Claudine Gay has resigned her Harvard presidency following extensive allegations of academic impropriety. She and her enormous glasses of racial understanding must return to the faculty, where they will lurk for years to come like a very expensive bad smell.
Gay was appointed as the first-ever black president of America’s wealthiest and most selective university, in a “historic first for people of color.” Alas, her presidency has turned out to be a first in other respects as well. For example, she will go into the history books as the first-ever Harvard president to have resigned after just six months in office. Womp womp.
There is a lot of butthurt in the American press right now. Gay’s appointment, once hailed as a “victory for diversity,” has become instead an occasion of “victory” for “Dr. Gay’s critics … in the escalating ideological battle over American higher education.” Reporters for the Associated Press in particular deplore the fact that nefarious actors on the right are wielding a new “conservative weapon against colleges.” This weapon, they inform us, is “the threat of unearthing plagiarism.”
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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.
Claudine Gay’s resignation Tuesday followed weeks of mounting accusations that she lifted language from other scholars in her doctoral dissertation and journal articles …
The plagiarism allegations came not from her academic peers but her political foes, led by conservatives who sought to oust Gay and put her career under intense scrutiny in hopes of finding a fatal flaw. Her detractors charged that Gay … got the top job in large part because she is a Black woman.
There is a very tiresome game at work here: 1) American schools go to incredible lengths to recruit black faculty and black administrators. 2) They eagerly advertise and celebrate these efforts as emblematic of their commitment to Diversity. 3) They put their Diverse hires and their Diverse presidents all over their websites and they issue press releases about how Diverse they are. 4) At the same time, they require everybody to pretend that none of this Diversity happened into their professorships and presidencies because they were Diverse, even though over-promoting the Diverse was the entire point of the first three moves in this game.
From there, our AP reporters leap from one absurdity to the next:
Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist who helped orchestrate the effort, celebrated her departure as a win in his campaign against elite institutions of higher education. 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.
Notwithstanding the ridiculous revisionist mythologies of 1960s historians, the taking of scalps was not primarily a tactic of “white colonists,” but rather of Native Americans, who eagerly scalped each other centuries before Europeans ever sailed to the New World. European settlers took up scalping only sporadically, borrowing it from the indigenous peoples they encountered. Perhaps somebody should also tell the AP that, in the centuries since, scalping has fallen out of vogue and become a metaphor.
In Gay’s case, many academics were troubled with how the plagiarism came to light: as part of a coordinated campaign to discredit Gay and force her from office, in part because of her involvement in efforts for racial justice on campus …
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Walter M. Kimbrough, the former president of the historically Black Dillard University, said what unfolded at Harvard reminded him of an adage from his mother, a Black graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, in the 1950s.
As a Black person in academia, “you always have to be twice, three times as good,” he said.
“There are going to be people, particularly if they have any inkling that the person of color is not the most qualified, who will label them a ‘DEI hire,’ like they tried to label her,” Kimbrough said. “If you want to lead an institution like (Harvard) … there are going to be people who are looking to disqualify you.”
The press print a lot of ridiculous stuff every day, but the idea that the Gays of academia “have to be twice, three times as good” as their unDiverse peers is one of the dumbest, most risible and thoroughly stupid statements I can imagine. Claudine Gay achieved tenure at Harvard with a handful of articles and a single book, none of them particularly noteworthy or groundbreaking. That makes her twice or three times as bad as the average tenured Harvard professor.
