The Lessons of Claudine Gay

1. Background

In case you didn’t follow academia’s most exciting recent story, Claudine Gay was the first African American woman to be president of Harvard University. She resigned in disgrace this month, after just 6 months on the job. (Note: She resigned from the presidency, not her job as a professor. She’ll still be teaching Harvard students, for $900,000 a year.) This was in the wake of criticism over:

1. Her testimony before Congress, in which Congresswoman Elise Stefanik grilled her and the presidents of UPenn and MIT about recent antisemitism on college campuses. Stefanik especially wanted to know whether calling for the genocide of Jews violated Harvard’s, MIT’s, and Penn’s policies on harassment. None of the presidents could give an unequivocal answer.

2. About 40 instances of plagiarism or plagiarism-like activities by Gay in her academic papers and her dissertation.

3. Accusations that she may have falsified data in one of her papers.

Some big Harvard donors called for her resignation. But 500 faculty members signed a very strong letter in support of Gay. Then on Jan. 2, she posted a completely unapologetic resignation letter. Can you guess what she blamed for her need to resign? Her mistakes as a leader? Her academic dishonesty? The appearance of being soft on anti-Semitism? No, no, no. You know the answer: It’s racism!

“… it has been 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.”

Gay’s NYT opinion column painted her ouster as part of a general crusade by the sinister right-wingers against black people, against academic excellence, and against truth.

2. Ridiculous Takes

We should be used to it by now, but the woke take on the story is stunningly delusional:

“Black Excellence Couldn’t Save Claudine Gay From Being On MAGA’s Hit List”

“Inside Claudine Gay’s resignation and the hyper scrutiny haunting Black women in higher ed”

It seems that Claudine Gay was an excellent, leading scholar, but she was forced to resign due to white hatred of her Blackness. And this just goes to show how black scholars are held to higher standards and have to work twice as hard to make it in academia.

Note: This is after the president of Penn, a white woman, also resigned over her nearly-identical answers in the same Congressional hearing. She didn’t have any plagiarism charges, yet she had to resign almost immediately. But anyway, it’s all about race.

And of course, this was all a politically-motivated attack on her, coming from MAGA Republicans.

Does this sound familiar? It sounds to me like the wokists have borrowed the Trump playbook. Never apologize. Never admit the facts. Attack your accusers. Anyone criticizing you is politically motivated, so it doesn’t matter what you did. Appeal to your tribe’s fear of the other tribe.

Claudine Gay was hardly an icon of scholarly excellence. (See her CV.) She is a mediocre scholar with a total of 11 published papers and no books, over a 23-year career. Note: that is far below what would normally be expected at a good research school. She would not have gotten tenure at my university. But somehow she got tenure at Stanford, then was hired as a full professor (the highest rank) at Harvard.

How? Can you say “affirmative action”? And while you’re at it, say “personal connections”? The two schools she worked for are, coincidentally, the school where she got her BA (Stanford) and the school where she got her PhD (Harvard). Note: Schools usually do not hire their own students. This isn’t prohibited, but it looks bad, for obvious reasons.

3. Why Should Claudine Gay Have Resigned?

a. Anti-semitism

Is she anti-Semitic? I know of no reason to think so. Her testimony before Congress did not show such. Critics reacted as if she was asked whether genocide was good or bad and she said “I’m not sure.”

That wasn’t what happened. No one asked her whether calling for genocide was evil. Nor even whether it violated at least some policy. Stefanik specifically and only asked whether it violated the policy on bullying and harassment. Gay gave what was no doubt the factually correct response. It depends on the details of the case. “Harassment” does not just refer to anything bad, or any statement of an evil idea.

If you say to your roommate, “Hey, wouldn’t it be great if we could end the human species?”, you don’t thereby bully or harass anyone. On the other hand, if you follow Jewish students around yelling “Death to all Jews!”, then you’re bullying and harassing.

See, it really wasn’t that hard to think of different contexts. This isn’t some amazing, outrageous thing. It doesn’t mean that Gay is soft on genocide.

Example: If Stefanik asked me whether Jeffrey Dahmer violated my school’s policy on harassment, I would have to say “No.” He violated the murder statute, but not the harassment policy. That doesn’t mean I’m pro-cannibalism.

b. Free Speech

That being said, I of course do not believe the act that Gay put on as a free speech crusader. She and Harvard never cared about free speech before now. More precisely, they never cared about free speech for non-leftist ideas. It’s only when the people calling for genocide are leftists that suddenly we see this deep commitment to free speech.

c. Plagiarism

Did she plagiarize? Yep. I looked at the examples. Some of them are minor, borderline cases. But at least some of them are just clear cases.

She didn’t copy a whole article or anything like that. But there are brief passages that she copied from other authors, sometimes with minor alterations of wording.

It’s not the worst plagiarism I’ve seen, but it is definitely plagiarism, and it definitely would not be accepted for anyone who wasn’t highly privileged in the status hierarchy. When students do this, I give them an F in the course and report them to the Office of Student Conduct. Some professors are less harsh. But I promise you, no professor would start trying to minimize the problem or make up euphemisms like “duplicative language” and “inadequate citation” to refer to what the student did.

The president of the top university in the country cannot be a person who falls below the standards of conduct that apply to undergraduate students. That’s why she had to go.

In her NYT op-ed, Gay minimized the plagiarism charges, portraying them as minor mistakes that she was completely unaware of and had to learn about from the media:

“My critics found instances in my academic writings where some material duplicated other scholars’ language, without proper attribution. … When I learned of these errors, I promptly requested corrections from the journals….”

This is simply breathtaking chutzpah.

When you learned of the errors? No, Professor Gay, you “learned” of the “errors” when you made them. You don’t accidentally copy text from someone else’s article and paste it into your own without noticing it. What you mean is: when the media learned of the plagiarism, then you requested corrections.

Do you think Professor Gay’s students are going to get away with this? The next time she accuses a student of plagiarism, can the student say, “Whoops, some material duplicated other scholars’ language. I didn’t know about that! I shall promptly request a correction”? I promise you, they won’t get away with that. She will flunk them.

d. Political Motivation

“But wait,” said the leftist professors, “we can’t have Gay resign. That would be giving in to the enemy! Oops, I mean, it would be giving in to political pressure.”

Were Gay’s critics politically motivated? Sure. But were they wrong? Nope. She did what they said she did.

If you think the “political motivation” charge is a great defense, I suppose you also thought it was a great defense for Trump, when he was accused of pressuring Ukraine to dig up dirt on Joe Biden. Then (just like Gay’s champions today), Trump said little about the actual substance of the charge. He concentrated on attacking the accuser. His accuser, whoever it was, was a never-Trumper. So clearly what Trump did was fine, and we should ignore it, right?

No. It doesn’t matter if the whistleblower was a never-Trumper, or a communist, or a serial killer, if what he said was in fact true. If Trump did the thing he was accused of, he shouldn’t get off just because the person who brought that to our attention had a political motive.

The same is true of Gay. If the main defense you have against a charge of serious wrongdoing is to attack your accuser, that, to me, is pretty much an admission of guilt.

e. Gay’s History

By the way, there is some irony in Gay’s defense of free speech and her supporters’ opposition to politically-motivated decisions. Before now, Claudine Gay was known for persecuting people at Harvard for political reasons, as well as sweeping under the rug another accusation of research misconduct. Gay and her fans have never been shy about politically motivated decisions before now.

4. What’s the Real Lesson?

To wokists, the lesson is about the enduring racism of America. Of course that’s the lesson, because that’s the lesson of everything. If you accidentally stub your toe, they’ll find a way to make that about race.

To the rest of us, the main lessons are about:

a. The corruption of the academic world.

Claudine Gay is not an isolated case. Wokists have taken over the academy, especially the administrative positions. I assume some really believe wokism, while others are just pretending in order to appease the wokists. (Your typical university administrator has the courage of a baby rabbit.)

The woke agenda is about dismantling meritocracy in favor of tribalism. Take over the positions of power, then use that power to give every position that you possibly can to a member of your tribe. Affirmative action is not used as a tie-breaker in academia. It’s not a thumb on the scale; it’s an elephant on the scale. In many cases, like that of Claudine Gay, the color of someone’s skin, the shape of their genitals, and/or their political orientation are decisive factors. Institutions across the country impose political loyalty tests: make all job applicants declare their allegiance to woke ideology as part of their application materials.

When you prioritize political ideology, you demote all other concerns. Political ideologues are willing to promote dishonest scholars, as long as those scholars promote the ideology. I suspect, as well, that it is not accidental that people whose ideology is fundamentally founded on lies would build personal careers founded on fraud as well. (Compare the case of Ward Churchill from my own university.)

b. The woke disconnection from reality.

Woke academics include some of the most shameless ideologues you can find outside of a MAGA rally. Of course, wokists and Trumpsters hate each other. But to normal people, the two extreme factions have much in common – notably the shamelessness, the naked tribalism, and the complete disregard for reality.

Every sane person in academia is well aware that being black is a huge advantage on the academic job market. (This is blatantly illegal, but no one cares.) Yet in the woke, alternate reality, the university is under the control of shadowy white supremacists, whom black scholars have to valiantly struggle against every day.

The doublethink is a marvel to behold. I believe a wokist can leave a hiring committee meeting in which everyone present agreed to exclude all white men from consideration for a job, then later that afternoon post a tweet about how the academic world is run by white supremacists.

. . .

c. Is this the beginning of the end for DEI?

Don’t get out the champagne. The rest of the woke administrators around the country have no intention of resigning, nor of giving up their unlawful discrimination practices. All they’ve learned at this point is, “Best not testify before Congress.”

Had Claudine Gay never addressed Congress, she never would have entered the public spotlight, her plagiarism would never have been noticed, and she would still be the president of Harvard. Because she made that one mistake, she’s out as university president, though retaining her $900k salary. Meanwhile, all the other frauds around the country who haven’t testified before Congress are still doing fine. None of them have any intention of changing their ways.

At the same time, the academic world is progressively losing its prestige with normal society. When that’s gone, the whole industry collapses.