January 3, 2023
Harvard’s president Claudine Gay has finally resigned. The Babylon Bee (which everyone should read) says satirically that her speech was plagarized from the Gettysburg Address. She returns to the faculty. I wonder if she keeps her $1 million per year salary. The question is will Harvard hire someone equally mediocre going forward. Prof. Carol Swain whose work was plagiarized by Gay wrote the most devastating critique of a fellow academic that I have ever read. It appeared in the Wall Street Journal on December 17 as “Claudine Gay and my scholarship.” I recommend it to you. Here is an excerpt.
“Even aside from the documented instances of plagiarism, Ms. Gay’s work wouldn’t normally have earned tenure in the Ivy League. Tenure at a top-tier institution normally demands ground-breaking originality; her work displays none. In a world where the privilege of diversity is king, Ms. Gay was able to parlay mediocre research into tenure and administrative advancement at what was once considered a world-class university.
Harvard can’t condemn Ms. Gay because she is the product of an elite system that holds minorities of high pedigree to a lower standard.”
Ouch!
It was interesting that at first Harvard’s Board stood by Gay and defended her testimony before Congress on the student pro-Hamas demonstrations and the antisemitic harassment of Jews on campus. Then came the charges of plagiarism. Again the Harvard Board stood by Gay despite the fact that plagiarism is perhaps the most egregious crime that a scholar can make in academe. (A personal note: I forced a PhD student to leave the program when I realized that he had plagiarized a critique of an academic article written by another student from my seminar a few years before. He had thought that I would not remember the report. But I did). Some Harvard students actually turned against Gay noting that the punishment for student plagiarism was severe while that accorded Gay was merely a slap on the wrist. The charges of plagiarism were not on a one off incident. Rather more than 50 instances of plagiarism were found in her “scholarly” work. Even so, her academic resume was painfully thin for one in such an exalted position. Interestingly, many on the Harvard faculty stood by her. More than 700 had signed a letter of support of her testimony – which leads me to wonder what the Jewish students would feel about these professors. When she resigned there were quotes from Harvard faculty who continued to support her even in the face of plagiarism. One wonders about their scholarship integrity as well.
haroldblackphd.com 