Few windows into today’s higher education leadership were as shocking as the testimony of three distinguished university presidents (from Harvard, Penn and MIT) before the star chamber hearing of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce last month. In their obtuse, overly lawyered statements on anti-Semitism on their respective campuses, they wrapped themselves in a tone-deaf defense of free speech with little regard to its implications.
All three affirmed their commitment to student safety but seemed oblivious to the security needs of Jewish (and Muslim) students threatened with harassment and intimidation by demonstrating extremists. No statement was more shocking than that of Harvard President Claudine Gay when she was asked whether it would violate Harvard’s code of conduct to call for genocide of Jews, and she allowed as how it would depend on context.
The hearing produced an enormous backlash across the institutional and political spectrum. Claudine Gay apologized. Right-wing critics of higher education had a field day mocking elitist colleges and universities’ single-minded emphasis on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, with liberal orthodoxy flying in the face of intellectual diversity.
Anti-DEI gadfly Christopher Rufo accused Gay of plagiarizing on Twitter, and in October the New York Post sought comment from Harvard. Harvard’s lawyers pushed back against the Post’s anonymous sources, hoping to kill the article. The Washington Beacon and articles on Substack took up the issue. Establishment news outlets like The New York Times remained silent, and the Harvard Corporation stood behind Gay.
Increasingly, as the Harvard Crimson has reported, scholars with credibility weighed in, documenting instances, including Gay’s 1997 doctoral dissertation, where she had copied others’ writing word for word from other publications, with neither attribution nor footnotes. The University itself did a cursory analysis and finally, in December, in Orwellian doublespeak, found instances of “duplicative language,” but said that Gay would “make corrections.”
But the genie was out of the bottle. Examples of sloppy scholarship were noted in half of the publications listed in her resume. The documentation became clear. Eventually, Gay resigned, citing racist attacks on her. Upwards of 700 Harvard faculty members protested her leaving. Black academics worried if black female scholars were next.
The evidence of plagiarism was dispositive. Gay had to go. The events around anti-Semitism, the testimony before the House, were important to the national debate on campus hate speech and harassment. But they were irrelevant to Gay’s fitness to be president of one of the world’s most elite academic institutions, one whose motto is simply “veritas.” Truth.
Harvard University’s history suggests it hasn’t always prioritized scholarship among those it taps for president. But even if a candidate’s scholarship is thin, it must still be honest.
The pursuit of fact, of truth, is at the heart of the academic process. How can you punish a 19-year-old student who cribs from a library book in writing a paper when the head of the university is doing the same thing? Harvard’s Guide to Using Sources is clear. Its Code of Honor is explicit about what constitutes academic integrity. In reality, student punishment is not draconian and is aimed toward rehabilitation. That could never be an option with the president of the university,
The Corporation (functionally its board of trustees) did not distinguish itself in this process. Were they concerned to admit that, because they were thrilled with her exciting bio, they hadn’t properly vetted her when they hired her after a very truncated search process?
Some on the left have been quick to dismiss the claims of plagiarism because they came from ultra-conservative and racist sources. Sorry, folks. That won’t work. The sources of the original story may indeed come from reprehensible people, sources that are part of the right wing’s war on higher education. But the plagiarism facts have been proven true despite the taint of the messengers.
It’s time to depoliticize the discussion and get to the heart of what colleges and universities are supposed to represent and what they are supposed to be teaching the next generation of thinkers and national leaders. Veritas. Lux et veritas. Integritas. It’s all about accountability, something desperately needed in all aspects of life today. If young students -and non-students alike -can’t learn that, our future is in doubt.
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Marjorie Arons-Barron 
Sorry Marjorie but you fell right into the right-winged anti Woke ( which to those people means Black) trap.
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Joan, Are you saying that she should be allowed to violate academic standards that the University’s students are punished for? How would you feel if Paula Johnson, Kim Bottomley, Diana Chapman Walsh or Nan Keohane violated Wellesley’s honor code and scholarship standards?
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You have known me long enough to know that I would not countenance dishonesty among Wellesley leadership. We were both students there, and I was a Trustee.
I have known of academics that have cited sources incorrectly; or attributed language to one scholar when it actually belongs to another. The wrong page is given in the footnotes. These errors are not an attempt to “cheat” or claim ownership for another’s scholarship. And are not considered pure plagiarism. Those errors might well be careless, but do not warrant being fired. Those academics making such errors, when they are white men, somehow get overlooked or taken as the innocent errors that they are. And the men are given the opportunity to correct them.
What is most disturbing is that the Right suggests that these errors are examples of being unqualified, incompetent, or lacking the credentials for the roles our Black and Brown scholars hold. That Gay only became the leader of Harvard University because the institution was fulfilling some diversity, equity and inclusion objective-not that she was the best candidate for the job at this time. Flinging those accusations at Black people (and out in the public square) are meant to push us back on our heels, to make us subconscious about our accomplishments and hard work-and believe me, Black women have to work doubly as hard to get half as far. That is just reality.
Elise Stefanick and others have used Professor Gay’s circumstance as a way to drone on with their WOKE BS, which is code for comments and behavior about and by Black people and others of color. They are on a mission-and even say the quiet parts out loud these days to let you know what their goals are. It’s all a smoke screen that sadly people come to believe and cite as the reason for the disciplinary actions that follow. Context, history and intention are ignored. The knee-jerk reactions are harmful to the larger, important dialogue that is needed to move this divided society forward.
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Joan, Of course, I have tremendous respect for you and hold you in high regard. I agree with much of what you have to say, and I understand and deplore the right wing’s attack on higher education and extreme anti-wokism. The attack on colleges and universities is of profound concern, as is the undermining of women, especially of Black women, who ascend to the highest leadership positions. I also understand context and intention of the poisonous sources originating the attack in question. With all that, however, the level of plagiarism detailed by the Harvard Crimson (well beyond the doctoral thesis) is so clearcut that I do believe it made her unsuitable to continue to lead and be the face of the University, an institution that makes clear to its students that if they write papers in the same way will be dealt with severely.
There is so much that we can agree on. But, on the plagiarism question, I beg to differ.
Margie
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Gay’s “plagiarism” is on Harvard. Harvard granted her a Ph.D. based on a thesis that we now hear involved copying without attribution. They then hired her presumably based on her body of academic work. They then promoted her repeatedly based on her academic work. This is a massive failure of the institution’s academic standards. Do you wait until an academic becomes University President before reviewing their work?
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You’re absolutely right. And what do you say of the Political Science Association that reportedly gave her an award for “best thesis of the year?”
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With all due respect, for me your analysis has some giant blind spots. your walking us to a ‘logical morale’ conclusion as regards the rules based system or ethos that we see as impartial and the path to transcendent truth. The main elements that led to her resignation were the bellowing, seething white outrage and racial hypocrisy. The plagiarism (real and a separate and complex issue) was an excuse to do something very very American. Find a scapegoat, and black women are traditionally and in contemporary American society, the easiest target. To argue against that would be naivety. It’s what we do as a society.
In this case it’s a scape goat to distract us from our governments very questionable stance on the war in Gaza. These things don’t happen in a planned way. They happen organically in our society. We scapegoat because the real game must be masked. Our militarism and disengagement from multilateralism since the end of the cold war sees us way out of step in the world these days. Very sad for former strategic leaders. Our foreign policy is archaic and based on a post WW2 paradigm. This is known in state department, and it’s a big problem.
Do take a moment to think about my comments, and the great and deeply ingrained social biases in the American lens.
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Thank you for your expansive reply. You raise some thoughtful points. It would make an interesting discussion, which I’d like to have with you sometime. You can’t separate the plagiarism from this matter.
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You can if plagiarism is common.
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Dan, If your assessment of plagiarism is true, and if its definition in some places is fuzzy, that’s not a reason to settle for it. Consider me old-fashioned, but I still view it as somewhere between stealing someone else’s intellectual property and garden variety sloppy scholarship.
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What’s surprising is that she became a tenured professor. One wonders whether a white male with the similar research — and impeccable citations — would’ve made the cut.
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