Last week, the Republican Party’s obloquy of the culture in America’s colleges overlapped with an old academic offence, and at the centre of it was social scientist Claudine Gay.
Ms. Gay, who studies race and politics, has been with Harvard University for 17 years. In July 2023, she assumed charge as the university’s new and first Black president. Her tenure also began right after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in higher education, leaving her to negotiate the admission of a diverse student body while following the law.
Ms. Gay is the daughter of Haitian immigrants. She finished schooling at the Phillips Exeter Academy, followed by a year at Princeton University, then Stanford University, and finally Harvard University — all elite institutions.
Trouble began to brew when the House Committee on Education and Labour invited her and her counterparts at the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for a hearing on Capitol Hill on December 5. The committee was chaired by Republican Party representative Virginia Foxx, who lambasted these institutes’ failure, as she alleged, to stem anti-Semitism on their campuses in response to Israel’s war on Hamas. But Ms. Gay simply asserted the university campus is a safe space for non-violent discourse and whose administration acts “when speech crosses into conduct”. Only four days later, UPenn president Elizabeth Magill resigned under pressure — mounting from the war’s early days — from the institute’s alumni and donors. Conservative activists then turned their attention to Ms. Gay.
On December 10, activists Christopher Brunet and Christopher Rufo published allegations that Ms. Gay had plagiarised parts of her Ph.D. thesis, which she had submitted at Harvard University in 1998. Soon after, a conservative publication reported finding plagiarised content in four of Ms. Gay’s papers published between 1993 and 2017.
Ms. Gay did not respond to the allegations. Many of her peers also supported her decision not to take responsibility at first. She later asked the journals that published these papers to incorporate corrections, but this was poorly received. For example, historian David Bell wrote Ms. Gay was responding as if to “an embarrassing number of typographical errors” rather than plagiarism.
Others were also derided for attempting to cast plagiarism in euphemistic terms such as “duplicative language”.
As the Right demanded that Harvard oust Ms. Gay, the scandal began to echo l’affaire Tessier-Lavigne. Last year, Stanford University’s then president Marc Tessier-Lavigne tendered his resignation after independent researchers found evidence of research misconduct in scientific papers in which he had been listed as a co-author.
Mr. Tessier-Lavigne’s departure was less politically fraught but the idea that even university presidents were not beyond reproach vis-à-vis misconduct lingered. And plagiarism is the sort of misconduct whose wrongness depends as much on the heft and amount of text copied without attribution as the person who did so.
This is why, while many scholars deemed the first allegations by Mr. Brunet and Mr. Rufo to be mild, the fact that it was Harvard’s president being held responsible caught academics between condemning her for setting a bad example and shielding her from the hateful, racist rhetoric being directed at her.
Gay finally resigned as university president on January 2. The New York Times published an article by her the next day. “The campaign against me … was merely a single skirmish in a broader war to unravel public faith in pillars of American society,” she wrote.
The Right organised a deplorable witch-hunt against Ms. Gay. Yet her response to the allegations sought to downplay them despite the repetitive nature of the alleged offence. Thus ended her brief but eventful term as Harvard University president.
Ms. Gay still holds her ground in characterising the larger forces at play as endangering America’s institutions, but that her peers tried to defend plagiarism to defend her — and that Ms. Gay may have been spared her resignation if she had directly addressed the allegations from the start — has left a sour aftertaste.
