Claudine Gay has resigned her Harvard Presidency following extensive allegations of academic impropriety. She and her enormous glasses of racial understanding must return to the faculty, where they will lurk for years to come like a very expensive bad smell.
Gay was appointed as the first-ever black President of America’s wealthiest and most selective university, in a “historic first for people of colour”. Alas, her presidency has turned out to be a first in other respects as well. For example, she will go into the history books as the first-ever Harvard President to have resigned after just six months in office. Womp womp.
There is a lot of butthurt in the American press right now. Gay’s appointment, once hailed as a “victory for diversity”, has become instead an occasion of “victory” for “Dr. Gay’s critics… in the escalating ideological battle over American higher education”. Reporters for the Associated Press in particular deplore the fact that nefarious actors on the right are wielding a new “conservative weapon against colleges”. This weapon, they inform us, is “the threat of unearthing plagiarism”.
The downfall of Harvard’s President has elevated the threat of unearthing plagiarism, a cardinal sin in academia, as a possible new weapon in conservative attacks on higher education.
Claudine Gay’s resignation Tuesday followed weeks of mounting accusations that she lifted language from other scholars in her doctoral dissertation and journal articles. …
The plagiarism allegations came not from her academic peers but her political foes, led by conservatives who sought to oust Gay and put her career under intense scrutiny in hopes of finding a fatal flaw. Her detractors charged that Gay… got the top job in large part because she is a black woman.
There is a very tiresome game at work here: 1) American schools go to incredible lengths to recruit black faculty and black administrators. 2) They eagerly advertise and celebrate these efforts as emblematic of their commitment to Diversity. 3) They put their Diverse hires and their Diverse presidents all over their websites and they issue press releases about how Diverse they are. 4) At the same time, they require everybody to pretend that none of these professors and presidents were appointed because they were Diverse, even though over-promoting the Diverse was the entire point of the first three moves in this game.
From there, our AP reporters leap from one absurdity to the next:
Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist who helped orchestrate the effort, celebrated her departure as a win in his campaign against elite institutions of higher education. On X, formerly Twitter, he wrote “SCALPED”, as if Gay was a trophy of violence, invoking a gruesome practice taken up by white colonists who sought to eradicate Native Americans.
Notwithstanding the ridiculous revisionist mythologies of 1960s historians, the taking of scalps was not primarily a tactic of “white colonists” but rather of Native Americans, who eagerly scalped each other centuries before Europeans ever sailed to the New World. European settlers took up scalping only sporadically, borrowing it from the indigenous peoples they encountered. Perhaps somebody should also tell the AP that, in the centuries since, scalping has fallen out of vogue and become a metaphor.
In Gay’s case, many academics were troubled with how the plagiarism came to light: as part of a coordinated campaign to discredit Gay and force her from office, in part because of her involvement in efforts for racial justice on campus…
Walter M. Kimbrough, the former President of the historically black Dillard University, said what unfolded at Harvard reminded him of an adage from his mother, a black graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, in the 1950s.
As a black person in academia, “you always have to be twice, three times as good”, he said.
“There are going to be people, particularly if they have any inkling that the person of colour is not the most qualified, who will label them a ‘DEI hire’, like they tried to label her,” Kimbrough said. “If you want to lead an institution like (Harvard)… there are going to be people who are looking to disqualify you.”
The press print a lot of ridiculous stuff every day, but the idea that the Gays of academia “have to be twice, three times as good” as their unDiverse peers is one of the dumbest, most risible and thoroughly stupid statements I can imagine. Claudine Gay achieved tenure at Harvard with a handful of articles and a single book, none of them particularly noteworthy or groundbreaking. That makes her twice or three times as bad as the average tenured Harvard professor.
Next our racial apologists bring in somebody named Davarian to explain how plagiarism is being weaponised against the melanated:
In highly specialised fields, scholars often use similar language to describe the same concepts, said Davarian Baldwin, a historian at Trinity College who writes about race and higher education. Gay clearly made mistakes, he said, but with the spread of software designed to detect plagiarism, it wouldn’t be hard to find similar overlap in works by other presidents and professors.
The tool becomes dangerous, he added, when it “falls into the hands of those who argue that academia in general is a cesspool of incompetence and bad actors”.
Gay’s sin was manifestly not the “use” of “similar language to describe” common technical “concepts”. It was the wholesale unattributed borrowing of prose, apparently because Gay is so dim she cannot command the standard idiom required in her field. Nor does Gay owe her downfall to plagiarism software; the initial discoveries of plagiarism all worked outwards from her citations, which is how plagiarism hunters typically work.
Without commenting on the merits of the allegations against Gay, President Irene Mulvey of the American Association of University Professors said she fears plagiarism investigations could be “weaponised” to pursue a political agenda.
“There is a Right-wing political attack on higher education right now, which feels like an existential threat to the academic freedom that has made American higher education the envy of the world,” Mulvey said.
She worries Gay’s departure will put a new strain on college presidents. In addition to their work courting donors, policymakers and alumni, presidents are supposed to protect faculty from interference so they can research unimpeded.
“For presidents to be taken down like this, it does not bode well for academic freedom,” she said. “I think it’ll chill the climate for academic freedom. And it may make university presidents less likely to speak out against this inappropriate interference for fear of losing their jobs or being targeted.”
Irene Mulvey is a total idiot. Professors should produce research that can withstand scrutiny, especially scrutiny from their critics. That is the whole point of publishing in the first place. I can’t imagine how the requirement to cite one’s sources completely and honesty might “chill the climate for academic freedom”. Perhaps Mulvey means to say that misconduct like Gay’s is so widespread that scrutiny has the potential to take down dozens or even hundreds of academics and university presidents. If that’s the case, maybe they should stop plagiarising.
This piece originally appeared on Eugyppius’s Substack newsletter. You can subscribe here.
Stop Press: The Spectator reports that the BBC has predictably rushed to defend Gay, calling her a “casualty of campus culture wars”.
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Is Claudine Gay’s personal motto “Who dares, wins”?
And there was me thinking this was all about dishonesty and educational ‘fraud’!
Anti-plagiarism is racist.
Writing using well constructed English grammar betrays your white privilege.
Grammar is racist.
She wasn’t!
English is racist because it’s a language spoken by racists and they’re racists because they’re speaking a racist language.
That’s the pro-leftie argument against anything in full: Universal guilt by mutual association. A more common form is XY is a Nazi because he’s frequenting well-known Nazi meeting place ABC! After this has sunk in by repetition for a while, it can be used the other way round: ABC is a Nazi meeting place because well-known Nazis like XY go there. As YZ goes there, too, he must be a Nazi as well!
“Universal guilt by mutual association”
Spot on. Trump is Literally Hitler and Trump endorsed HCQ as a treatment for “covid” so HCQ is evil and must not be used, and anyone who advocates use of HCQ is Literally Hitler just like Trump.
I enjoyed this too:
“plagiarism is being weaponised against the melanated”
Ouch!
Eugyppius has a way with words
Yup.
The large glasses don’t hide the fact she’s a nasty idiot with vicious and intolerant politics.
Condemning plagiarism is not a new weapon. https://www.etymonline.com/word/plagiarism
Identifying plagiarism has become easier with the development of software. This sort of software is widely used to keep students honest.
Claudine Gay is not the victim here – she’s the perpetrator.
Also an interesting view on this from Igor Chudov-
https://www.igor-chudov.com/p/plagiarist-harvard-president-resigns?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=441185&post_id=140293544&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&r=x6a6a&utm_medium=email
https://off-guardian.org/2024/01/03/moscow-to-prioritize-davos-endorsed-plan-to-cattle-tag-the-planet/
A much more serious story concerning Digital ID which will effectively turn the planet in to a series of Digital Concentration Camps.
Not for the squeamish.
But is it new?
(Tom Lehrer – every inch a Harvard man himself.)
Seems the three things you need to be a top academic is the right colour skin, Ctrl-C, and Ctrl-V.
As a student any work I write has to go through ‘turnitin’, which picks up plagiarism.
It will always pick up some phrases commonly used, so even original work never gets 0%.
I gather she has lifted whole paragraphs. So easy to check nowadays.
European settlers who in indulged in scalping would be accused of cultural appropriation these days.
I bet if she stole, sorry, ‘borrowed’ words and articles from an Associated Press news story and passed them off as her own they wouldn’t be so forgiving.