The Ivory Tower Is Crumbling

By Jack Crowe

Friday, December 22, 2023

 

Harvard administrators are sticklers for the rules — sometimes: Dozens of students were forced to withdraw from the university for academic-integrity violations during President Claudine Gay’s time as dean of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

 

The university seems to be less concerned with the conduct of Gay herself, who has since ascended to the presidency, the pinnacle of an academic career that appears to have consisted mainly of plagiarizing her fellow scholars, including her colleagues at Harvard.

 

After initially downplaying Gay’s questionable record — on the grounds that she merely failed to include proper citations and quotations on just four occasions — Harvard retreated slightly in a Wednesday night statement, acknowledging that Gay will also be asking for three corrections in her doctoral dissertation.

 

The slow climbdown has not impressed the academics whose work Gay apparently plagiarized, as National Review’s Ryan Mills and Zach Kessel reported Thursday:

 

It does not appear that any of the corrections will address portions of Gay’s doctoral dissertation drawing heavily from the work of Vanderbilt University professor Carol Swain, in some cases reproducing her writing word for word without citation.

 

Swain — who has been outspoken about her feelings on the plagiarism scandal — told National Review that she is concerned by Harvard’s response to the revelations of its president’s academic-integrity issues. She feels that the university should have reached out to her and the other scholars both as a professional courtesy, to inform them their work may have been plagiarized, and as part of their fact-finding effort to determine the extent of Gay’s transgressions, since they’re the foremost experts on their own work.

 

“I have a problem with the way Harvard has reacted to the entire situation, because it seems like — with the assistance of some of their professors and other elites — they’re trying to redefine what is plagiarism,” Swain said, “and they’re making the argument that there are different levels and, by extension, that some of it is acceptable. That is a problem for higher education in America.”

 

A number of experts and academics contacted by National Review said that the examples of potential plagiarism that have been flagged are serious, and the large number of instances suggests a pattern.

 

Lee Jussim, a social psychologist and distinguished professor at Rutgers University, said he’s “never seen anything like” the plagiarism scandal involving Gay.

 

“I can tell you, I expelled a student from my lab when I first got to Rutgers who I caught doing something not all that different — probably less — than what she has done,” he said.

 

Harvard’s board claims to have conducted a thorough, independent investigation after the initial plagiarism allegations were first brought to its attention, but that effort apparently did not include a review of Gay’s doctoral thesis. The board didn’t bother with that until later, after further press inquiries.

 

More from Zach and Ryan:

 

Harvard’s delay in identifying errors in Gay’s doctoral thesis “means that they, almost certainly, did not do a thorough review of her past work,” according to Jonathan Bailey, a plagiarism expert and consultant who publishes the website Plagiarism Today.

 

“It’s frustrating that Harvard (or even Gay herself) didn’t thoroughly investigate her prior works and, seemingly, just checked and responded to the initial allegations. They had an opportunity to get ahead of this and missed it,” Bailey said.

 

As donors continue to pull their money and the public pressure mounts thanks to negative coverage in mainstream outlets like the New York Times and CNN, Harvard may be forced to ditch Gay.

 

But the damage is done.

 

Plagiarism aside, the president of Harvard has been revealed as an intellectual fraud. She has published eleven papers in her entire career and the cornerstone of her academic record, her doctoral dissertation, contains nothing approaching an original thought — just ask Swain, whose work she relied on and who is now calling for her to be fired.

 

A brief comparison: Larry Summers had published 150 scholarly papers and multiple books by the time he was made president of Harvard in 2001. He was also coming off a stint as Treasury secretary.

 

How far we have fallen.

 

It’s almost as if Claudine Gay wasn’t hired for her scholarship.

 

Lee Jussim, the Rutgers professor, told Ryan and Zach that she was likely hired for an altogether different purpose:

 

Ultimately, [Jussim] said, he suspects Gay will be protected. Most high-level university administrators are “not really there for their scholarship,” he said, and that likely includes Gay.

 

If advancing ideology is Gay’s primary mission as Harvard president, he said, “who cares about any of this?”

 

The Harvard board’s decision to stand by Gay — even to praise her as the right leader for the current moment — makes a lot more sense once you accept Jussim’s framing.

 

She’s doing the job she was hired to do.