure of this learning process. In contrast, the president of an esteemed institution like Harvard is expected to be well-versed in academic integrity. Plagiarism at such a high level suggests a deliberate breach of ethical standards, which is more serious given their role and influence. … The president of Harvard, as a leader and scholar, holds a position of significant influence and authority. Plagiarism in their scholarly work would severely undermine their credibility, the integrity of their research, and could lead to broader implications for the reputation of the institution they represent. … The president of a university is held to higher standards of accountability due to their leadership position. Plagiarism in their work can lead to severe consequences, including loss of their position, public censure, and damage to their professional career. For a student, consequences are usually confined to academic penalties, such as failing the assignment or course, and potentially facing disciplinary action from the university.

So far, Harvard has stuck by Gay, merely noting that some of the articles would be reworded to satisfy critics. This did not satisfy CNN's Em Steck, who correctly took the school to task for failing to address "her clearest instances of plagiarism." And according to the Times, the university's review of Gay's work was conducted by Harvard Corporation—the university's governing board—rather than the office of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, which would normally handle academic malfeasance.

People are free to conclude that Gay's transgressions are not quite serious enough to merit termination. They are also free to point out that such sloppiness is probably rampant in higher education and certainly under-policed. (At some point, though, this isn't really an excuse for Gay—but rather a broader indictment of the entire project of elite education.)

I, for one, wield no pitchfork on this. I did not call for Dr. Gay’s dismissal in the wake of her performance at the antisemitism hearings in Washington, and on social media I advised at first to ease up our judgment about the initial plagiarism accusations. But in the wake of reports of additional acts of plagiarism and Harvard’s saying that she will make further corrections to past writing, the weight of the charges has taken me from “wait and see” to “that’s it.”

If it is mobbish to call on Black figures of influence to be held to the standards that others are held to, then we have arrived at a rather mysterious version of antiracism, and just in time for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday in less than a month. I would even wish Harvard well in searching for another Black woman to serve as president if that is an imperative. But at this point that Black woman cannot, with any grace, be Claudine Gay.

And if Harvard declines to dismiss her out of fear of being accused of racism — a reasonable although hardly watertight surmise — Dr. Gay should do the right thing on her own. For Harvard, her own dignity and our national commitment to assessing Black people (and all people) according to the content of their character, she should step down.