The news arrived in an email from The New York Times, so it had to be true, given the NYT calls itself the “Newspaper of Record.” (The three young men falsely accused in the infamous Duke Lacrosse Case might differ with the NYT’s adherence to keeping an accurate record, but that is a discussion for a different time.)
After the education activist Christopher Rufo had pointed out in a number of articles that Harvard President Claudine Gay had engaged in near-serial plagiarism on her doctoral dissertation (obtained at Harvard), Gay finally resigned, announcing in a letter to Harvard’s faculty: “It is with a heavy heart but a deep love for Harvard that I write to share that I will be stepping down as president.”
She failed to mention any of the plagiarism allegations, having earlier declared: “I stand by the integrity of my scholarship,” even though Harvard has expelled or disciplined students for incidents that were not even as severe as what Rufo had uncovered. Perhaps it is telling, then, that the NYT repeatedly declared that the plagiarism accusation from Rufo were made in “conservative” publications. While one cannot know the mindset of Anemona Hartocollis, who wrote the article, the NYT has a long history of slanting its coverage to promote progressives and discredit conservatives.
The problem for the NYT and Harvard, however, was not that Gay’s plagiarism was discovered and publicized by a conservative activist, but rather that both the university and the “Newspaper of Record” were happy to ignore both Gay’s academic felonies and continue the fiction that she was academically and morally qualified to lead one of the world’s top academic institutions. Once again, we find that elites in academe and journalism are willing to engage in a massive fraud while telling everyone else to move along because there is nothing to see.
This sorry tale has many layers that cannot be covered fully in this brief article but suffice it to say that despite all protestations from Harvard and Gay’s supporters elsewhere, she never should have been president of Harvard University. For that matter, given her thin publication record, she should not have been tenured at Stanford University or Harvard. Her academic resume contains just 11 peer-reviewed papers which might get one tenured at an R2 institution, but certainly not an R1 university as supposedly prestigious as Harvard. The Harvard Crimson might gush over Gay’s academic record, but in what is left of reality in the world of academic elites, Gay was not academically qualified to be tenured or even hired at that level. Her plagiarism further confirms that point.
So, why did Gay rise so quickly in a world where one’s publishing record means everything? The answer is obvious but purposely hidden in plain sight: her ethnic background. Her parents were Haitian immigrants, and she clearly is an intelligent and well-spoken person, and in the academic world where DEI now reigns supreme, she didn’t need much more. What publications she had were centered around ethnic and racial issues and while she was a dean at Harvard, her main accomplishment was advancing ethnic studies.
Both the areas of ethnic studies and accompanying identity studies have a primary purpose not of expanding learning but being a source of campus activism. For example, the majority of the 88 faculty signees of the infamous Duke Chronicle advertisement prematurely assuming guilt in the Duke Lacrosse Case came from identity studies departments at Duke.
Instead of adding to learning in higher education, ethnic and identity studies departments serve as repositories for minority faculty members who would not qualify in traditional academic areas of study, such as physics, chemistry, or mathematics. That was Claudine Gay’s world, and she excelled in it.
It is ironic that the person who owed her career to the establishment of academically fraudulent standards is taken down by her own fraudulent behavior which many at Harvard tried either to conceal or downplay. As I wrote earlier, Claudine Gay never should have been in that position at all. Brett Stephens in his NYT column better understood the situation than the rest of his journalistic colleagues, writing:
The point may now be moot, but the important question for Harvard was never whether Gay should step down. It was why she was brought on in the first place, after one of the shortest presidential searches in Harvard’s recent history. How did someone with a scholarly record as thin as hers — she has not written a single book, has published only 11 journal articles in the past 26 years and made no seminal contributions to her field — reach the pinnacle of American academia?
The answer, I think, is this: Where there used to be a pinnacle, there’s now a crater. It was created when the social-justice model of higher education, currently centered on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts — and heavily invested in the administrative side of the university — blew up the excellence model, centered on the ideal of intellectual merit and chiefly concerned with knowledge, discovery and the free and vigorous contest of ideas.
Indeed, Gay was an active participant in blowing up the old standards of academic scholarship and Gay succeeded well beyond what she might have imagined. However, enough of the old world has survived to expose her fraudulent behavior. However, do not expect any changes in the world of elite academics where those in charge mirror the attitudes of what the French statesman Tallyrand once said about the Bourbons: “They learned nothing and forgot nothing.”
