Despite what some “progressives” are claiming, Gay’s downfall was not driven by her race or political beliefs. It was due to her serial plagiarism
Claudine Gay resigned as Harvard University president on Jan. 2. She had sullied her reputation during an appearance at last month’s U.S. congressional committee hearing about antisemitism at universities. This was followed by allegations of plagiarism, which ultimately led to her downfall.
Sounds pretty clear-cut.
Not to some progressives. They decided to spin this controversy in the most unusual fashion. Since conservatives had been unsuccessful in convincing Harvard to remove Gay, they supposedly used plagiarism as a “new possible weapon” to bring her down.
When did plagiarism become a tool for partisan purposes? Never, for the record.
Let’s try to figure this out.
Gay, along with University of Pennsylvania president Mary Elizabeth Magill and Massachusetts Institute of Technology president Sally Kornbluth, appeared at the Dec. 5, 2023 U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce hearing about antisemitism on college campuses. They were joined by Pamela Nadell, a history professor at American University.
The main objective of the hearing was to discuss the significant rise of antisemitic and anti-Israel voices on university campuses since Hamas’s attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. The Republican-controlled House pushed for this discussion, but plenty of Democrats were supportive.
All four invitees embarrassed themselves before the elected officials and the American people. Gay, like her colleagues, sidestepped questions so often that it could have been turned into a dance routine.
Here’s an example.
When New York Republican Representative Elise Sefanek asked Gay a straightforward question, “At Harvard, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules of bullying and harassment, yes or no?” she answered, “It can be, depending on the context.” She also said, “the rules around bullying and harassment are quite specific and if the context in which that language is used amounts to bullying and harassment, then we take, we take action against it.”
Gay added to the confusion by making this statement after her appearance. “There are some who have confused a right to free expression with the idea that Harvard will condone calls for violence against Jewish students. Calls for violence or genocide against the Jewish community, or any religious or ethnic group are vile; they have no place at Harvard. Those who threaten our Jewish students will be held to account.”
Hogwash.
Calling for genocide isn’t a matter of free speech or free expression. Genocide refers to the systematic death and/or destruction of an ethnic community, religious group or nation. There’s no context or middle ground if the intent is to wipe out someone or something.
Was Gay the only university president to make this assessment? No. They all did it in their own way. But her rationale was arguably the worst of the lot.
Pressure for them to step aside began immediately. Magill resigned within four days, but Gay was defended by faculty members. They pushed back at what they perceived as conservative efforts to remove Harvard’s first black president.
Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the conservative-leaning Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, then teamed up with the Washington Free Beacon’s Aaron Sibarium and accused Gay of plagiarism. According to the New York Times, this included “material from other sources without proper attribution in her dissertation and about half of the 11 journal articles listed on her résumé.” It was a cornucopia of “brief snippets of technical definitions to paragraphs summing up other scholars’ research that are only lightly paraphrased, and in some cases lack any direct citation of the other scholars.”
Gay stood by her academic work but issued corrections to two articles and her dissertation. The list of her plagiarisms continued to multiply at top speed. It reached 40 allegations by Jan. 1, which was too much for her to explain away and Harvard to defend. She resigned the following day.
Which brings us to the never-before-seen political weaponization of plagiarism.
A Jan. 3 Associated Press story by Collin Binkley and Moriah Balingit suggested Gay’s fall from grace had “elevated the threat of unearthing plagiarism, a cardinal sin in academia, as a possible new weapon in conservative attacks on higher education.” They noted that “many academics were troubled with how the plagiarism came to light: as part of a co-ordinated campaign to discredit Gay and force her from office, in part because of her involvement in efforts for racial justice on campus.”
The reporters threw this in for good measure: “Republican detractors have sought to gut funding for public universities, roll back tenure and banish initiatives that make colleges more welcoming to students of colour, disabled students and the LGBTQ community. They have also aimed to limit how race and gender are discussed in classrooms.”
This is so ridiculous it’s hard to know where to begin.
U.S. conservatives are troubled by the left-leaning nature of public universities. They don’t like what’s being taught in academic circles. They would like things to change – or, at the very least, become more balanced.
Accusing Gay of plagiarism is a separate matter, however.
Copying or stealing from original sources is wrong. When a university professor is doing it, that’s even worse. It doesn’t matter if the individual is liberal, socialist, conservative or otherwise. It’s not defensible, period.
Contrary to popular belief, Gay wasn’t targeted by U.S. conservatives because of her race or ideological leanings. She made a spectacle of herself at the congressional hearings, to be sure, but she had clearly not followed the rules in becoming a university professor. If Gay couldn’t be trusted to do things by the book in this important capacity, how could she be trusted to properly handle accusations of antisemitism on the university campus she oversaw?
Plagiarism isn’t ideological. A person in authority was accused of plagiarizing her work and research. She got called out for it – and was caught with citations and quotation marks down. That’s all it is, was, and ever will be.
Progressives can drop their weapons at any time, if they so choose.
Michael Taube, a Troy Media syndicated columnist and Washington Times contributor, was a speechwriter for former Prime Minister Stephen Harper. He holds a master’s degree in comparative politics from the London School of Economics.
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