The downfall of Harvard’s president has elevated the threat of unearthing plagiarism, a cardinal sin in academia, as a possible new weapon in conservative attacks on higher education.
Claudine Gay’s resignation Tuesday followed weeks of mounting accusations that she lifted language from other scholars in her doctoral dissertation and journal articles. The allegations surfaced amid backlash over her congressional testimony about antisemitism on campus.
The plagiarism allegations came not from her academic peers but her political foes, led by conservatives who sought to oust Gay and put her career under intense scrutiny in hopes of finding a fatal flaw. Her detractors charged that Gay — who has a Ph.D. in government, was a professor at Harvard and Stanford and headed Harvard’s largest division before being promoted — got the top job in large part because she is a Black woman.
Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist who helped orchestrate the effort, celebrated her departure as a win in his campaign against elite institutions of higher education. On X, formerly Twitter, he wrote “SCALPED,” as if Gay was a trophy of violence, invoking a gruesome practice taken up by white colonists who sought to eradicate Native Americans.
“Tomorrow, we get back to the fight,” he said on X, describing a “playbook” against institutions deemed too liberal by conservatives. His latest target: efforts to promote diversity, equity and inclusion in education and business.
Tom Nichols: “Claudine Gay engaged in academic misconduct. Everything else about her case is irrelevant, including the silly claims of her right-wing opponents.”
David French: “This is exactly the right call. Harvard can’t impose lower standards of academic integrity on its president than it imposes on its students. I could not have graduated from the law school with similar levels of plagiarism. She shouldn’t lead the institution.”
Jonathan Chait: “Claudine Gay’s resignation as Harvard’s president for having repeatedly engaged in low-level plagiarism is a strange and sad ending to her brief tenure as a symbol in the culture wars. The tragicomedy of it lies in the disjuncture between the picayune scale of her sloppiness and the broader ideological stakes she came to symbolize. On those stakes, Gay was right. But on the morally insignificant matter that doomed her — the discovery that she had violated rules of attribution in her academic work — she was frustratingly defenseless.”
Never heard that one before