Claudine Gay’s Resignation Won’t Solve Harvard’s Problems
https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/01/claudine-gays-resignation-wont-solve-harvards-problems/
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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