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“Harvard President Claudine Gay said she would resign from her position [last] Tuesday, ending a six-month tenure marred by allegations of plagiarism and backlash over her congressional testimony about antisemitism on campus…
“Despite the controversy ensnaring Gay, the Harvard Corporation last month reaffirmed its confidence that she could lead the school through a period of high tension over the war in the Middle East. It also said an independent review of Gay's academic work found she had not committed research misconduct. She has submitted several corrections for citation errors in recent weeks…
“Gay, the first Black president in Harvard's 388-year history, and the members of the Harvard Corporation said in their letters to the community on Tuesday that she had been subject to racist attacks. Some of Gay's critics, including billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, have argued that she was chosen for the role as part of the school's effort to promote diversity rather than for her qualifications. Right-wing activists, including journalist and researcher Christopher Rufo, celebrated Gay's resignation on Tuesday as a win in their mission to dismantle diversity, equity and inclusion programs.” Reuters
Here’s our previous coverage of Gay’s comments to Congress. The Flip Side
The right argues that Gay’s resignation was merited based on her documented academic misconduct.
“Claudine Gay’s resignation is a step in the right direction. But as Gay acknowledged in the aftermath of her disastrous congressional testimony, ‘words matter.’ And her resignation statement had a rather glaring omission: She did not accept responsibility for her plagiarism…
“The statement of the Harvard Corporation was not much better. While it claimed that ‘President Gay has acknowledged missteps,’ it also thanked her for ‘her deep and unwavering commitment to Harvard and to the pursuit of academic excellence.’…
“It is frustrating though unsurprising that even in letting Gay go, university leadership is unwilling to acknowledge that her behavior both before assuming the presidency and in exercising it was unbecoming of her office… Harvard’s next president should be a truly first-rate scholar so that he can credibly set the standard for academic quality and productivity.”
Alexander Hughes, National Review
“Now, sure, it’s an interesting story that conservatives were out to get Claudine Gay. But it’s not like Chris Rufo has a time machine that allowed him to go back to the 1990s and force her to plagiarize whole paragraphs. Sibarium didn’t make Gay do anything, he revealed what Gay did. You know what would have happened if Gay hadn’t muffed her testimony to Congress? No one would have looked at her scholarship (or ‘scholarship’). And if Gay had never plagiarized, she’d still be the president of Harvard…
“[Ibram X Kendi contends that] ‘The question is whether all these people would have investigated, surveilled, harassed, written about, and attacked her in the same way if the Harvard president in this case would have been White. I. Think. Not.’… [But] just in the last six months, the white president of Stanford lost his job when his shoddy academic work was revealed, and the white female president of the University of Pennsylvania was forced out for giving an equally craptacular performance at those congressional hearings alongside Gay…
“The segment of the left circling the wagons around Gay would be much better off in the long run if they just took the loss. If you believe that there’s no trade-off in quality or qualifications when pursuing diversity, the last thing you should do is insist that the standards of excellence are racist only when black people fall short of them. You should express your disappointment in this specific incident, insist it’s a regrettable exception to the rule, and move on.”
Jonah Goldberg, The Dispatch
“The important question for Harvard was never whether Gay should step down. It was why she was brought on in the first place, after one of the shortest presidential searches in Harvard’s recent history. How did someone with a scholarly record as thin as hers — she has not written a single book, has published only 11 journal articles in the past 26 years and made no seminal contributions to her field — reach the pinnacle of American academia?…
“Where there used to be a pinnacle, there’s now a crater. It was created when the social-justice model of higher education, currently centered on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts — and heavily invested in the administrative side of the university — blew up the excellence model, centered on the ideal of intellectual merit and chiefly concerned with knowledge, discovery and the free and vigorous contest of ideas.”
Bret Stephens, New York Times
The left is divided about Gay’s resignation.
The left is divided about Gay’s resignation.
“Harvard has, in the past century, had two rough categories of president: those notable for their scholarship, and those notable for something else—past success in administration, say, or origins in a particular part of the country. Gay’s defenders erred in trying to suggest that she was, like [James Bryant] Conant or Lawrence H. Summers, one of the scholars…
“In truth, Gay was more like… Neil Rudenstine, in that her days of academic research were long past. The excellence of Rudenstine’s writings on the poetry of Sir Philip Sidney had nothing to do with his hiring as Harvard’s president in 1991. He had been a popular Princeton administrator for years, and donors liked him. The honest defense of Gay would have acknowledged that she was supposed to be more of a Rudenstine, and was instead being judged against Summers.”
Graeme Wood, The Atlantic
“Charlie Kirk, executive director of the conservative group Turning Point USA, could not resist saying the quiet part out loud after Gay resigned on Tuesday: ‘One unqualified diversity hire down, just a few million to go.’ In fact, Gay was eminently qualified to serve as Harvard’s president…
“After a stellar academic career at Stanford University, she became Harvard’s dean of social sciences in 2015 and dean of faculty of arts and sciences in 2018. She knew how to deal with the vagaries of budgets, having guided her department through the disruptions of the coronavirus pandemic. She knew how to handle Harvard’s prickly tenured professoriate…
“The Harvard president’s job is not to perform scholarship; it is to ensure that world-changing scholarship can be performed — and that the next generation of scholars, senators, Supreme Court justices, financial wizards and industry titans can be educated. Gay was well prepared to do those things.”
Eugene Robinson, Washington Post
Others argue, “It is impossible to talk about this controversy without acknowledging the fact that the unraveling of Gay’s presidency was the product of a well-planned right-wing broadside, an attack that began taking shape after her December 5 congressional testimony on campus anti-Semitism… When the plagiarism scandal ramped up just a few days after the congressional hearing, it felt pretextual because it was…
“[Yet] The idea that clear and long-established criteria for plagiarism should have been thrown out to save the elite-born president of an elite university, solely on the basis of her skin color, is not only preposterous; it’s that old soft bigotry. There are talented senior academics and administrators of color across this country who don’t need anyone to lower plagiarism standards for them. Harvard can, and should, hire one of them.”
Tyler Austin Harper, The Atlantic
“From 1989 to 2021, a period covering 32 years, five presidents, and eight presidential terms, every U.S. president went to an Ivy League school as an undergraduate or graduate. Even more incredibly, for 28 straight years from 1989 to 2017, the president went to either Harvard or Yale — or, in the case of George W. Bush, both…
“On its face, our era of Ivy dominance is the sign of a society that’s calcified… Harvard should neither be reformed (to eliminate its wokeness) nor protected (from the forces of reaction). Rather, it should be razed to the ground.”
Jon Schwarz, The Intercept
A libertarian's take
“Gay’s supporters seem to have become so focused on denying her conservative critics a victory, so intent on proving that outsiders can’t boss them around, they failed to count the institutional and reputational costs of making that point… Suddenly, people who make their living writing articles and books were struggling with the basic definition of a common English word. Was copying someone else’s words plagiarism, or was it just ‘citation errors,’ ‘occasional sloppiness,’ or ‘duplicative language without appropriate attribution’? After all, Gay hadn’t stolen ideas — just whole paragraphs of someone else’s writing…
“A bad thing does not become less bad because Christopher Rufo, the conservative activist who surfaced the first allegations against Gay, has pointed it out. Nor can Rufo be thwarted by pretending the bad things aren’t real. The would-be warriors trying to fend off Rufo instead provided evidence for his core critique: that academia now cares more about progressive politics than about scholarly rigor. In the process, they handed him a victory greater than it would have been if they’d simply said, ‘That’s plagiarism, and we don’t do that here.’”
Megan McArdle, Washington Post
