The Associated Press published an article on Wednesday blaming former Harvard president Claudine Gay’s resignation on Tuesday on “conservative attacks” using the “new weapon” of plagiarism accusations and also insinuated that she came under attack due to her racial identity.
The article, entitled Harvard President’s Resignation Highlights New Conservative Weapon Against Colleges: Plagiarism, almost completely ignores Gay’s lack of response to the soaring antisemitism on campus since October 7th and her outrageous comments at the Congressional hearing, with only one sentence in the entire article referring to it. It also quotes a professor who attributes Gay’s resignation to “right-wing political attacks on higher education.” The professor makes no mention of the antisemitism on campus and the fear of Jewish students to speak out in support of Israel and instead ironically claims that Gay’s resignation will “chill the climate for academic freedom.”
Read the article below:
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.
“We must not stop until we have abolished DEI ideology from every institution in America,” he said. In another post, he announced a new “plagiarism hunting fund,” vowing to “expose the rot in the Ivy League and restore truth, rather than racialist ideology, as the highest principle in academic life.”
Gay didn’t directly address the plagiarism accusations in a campus letter announcing her resignation, but she noted she was troubled to see doubt cast on her commitment “to upholding scholarly rigor.” She also indirectly nodded to the December congressional hearing that started the onslaught of criticism, where she did not say unequivocally that calls for the genocide of Jews would violate Harvard policy.
Her departure comes just six months after becoming Harvard’s first Black president.
As the figureheads of their universities, presidents often face heightened scrutiny, and numerous leaders have been felled by plagiarism scandals. Stanford University’s president resigned last year amid findings that he manipulated scientific data in his research. A president of the University of South Carolina resigned in 2021 after he lifted parts of his speech at a graduation ceremony.
In Gay’s case, many academics were troubled with how the plagiarism came to light: as part of a coordinated campaign to discredit Gay and force her from office, in part because of her involvement in efforts for racial justice on campus. Her resignation came after calls for her ouster from prominent conservatives including Rep. Elise Stefanik, a Harvard alumna, and Bill Ackman, a billionaire hedge fund manager who has donated millions to Harvard.
The campaign against Gay and other Ivy League presidents has become part of a broader right-wing effort to remake higher education, which has often been seen as a bastion of liberalism. Republican detractors have sought to gut funding for public universities, roll back tenure and banish initiatives that make colleges more welcoming to students of color, disabled students and the LGBTQ+ community. They also have aimed to limit how race and gender are discussed in classrooms.
Walter M. Kimbrough, the former president of the historically Black Dillard University, said what unfolded at Harvard reminded him of an adage from his mother, a Black graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, in the 1950s.
As a Black person in academia, “you always have to be twice, three times as good,” he said.
“There are going to be people, particularly if they have any inkling that the person of color is not the most qualified, who will label them a ‘DEI hire,’ like they tried to label her,” Kimbrough said. “If you want to lead an institution like (Harvard) … there are going to be people who are looking to disqualify you.”
Reviews by conservative activists and then by a Harvard committee did find multiple shortcomings in Gay’s academic citations. In dozens of instances first published by The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative website, Gay’s work includes long stretches of prose that mirror language from other published works. A review ordered by Harvard acknowledged “duplicative language” and missing quotation marks, but it concluded the errors “were not considered intentional or reckless” and didn’t rise to misconduct.
Harvard previously said Gay updated her dissertation and requested corrections from journals.
Among her critics in conservative circles and academia, the findings are clear evidence that Gay, as the top academic at the pinnacle of U.S. higher education, is unfit to serve. Her defenders say it isn’t so clear-cut.
In highly specialized fields, scholars often use similar language to describe the same concepts, said Davarian Baldwin, a historian at Trinity College who writes about race and higher education. Gay clearly made mistakes, he said, but with the spread of software designed to detect plagiarism, it wouldn’t be hard to find similar overlap in works by other presidents and professors.
The tool becomes dangerous, he added, when it “falls into the hands of those who argue that academia in general is a cesspool of incompetence and bad actors.”
John Pelissero, a former interim college president who now works for the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, said instances of plagiarism deserve to be evaluated individually and that it’s not always so cut and dried.
“You’re looking for whether there was intentionality to mislead or inappropriately borrow other people’s ideas in your work,” Pelissero said. “Or was there an honest mistake?”
Without commenting on the merits of the allegations against Gay, President Irene Mulvey of the American Association of University Professors said she fears plagiarism investigations could be “weaponized” to pursue a political agenda.
“There is a right-wing political attack on higher education right now, which feels like an existential threat to the academic freedom that has made American higher education the envy of the world,” Mulvey said.
She worries Gay’s departure will put a new strain on college presidents. In addition to their work courting donors, policymakers and alumni, presidents are supposed to protect faculty from interference so they can research unimpeded.
“For presidents to be taken down like this, it does not bode well for academic freedom,” she said. “I think it’ll chill the climate for academic freedom. And it may make university presidents less likely to speak out against this inappropriate interference for fear of losing their jobs or being targeted.”
10 Responses
“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.”
AP revising history. Native Americans scalped each other, then colonists when they arrived.
Anyone missing a reminder that the AP is the mouth of the sitra achra??
I don’t think it’s right for YWN to mock the AP considering it uses many of its articles on its website. Show some hakaros hatov.
“Laughable”?? The Conservatives are the ones opposed to the new Nazis, not the Liberals (who are still a bit confused on the matter). And if you define Nazism as the policy of establishing a master race and those who oppose that policy as racists, then it is true that it is racist to reject the establishment of the master race (defined with more diversity in mind than the 1930s, but remember that “race” is a function of politics, not biology or genetics).
The left wing Democrats are Nazis, just like Adolf and his friends. It is the Conservatives who are standing up to them, and Democrats such as Biden need to decide if their party loyalty trumps what they have always thought to moral and right (“right” in the sense of correct). The showdown will probably come at the Democratic convention where there will be a vote for or against anti-Semitism, with the “progressives” threatening to bolt if they don’t get their way. BTW, there was a similar dispute at the 1948 convention where the radicals led by Hubert Humphrey supported a platform denouncing racism and anti-Semitism, which was adopted leading to many Democrats to walk out, and until Truman managed to win the election many people thought that Humphrey was cost the election.
Someone pointed out to me that these two authors in the original article also claimed it was white people who scalped american indians originally, and not the other way around. The academic integrity of AP authors to write about university politics is just staggering.
Such a disgrace that people without moral character are given positions of leadership. It is this level of decadence that makes the need for Moshiach so desperate. The woke left communists eventaually have influences that seep into our community, and that threatens our very existence. This golus has sunk so low that the only way must be up.
jack agrees.
Why else would this highly-qualified, capable, honest, Jew-loving paragon of woke virtue have been booted?
Ever the victims…
No racism or attacks. All free speech and based on context.
The AP is always pathetic. The reason is that the AP is funded by various liberal/anti-G-d groups.
As Shlomo HaMelech said “ViHaKesef Yaaneh es HaKol”.