Harvard president's ouster signals a larger problem of integrity

The resignation of Harvard president Claudine Gay amid charges of plagiarism — and of failing to properly respond to antisemitism on the school’s campus — has further fueled ongoing controversies about the politics of the American university.

To many conservatives, the ouster of the school’s first Black female president is a well-deserved defeat for the academic progressive left. To many liberals, it’s a troubling victory for right-wing agitators who claim to defend academic freedom from progressive ideologues but actually want to subordinate American higher education to their own ideology. As often happens, the truth is more complicated. Gay’s resignation was appropriate, but at least so far the only victory is for self-serving spin across the board.

Gay’s troubles began with controversial congressional hearings last month in which Rep. Elise Stefanik, the upstate New York Republican aggressively questioned a panel of university presidents on whether a call for a genocide of Jews would violate their schools’ harassment policies — and obtained evasive answers that stressed the importance of context. Stefanik is now taking credit for Gay’s downfall as her second victory after the resignation last month of University of Pennsylvania president M. Elizabeth Magill.

In fact, Gay’s decision to step down technically had nothing do with the hearing or with campus antisemitism. But it was the hearing that prompted the scrutiny of her work by conservative activists and journalists. This scrutiny uncovered a pattern of using entire phrases and paragraphs from other scholars’ work — sometimes while acknowledging that work as general source material, sometimes without mentioning it anywhere near the borrowed text.

Plagiarism, in most cases, is a complicated offense: The rules for when and how sources should be acknowledged and attributed are far from straightforward. What’s more, different professions have different rules for it. Gay’s defenders point out that during his confirmation hearings in 2017, Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch survived a plagiarism scandal related to one of his three books, which did not fully disclose the extent of his reliance on another author’s research. Others say that not only was it a milder offense than the ones held against Gay — and a much smaller portion of Gorsuch’s work — but the standards for a judge are different from the ones for an academic. The consensus is that a Harvard student would have been harshly punished for doing what Gay did.

Contrary to right-wing rhetoric, Gay’s lapses are not an indictment of progressive academics as a group. But, as Bates College assistant professor Tyler Austin Harper notes in The Atlantic, the willingness of many progressive academics to defend those lapses as business as usual, or deflect by calling attention to the bad motives of Gay’s detractors and portraying her as a victim of racism and sexism, does attest to a larger problem of integrity and ideological loyalty.

Of course, if Gay’s defenders are unprincipled ideological hacks, so are many of Gay’s detractors — particularly right-wing activist Christopher Rufo, who openly crows about the takedown of Gay as a victory in his own crusade against “wokeness” in academia. Ironically, Rufo’s boasts about “smuggling” the plagiarism allegations into mainstream media outlets ended up giving ammunition to Gay’s supporters. What’s more, the attacks on Gay have in fact included barely veiled racist swipes suggesting that she got away with bad scholarship because she is a Black woman.

The Gay scandal and the reaction to it should prompt a hard look at ideological hackery across the board: in “woke” academic circles and “anti-woke” activist circles.

Opinions expressed by Cathy Young, a writer for The Bulwark, are her own.

By Cathy Young

Cathy Young is a writer for The Bulwark.