Claudine Gay Should Have Been Fired for the Work She Didn’t Copy

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Wednesday, December 13, 2023

 

Dominic notes:

 

Harvard president Claudine Gay’s plagiarism has been publicly readable for years, and nobody noticed until now. She was getting away with it just fine, until she was in the unusual situation of testifying before Congress about whether calling for genocide was against her university’s code of conduct. Most people will never be in that situation.

 

My explanation for this is that Claudine Gay’s work is pointless. Noah described it yesterday as representing “modest contributions to the sum of human knowledge.” Is it? Do we really believe that? If Claudine Gay had never published her papers, would human knowledge be worse off in any way? Would anyone be less wise, less aware, less happy? I find that extremely difficult to believe. I think there’s a reason that, relative to actual academics, Gay has published almost nothing, and I think that the reason is that she’s not very good at it.

 

At the Free Beacon, Aaron Sibarium records that “academics say the pattern raises serious questions about Gay’s scholarly integrity and her fitness to lead the nation’s oldest university.” But, in truth, it doesn’t do anything of the sort, because Gay isn’t a “scholar,” she doesn’t have any “integrity,” and her “fitness to lead the nation’s oldest university” has never been contingent upon her academic output. Like most other university presidents of our era, Gay is an apparatchik. Her job is to enforce orthodoxy, to channel huge amounts of money into Harvard’s orbit, and to use the imprimatur that the institution has built up over centuries to advance the political goals of her friends. She’s a plagiarist, sure, and, by Harvard’s own rules, she ought to be punished for it. But her plagiarism doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things, because nothing of value has been lost as a result of it. There is not a single person in the world who is crying into their cornflakes this morning because Claudine Gay’s work has been revealed to be hollow, and there never will be. Given the standards that are applied to others, Gay should probably be fired for the work she copied. In a more serious world, though, she’d have been fired for her own work.