US academics fear grim precedent set by Gay’s Harvard exit

With Claudine Gay accepting debatable instances of plagiarism as final straw, faculty see odds getting hopeless for countering unified political and economic power

January 8, 2024
Claudine Gay,with Liz Magill, resident of University of Pennsylvania before the House Education and Workforce Committee at the Rayburn House Office Building on December 05, 2023 in Washington, DC as discussed in the article
Source: Getty images

By surrendering to a political mob despite the apparent protection of the world’s most powerful university, Claudine Gay has set a precedent that has left academics wondering who else can possibly survive the US’ rising ideological crusades.

Professor Gay stepped down as president of Harvard University after six months of stifling pressure from an alignment of conservative forces, largely navigating the howls of pro-Israel activists, only to succumb to borderline complaints about poor editing in her past scholarly writings.

It amounts to a politically based toppling of the leader of the nation’s most prestigious and well-endowed university, several academics said, with ominous implications for anyone else in academia who dares to persistently challenge the interests of US political and economic wealth.

“This is the most prominent scalp,” said Dov Waxman, professor of political science at the University of California, Los Angeles, and director of its Y&S Nazarian Centre for Israel Studies. “That’s why I think this is going to really embolden those who want to continue this.”

The ultimate success of the plagiarism complaints as the apparently determinative weapon against Professor Gay, he and other academics warned, was especially worrying, since it is an allegation that is becoming very easy to raise with the help of advanced computer tools and often very difficult to adjudicate in a fair and consistent manner.

“Very few of us can probably hold up to that kind of scrutiny,” said Jennifer Ruth, professor of film studies at Portland State University who writes on issues of academic freedom through the American Association of University Professors. “By giving in, Harvard has only set the stage for continuing the expansion of this kind of scare and chilling of academic freedom and targeting of higher ed.”

The endgame for Professor Gay began a month earlier, when she and the heads of two other elite US universities – all women relatively new to their presidencies – agreed to appear before Congress to answer Republican allegations that student protests against Israeli military attacks on Palestinian civilians amounted to campus tolerance of antisemitism. That moment of political theatre – combined with sustained criticism from wealthy individual donors – soon led one of the presidents, Elizabeth Magill of the University of Pennsylvaniato step down.

Professor Gay appeared to have survived the moment, backed by hundreds of faculty demanding that she stay. But she then became consumed by a parallel campaign by conservative activists compiling a list of more than 40 instances – typically brief excerpts of a few sentences or less – that they put forth as evidence that her scholarly record was marred by repeatedly citing others without proper credit.

Professor Gay – the first black president of the nation’s oldest and most prestigious university – said she had resigned “in the best interests of Harvard” to let the institution move forward. In a subsequent article for The New York Times, she described a brief presidency filled with constant attacks including death threats, and urged her academic colleagues nationwide not to succumb to “the loudest and most extreme voices in our culture”.

She acknowledged that her critics were able to find “instances in my academic writings where some material duplicated other scholars’ language, without proper attribution”, but said she immediately corrected such “errors”, and “never misrepresented my research findings, nor have I ever claimed credit for the research of others”.

Academia has long struggled with evaluating what kinds of duplications or apparent duplications in writing deserve what kind of sanction, said Duff Wrobbel, professor of applied communication studies at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. SIU was home to a 2007 case that led it and numerous US institutions to make more nuanced assessments of the matter, involving a former Democratic congressman, Glenn Poshard, who was obliged by a faculty senate vote to step down as president of the SIU system because of unattributed material in his doctoral dissertation, then allowed to stay after further investigation called it “inadvertent plagiarism”.

Professor Wrobbel said it was usually straightforward to see if a writer intended to be deceitful about sources, and that many scholarly articles contain similar chunks of phrasing because academics – for good reason – share common concepts and a common set of language.

“There’s only so many ways to say something,” he said. “And any time you change a word, you muddy it up, and academics are trained to not do that.”

Yet there was little evidence, said Professor Ruth, that Professor Gay’s critics were interested in that kind of attentive analysis. Even her chief critic in the congressional hearing, Elise Stefanik, was accused by a Democratic colleague of copying large portions of a letter she sent to the Harvard, Penn and Massachusetts Institute of Technology presidents after the hearing demanding their resignations. Ms Stefanik dismissed the duplication as “something that happens every day on Capitol Hill”.

Such instances of apparent hypocrisy from Professor Gay’s antagonists appear to have no effect on critics of higher education, Professor Ruth said, because ideologues have a long list of supporters willing to back them regardless.

“It’s total scare,” she said. “It is part of the rise of fascism.”

paul.basken@timeshighereducation.com

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Reader's comments (11)

"Her conservative critics compiled a dossier of 40 instances in the former president’s scholarly work where she appeared to cite others without proper credit" Actually laughed at this nonsense. It'd be well worth running this dismal article through a plagiarism checker to see how much of it is actually Paul's own work.
Equity, Diversity and Inclusion supporters calling their opponents "ideological." Priceless.
It seems a stretch to say that the dispute is "part of the rise of fascism". Perhaps this point could have been elaborated.
The article is in effect an opinion piece and should have been tagged as such; not presented as a news where I would have expected neutral reporting - had me wondering if the quote marks had dropped out, bit then realised it was the journalist’s own thoughts being expressed rather than his reporting of protagonists in the furore surrounding this dismal episode in US HE.
I too thought it was supposed to be a news item. Soon realised it was an opinionated puff piece reinforced by the unexplained last quote.
Strange no article defending Canadian Jordan Peterson's Academic freedom. Ms. Gay does not even know what scrutiny means.
Professor Peterson said the Cambridge fellowship invitation had been rescinded by “conspiratorial, authoritarian and cowardly bureaucrats” who identified neither themselves nor their reasons.
Claudine Gay was a prime example of a 'diversity hire'. She didn't get the job on the basis of merit, rather on the basis of her race and gender. Her lack of moral fibre and intellectual ability were put on show for all to see, and she had to go.
Regardless of what you think of Dr. Claudine Gay and Harvard University's handling of this controversy, the THE "article" uses loaded language to present controversial opinions as journalistic facts and thereby disserves readers.
One of Claudine Gay's critics was the (black, female) scholar, Carol Swain, who claimed that her own work had been plagiarised by Gay and who called for her resignation. https://www.thecollegefix.com/black-scholar-plagiarized-by-harvards-gay-sends-legal-demand-letter-unlawful-copying/ Others, including the Columbia University linguist John McWhorter and the Brown University economist Glenn Loury, argued that the multiple instances of plagiarism were much more serious than 'borderline'. Gay had a publications record that was not stellar, one perhaps suitable for the president of a community college or second-tier university, but not for "the leader of the nation’s most prestigious and well-endowed university". The members of the Harvard Corporation (Board of Trustees) chose someone who was not suitable to be the President of Harvard. They should have resigned, too. And as for 'ideological crusades', some would say that DEI is a good example...
The postmodern left has completely lost the plot - defending the completely indefensible for partisan reasons. These are very dangerous times indeed.

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