It is understandable that Claudine Gay is furious over her forced resignation, her calamitous fall from grace, and the public consensus about the great damage done to Harvard by her presidency.
But still, playing the wounded fawn is no excuse or defense.
Thus Claudine Gay’s recent New York Times disingenuous op-ed alleging racism as the prime cause of her career demise was, to quote Talleyrand, “worse than a crime, it was a blunder.” And her blame-gaming will only hurt her cause and reinforce the public’s weariness with such boilerplate and careerist resorts to racism where it does not exist.
Gay knows that her meteoric career trajectory through prestigious Phillips Academy, Princeton, Stanford, and Harvard was not symptomatic of systemic racism, but rather just the opposite—in large part through institutional efforts to show special concern, allowances, and deference due to her race and gender.
And she knows well that her forced resignation was not caused by a conspiracy of conservative activists. It came at the request also of liberal op-ed writers in now embarrassed left-wing megaphones like the New York Times and the Washington Post, black intellectuals, and academics—and donors who usually identify, like the vast majority of Harvard philanthropists, as liberal Democrats.
Gay knows, too, that in her now notorious congressional testimony, had she just offered an independent assessment of the epidemic of antisemitism on her campus and a Harvard plan to stop it (rather than joining in the finger-in-the-wind groupthink of the other two presidents), and had she not been guilty of long-standing, serial, and flagrant plagiarism, she would still have her job.
Gay knows that other white university presidents have recently been forced to resign for far less culpable behavior than her own. Pennsylvania president Liz Magill was forced to quit after her Dec. 5 seeming inability or unwillingness to act against blatant anti-Semitic speech and conduct on her own campus, or Stanford’s president Marc Tessier-Lavigne for co-authoring, some decades earlier, scientific papers whose results were not always based on authenticated data.
Again, as for Gay’s insinuations of a cabal that took her down, she also knows that such a charge is no more true or false than the public outrage, both liberal and conservative, over Magill’s obtuseness, or the largely left-wing effort to remove the white male Tessier-Lavigne.
Gay knows that she herself has disciplined and censored lots of Harvard professors, among them preeminent black scholars, such as Roland Fryer and Ronald Sullivan, on speculative allegations far less egregious than her own serial plagiarism and inconsistent policies of addressing “hate speech.” Did anyone suggest she was then a “racist”?
Gay knows that as president she oversaw a code of behavior that routinely severely disciplined students, staff, and professors for plagiarism of a nature far less serial and systematic than her own.
Gay indeed knows that her plagiarism was far more serious than suggested by her half-hearted defense of her scholarship (“I have never misrepresented my research findings, nor have I ever claimed credit for the research of others”).
In fact, when anyone—again and again—copies word-for-word whole paragraphs without attribution or quotation marks, or lifts entire sentences and appropriates the thoughts of another without sufficient footnotes, that is precisely “misrepresentation” and claiming “credit” where credit is not due. If a Harvard president and full professor makes such a defense of intellectual theft, what will it say in the future about Harvard?
Gay knows that her claim of being proactive in correcting some lifted passages was not proactive at all. It was entirely reactive and came only in response to criticism of her scholarly methods.
Gay knows that she has done irrevocable damage to Harvard; given the Harvard Corporation, its legal team, its 700 supportive faculty letter-signers, and its satellite freelancers leave to embarrass themselves further; and gravely eroded the institution’s reputation and credibility by going out of their way to defend the indefensible solely on her behalf:
• By threatening legal action against the New York Post for airing the legitimate charges of plagiarism
• By creating a new, ad hoc vocabulary to legitimize her plagiarism (“duplicative language”/“missteps”)
• By also echoing her charges of racism (and in surreal fashion without any self-awareness that if such charges were true, then Harvard would not have forced her to resign or at least would have refused her resignation)
• By claiming that anonymous complaints of her intellectual theft were somehow illegitimate by virtue of their whistleblower status
• By absurdly insinuating that plagiarism is not plagiarism if the plagiarized does not complain
There was one key issue that Gay neither raised nor much less resolved: Given that now Professor Gay has made no effort to explain item by item all the allegations of decades-long and habitual plagiarism, does she feel now exempt from such charges as a Harvard professor of political science?
And if so, is her faculty exemption of the sort usually accorded other professors and students under similar suspicion of plagiarism?
In the end, was it really asking too much of a Harvard president just to do two things? 1) Explain to Congress why there was a problem of antisemitism at Harvard, and then outline the concrete steps she would take to stop the spread of growing anti-Semitic speech and conduct at her campus, and 2) Don’t plagiarize the work of other scholars?
