Harvard Plagiarism Case

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. (Recent AP story by Collin Binkley and Moriah Balingit)

The authors make their own Culture War alignment clear when they write about Chris Rufo, one of the conservative activists involved:

"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  and also used by some tribes against their enemies.

Attributing scalping to the colonists “and also used by some tribes” has nothing to do with the argument of the article, makes sense in context only as a way of signaling which side of the political division the authors are on.

They concede that:

Gay’s work includes long stretches of prose that mirror language from other published works. A review ordered by Harvard acknowledged she duplicated the language without using quotation marks.

and never actually claim that Gay is innocent of plagiarism, but do their best to imply it:

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.

Discussing the vulnerability of university presidents to charges against their scholarship, they write:

"Stanford University’s president resigned last year amid findings that he manipulated scientific data in his research."¹

They do not mention that the attack on Marc Tessier-Lavigne was pushed by the (left wing) student newspaper, arguably in retaliation for his criticism of student disruption of a talk by a conservative judge. Attacking academic administrators by pointing out problems with their scholarship is, as the article says, a Culture War tactic but not, as it implies, one used only by conservatives.²

Gay’s Scholarship

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.

The list of her previous positions is presumably intended to imply that she is a serious scholar, hence that criticism of her as a DEI hire is unjustified. The obvious response is that a university willing to choose its president on the basis of race rather than competence would be willing to hire for less important positions on the same basis. Gay’s plagiarism violates Harvard’s plagiarism policy for students:

Students who, for whatever reason, submit work either not their own or without clear attribution to its sources will be subject to disciplinary action, up to and including requirement to withdraw from the College.

But Harvard (like, I think, most universities) has no published plagiarism policy for faculty. It is evidence that she is an author who cannot be bothered either to put ideas in her own words or to credit the sources she copies, but not that she is not a productive scholar. Judging her scholarship requires a look at her academic record.

Another substack author has done it.

Chris Bray on Tell Me How This Ends compares her cv to those of two previous Harvard Presidents, each of whom had published five or six books and dozens of articles. Claudine Gay has published no books and eleven peer reviewed articles. Bray then offers another comparison, relevant to her initial hiring by Harvard:

Claudine Gay was a professor at Stanford when Harvard desperately worked to lure her away because of her amazingly brilliant performance as a scholar, so let’s choose the very first associate professor listed in the poli sci department there and look at his academic c.v. for comparison.

Adam Bonica, a young associate professor who completed his PhD in 2011 — not quite twenty years after Claudine Gay finished hers — has published a book, 28 peer-reviewed articles and a couple of student-editor-reviewed law review articles, and a handful of book chapters. Weirdly, he does not seem to be considered a shockingly distinguished professor who should be running Harvard.

The point that the AP article is carefully ignoring is that attacking a university administrator as a DEI hire works better if it is true.

Harvard

Gay does not belong where she once was and is now again, a tenured professor at Harvard. It does not follow that she was not competent to be president. Elite universities like to claim that their top administrators are distinguished scholars and there are some advantages to it being true but it is not essential.

The real scandal in the case is not Gay’s behavior but the university’s. Instead of making any serious attempt to evaluate the evidence that their president was guilty of plagiarism, as with their resources they could easily have done, they tried to suppress the story by threatening to sue the newspaper that was working on it and the people whose work it was based on, if they could be identified, for vast damages. That was the response of an organization that did not care what was true, only what made them look bad. Once the story was out they did their best to minimize it; additional examples of plagiarism, of which there were many, were discovered by other people.

Gay has resigned but the people who should apologize — and resign — are the people responsible for Harvard’s response to the case, probably members of the Board of Governors of the Harvard Corporation, possibly Harvard lawyers and administrators.

Until they do, they could at least amend the university’s shield.

Additional Links

How We Squeezed Harvard to Push Claudine Gay Out (Chris Rufo in the WSJ)

Harvard web site

Gay’s resignation letter

A commenter links to a lengthy and detailed critique of both Gay’s work and the work of Gary King, apparently her mentor.

Another commenter informs me that “and also used by some tribes against their enemies” was not in the original version of the AP article. It was presumably added after someone pointed out to the authors that pretending that scalping was an invention of the colonists was too obviously dishonest for them to get away with.

1. The article’s claim about Tessier-Lavigne’s resignation is contradicted by the story they link to, which starts:

“The president of Stanford University said Wednesday he would resign, citing an independent review that cleared him of research misconduct but found “serious flaws” in five scientific papers on subjects such as brain development in which he was the principal author.” (Italics mine)

2. For multiple examples of plagiarism claims against conservatives by journalists on the left, see Robby Soave’s Reason article.