National Review Online
Tuesday,
January 02, 2024
The new
year is barely two days old, yet it has already witnessed a surprise conclusion
to a sordid controversy from 2023: Claudine Gay has tendered her resignation as president of Harvard
University after her unsuccessful testimony before Congress on the subject of
campus antisemitism led to a deeper exploration of her questionable academic
background and uncovered a stunning number of examples of plagiarism dotting a
publication history only a mere eleven pieces long in the first place.
It
is a pathetic end for the first black and female president of such an august
intellectual institution, but one that all involved — Gay, the university
administration, its faculty, and the unruly student body alike — were wholly
complicit in bringing about. Gay’s resignation is richly deserved, but it
obviously isn’t going to solve the crisis America currently faces on its elite
campuses.
At
this point, there can be no denying the gravity of the plagiarism accusations
against her. All throughout her academic career dating back to her days as a
graduate student, Claudine Gay engaged in serial plagiarism in nearly all of
her published writing. It is no exaggeration at all to say that Gay was
revealed — by the dogged work of researchers like Christopher Rufo as well as
Aaron Sibarium of the Washington Free Beacon and Ryan Mills
and Zach Kessel here at National
Review, among others — to have been a phony scholar, one whose very small
and uninfluential body of work was itself appropriated from others in a
repeating pattern of indifference to the basics of proper scholarship. Gay
seems to have been in the university business for other reasons, and (even more
shamefully) her peers recognized and celebrated it: Despite having a negligible
record of scholarship — and this before it was understood that what little
existed contained instances of plagiarism — she was rapidly promoted by her
peers from a tenure-track faculty position to a full professorship with tenure,
then made dean of the School of Arts & Sciences, then president of Harvard
itself. It is safe to surmise now that none of this happened because of her
brilliant contributions to advancing knowledge.
But
the plagiarism charges are only the hook upon which Gay’s reputation was
publicly mounted to wither and die when exposed to critical sunlight; they are
not what ultimately brought her brief career as president to an end. The fatal
look into Gay’s (as it turns out, largely nonexistent) academic credentials
was triggered by her repulsive testimony before Congress on
December 5, 2023, where she burst into national prominence by repeatedly
averring, with her peers, that while calling for the death of Jews and the
extinction of Israel was “personally abhorrent,” whether it violated campus
policies was context-dependent in a way that, by contrast, accidental
misgendering is not. The almost reptilian moral indifference of the testimony
delivered on that day has since cost two of the three testifying university
presidents (Gay and the University of Pennsylvania’s Liz Magill) their positions.
Yet
it must be understood that a mere change at the top will not alter the diseased
university culture and intellectual dogma at places such as Harvard or the
University of Pennsylvania. When it comes to an academic monoculture that has
long been fueled, in part, by DEI administrative power and prerogatives, the
fish rots from the body up, not the head down; the work of fixing the madness
of campus culture will involve massive structural reforms like tearing out DEI
administrative culture from the university system root and branch, not merely
cosmetic leadership changes. Similarly, Gay’s resignation will not change the
fact that you can flip up a rock anywhere in elite academia and find hundreds
more Claudine Gays, whose careers benefit from an almost comical indifference
to the scholarly standards compared to DEI imperatives. It is worth noting that
the Harvard Corporation stood by Gay for weeks, initially clearing her after a
superficial investigation that downplayed “a few instances of inadequate citation”
while ignoring dozens of other examples of potential plagiarism that had been
flagged by researchers.
In her resignation letter, Claudine Gay offers no mea culpa
and fails to even address the specific accusations against her. She implies she
is resigning not because of any academic sins she herself personally committed
— for any such admission would, on a logical level, make her planned return to
a teaching position equally as untenable as retaining the presidency. No, she
maintains that it was “distressing to have doubt cast on my commitments to
confronting hate and to upholding scholarly rigor—two bedrock values that are
fundamental to who I am—and frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and
threats fueled by racial animus.” Perhaps this is understandable — people
rarely show equanimity in the face of massive personal, public disgrace.
Nonetheless, she will remain on the faculty at Harvard University, and Harvard
University, like almost all of our elite academic institutions, is sick to its
soul with an inability to confront the hatred running rampant on its campus.
The battle for sanity in American education continues.
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