By Madeleine A. Hung and Joyce E. Kim, Crimson:

Here and around the world, students, faculty, alumni organize, mobilize resistance movements to fight our own institution’s facilitation of the dehumanization of the Filastin people,” m’Cheaux added.

m’Cheaux’s remarks come days after the Harvard College Administrative Board suspended five undergraduates and placed at least 20 others on probation for their participation in the 20-day pro-Palestine encampment of Harvard Yard, which ended last week.

Though the sanctions barred 13 seniors from graduating at Commencement on Thursday, members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted to add them back to the list of degrees recommended for conferral on Monday.

As of Tuesday evening, the status of their degrees remains uncertain.

——

Commentary.

Christopher Brunet:

So, what prompted his major downgrade from Ohio State to LeMoyne-Owen College in 2018? 

LeMoyne-Owen College is not even ranked and has a 98% acceptance rate for undergrads.

Of course, there are always idiosyncratic preferences and family reasons for moving to lower schools, but in general, no rational tenured professor would voluntarily accept such a major downgrade in status and salary. 

The answer is that Strayhorn was ‘’ousted’’ from Ohio State in 2017 over financial misconduct.

Aaron Sibarium:

The complaint makes 40 allegations of plagiarism that span the entirety of Charleston’s thin publication record. In her 2009 dissertation, submitted to the University of Michigan, Charleston quotes or paraphrases nearly a dozen scholars without proper attribution, the complaint alleges. And in her sole peer-reviewed journal article—coauthored with her husband, LaVar Charleston, in 2014—the couple recycle much of a 2012 study published by LaVar Charleston, the deputy vice chancellor for diversity and inclusion at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, framing the old material as new research.

Through that sleight of hand, Sherri Ann Charleston effectively took credit for her husband’s work. The 2014 paper, which was also coauthored with Jerlando Jackson, now the dean of Michigan State University’s College of Education, and appeared in the Journal of Negro Education, has the same methods, findings, and description of survey subjects as the 2012 study, which involved interviews with black computer science students and was first published by the Journal of Diversity in Higher Education.

Aaron Sibarium

It’s not just Claudine Gay. Harvard University’s chief diversity and inclusion officer, Sherri Ann Charleston, appears to have plagiarized extensively in her academic work, lifting large portions of text without quotation marks and even taking credit for a study done by another scholar—her own husband—according to a complaint filed with the university on Monday and a Washington Free Beacon analysis.

The complaint makes 40 allegations of plagiarism that span the entirety of Charleston’s thin publication record. In her 2009 dissertation, submitted to the University of Michigan, Charleston quotes or paraphrases nearly a dozen scholars without proper attribution, the complaint alleges. And in her sole peer-reviewed journal article—coauthored with her husband, LaVar Charleston, in 2014—the couple recycle much of a 2012 study published by LaVar Charleston, the deputy vice chancellor for diversity and inclusion at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, framing the old material as new research.

Michael Casey:

The panel, however, concluded that nine of 25 allegations found by the Post were “of principal concern” and featured “paraphrased or reproduced the language of others without quotation marks and without sufficient and clear crediting of sources.” It also found one instance where “fragments of duplicative language and paraphrasing” by Gay could be interpreted as her taking credit for another academic’s work, though there isn’t any evidence that was her aim.

It also found that a third paper, written by Gay during her first year in graduate school, contained “identical language to that previously published by others.”

Those findings prompted a broader review of her work by a Harvard subcommittee, which eventually led Gay to make corrections to the 2012 article as well as a 2001 article that surfaced in the broader review. The subcommittee presented its findings Dec. 9 to the Harvard Corporation, Harvard’s governing board, concluding that Gay’s “conduct was not reckless nor intentional and, therefore, did not constitute research misconduct.”

Aaron Sibarium & Reihan Salam

Radical DEI (Diversity, Equity & Inclusion) ideology has overtaken elite universities and, increasingly, American public life. Few reporters have followed the “woke” takeover of American universities and the corrosion of its institutions more closely than our guest. 

Our guest Aaron Sibarium, a Yale University alum, now reports on elite institutions that he is the very product of and investigates the pervasive influence of “woke” bureaucracy and ideals in higher education. His extensive and in-depth reporting helped lead to the uncovering of a plagiarism scandal and subsequent resignation of former Harvard president Claudine Gay. 

Aaron Sibarium is a staff reporter for the Washington Free Beacon and one of the reporters whose work contributed to the resignation of Harvard president Claudine Gay. He was recently dubbed the “Gen Z Investigative Reporter… Rocking Conservative Media” by Politico Magazine.

Wall Street Journal:

Claudine Gay’s resignation Tuesday from the presidency of Harvard is a measure of accountability amid scandals on campus antisemitism and plagiarism. Her leadership had clearly become a drain on the school’s reputation. The question is whether the Harvard Corporation that chose her and presided over this debacle will rebalance by installing an educator who isn’t afraid to challenge the school’s dominant and censorious progressive factions.

In the months since Hamas brutally murdered Israeli civilians on Oct. 7, the atmosphere on Harvard’s campus has been hostile to Jewish students. During one rally, the Crimson newspaper reported, a student “led the crowd in a chant of ‘Long live Palestine; long live the intifada; intifada, intifada; globalize the intifada.” Rabbi Hirschy Zarchi of Harvard Chabad said Dec. 13 that a menorah couldn’t be left outside on campus overnight, “because there’s fear that it’ll be vandalized.” Sen. Dan Sullivan described on these pages the intimidating scene inside the school’s Widener Library.

That was only days after Ms. Gay’s disastrous testimony to the House, which also prompted the University of Pennsylvania’s president to quit. Asked about chants to “globalize the intifada,” Ms. Gay said such calls were “hateful,” “abhorrent,” and “at odds with the values of Harvard,” but she would not say that they violated the code of conduct.

Gregg Easterbrook:

Whatever did or didn’t happen in the brief freehold of Claudine Gay at the pinnacle of academia, her resignation letter is an epitome of contemporary self-pity – so much so that it made me think of someone else.

Gay did not apologize for harming the institution she was supposed to protect. Gay took no responsibility for her choices, shifting blame to others. Malevolent outside forces, not her own failing, brought her undoing.

The failing was not extemporaneous comments to Congress under political pressure, rather, was plagiarism: which she knew was wrong, had a long time to think about and correct.

So self-absorbed she had to write about herself twice in two days, Gay in the New York Times once again blamed others — a “coordinated” intrigue against her by conveniently unnamed shadowy figures. (Bad people did bad things? Name them!) Gay did not own up to plagiarism: in her articles “material duplicated other scholars’ language without proper attribution,” weirdly passive phrasing that suggests “material,” not stolen work, magically appeared.

Frederick Hess:

I’ve had a peculiar perspective on the whole thing, having started my academic career alongside Gay three decades ago. In 1992, Gay, her now-husband, my then-roommate, and I constituted the “American Government” doctoral cohort in the Harvard Government Department’s Ph.D. program. Over the next five years (I finished my Ph.D. in 1997, she completed hers a year later), I probably spent more than 150 hours in seminars, methods classes, and talks with Gay. I didn’t know her well and haven’t spoken to her in the past quarter century, but I’ve known of her and observed her academic journey as an old classmate.

I’m disinclined to revisit the plagiarism charges or the Harvard Corporation’s efforts to bury the whole thing. I’ll just say that it seems clear that Gay’s scholarly issues were a reasonable cause for termination, Harvard’s conduct has been horrendous, and this whole thing will one day be a textbook case of crisis mismanagement. What I want to do here is offer three reflections that I’ve found myself repeatedly sharing of late.

First, as much as Gay has been depicted as a DEI crusader, I don’t recall her being one at the start of her career. I was pretty sensitive to such things and frequently annoyed by the progressivism and pioneering critical race theory that held sway at Harvard. But I don’t recall Gay saying anything that stuck in my craw. Even her much-discussed dissertation on black representation, as I remember, was less an ideological endeavor than an exhausted grad student’s attempt to use some econometric gee-whizzery to get the degree. Maybe Gay was a discreet radical but I tend to suspect that, like so many others, Gay embraced higher ed’s DEI groupthink mostly as a means of personal advancement. Gay has spent most of her time at Harvard as a bureaucrat, not a scholar. I mean, in 2022, when charged with implementing a Faculty of Arts and Sciences anti-racism initiative, Gay sent an email to the faculty seeking “requests for denaming” of campus buildings or programs. I wonder whether she just saw herself as an effective bureaucrat. Did she even appreciate how Orwellian it all sounded? I’ve found many of these fights turn out to be less about ideologues than, with apologies to Hannah Arendt, the banality of campus illiberalism.

Ross Douthat:

Throughout the weeks that Harvard spent resisting, unsuccessfully, the calls for Claudine Gay’s resignation, a common line of defense of the embattled Ivy League president was that it’s essential not to hand any kind of victory, under any circumstances, to conservative critics of higher education.

For instance, a Harvard Law professor, Charles Fried, said that he might give “credence” to the evidence that Gay was a serial plagiarist “if it came from some other quarter.” But not, he averred, when it’s being put forward as “part of this extreme right-wing attack on elite institutions.”

Such right-wing attacks, argued Issac Bailey, an assistant professor of communications at Davidson College, ultimately have nothing to do with the particulars of any given academic scandal: “Right-wingers believe awful things about liberals and colleges because they want to believe awful things about liberals and colleges, and they will always refuse to believe anything else, no matter what liberals and colleges say or do.”

Now that Gay has departed, now that the work of conservative activists and journalists has overcome institutional resistance, it’s worth examining right-of-center beliefs about higher education a bit more closely. The right’s writers and activists have indeed spent generations, from Christopher Rufo in the present day going back to William F. Buckley Jr. in the 1950s, critiquing the liberal tilt of academia. And the consistency of that critique could understandably persuade academics that it doesn’t really matter where they stand, what they teach or, for that matter, how tough they are on plagiarism. The right will always be against them — and bent on destruction, not reform.

Ann Althouse:

I’m reading “How a Proxy Fight Over Campus Politics Brought Down Harvard’s President/Amid plagiarism allegations and a backlash to campus antisemitism, Claudine Gay became an avatar for broader criticisms of academia” by Nicholas Confessore, in The New York Times.

Dr. Gay’s defenders… warn[ed] that her resignation would encourage conservative interference in universities and imperil academic freedom. (Though some experts have rated Harvard itself poorly on campus free speech during Dr. Gay’s tenure in leadership.)…

What a delicious parenthetical!

That link on “poorly” goes to the FIRE website, where you have to do a search to see where Harvard ranks. I did the search (and you can too). We’re told the “speech climate” is “abysmal.”

But of course, this article, outside of its parentheses, portrays conservative critics of academia as the threat to freedom. Note that the FIRE analysis is looking at “student free speech and open inquiry,” while the NYT article has Gay’s defenders concerned about “academic freedom,” which connotes the interests of faculty. 

Back to the NYT article:

———

Rifts dividing students, faculty and donors have widened

👀
SCOOPLET + 🧵

Danielle Allen, a highly respected Harvard poli sci prof, interviewed for the presidency in 2022.

She didn't get past an early round.

Worth asking why Gay got the job while Allen didn't come close.

I'm not saying I know. But it sure wasn't scholarship…

1/ pic.twitter.com/JtfKJsjysV

— Alice (@AliceFromQueens) January 3, 2024

Ronald Sullivan deleted this one word post written in response to former Harvard president Claudine Gay's resignation: "Karma".

As Dean of Faculty of Arts and Science, Gay refused to defend Sullivan's right to provide legal counsel to an unpopular client and played a key role… pic.twitter.com/WCPTG42I5G

— Wesley Yang (@wesyang) January 3, 2024

Mara Gay — a member of the NYT editorial board and one of America's most infamous diversity hires — is perhaps best known for claiming on live TV that $500 million divided among 327 million people would give each person $1 million. https://t.co/P8uOwaQBSs

— i/o (@eyeslasho) January 3, 2024

You’d think nothing in the article could top the headline, but then you see @AP’s definition of scalping. https://t.co/BaC9cJaBjs pic.twitter.com/WORZ2IqISp

— John McCormack (@McCormackJohn) January 3, 2024

As much as I would like to blame Claudine Gay for her shenanigans, I think most of the fault lies with "us," the people who designed, supported and/or tolerated the current systems of affirmative action, diversity, equity, inclusion and all the other nonsense for the past 50… pic.twitter.com/Ud8kNxKwxA

— Thomas Sowell, The Genius of… (@AlanWolan) January 3, 2024

And:

Bill Ackman:

What I learned, however, was that DEI was not about diversity in its purest form, but rather DEI was a political advocacy movement on behalf of certain groups that are deemed oppressed under DEI’s own methodology.

Under DEI, one’s degree of oppression is determined based upon where one resides on a so-called intersectional pyramid of oppression where whites, Jews, and Asians are deemed oppressors, and a subset of people of color, LGBTQ people, and/or women are deemed to be oppressed. Under this ideology which is the philosophical underpinning of DEI as advanced by Ibram X. Kendi and others, one is either an anti-racist or a racist. There is no such thing as being “not racist.”

Under DEI’s ideology, any policy, program, educational system, economic system, grading system, admission policy, (and even climate change due its disparate impact on geographies and the people that live there), etc. that leads to unequal outcomes among people of different skin colors is deemed racist. More.

Christopher Rufo:

I don’t like playing the racism tabulation game, but, given that Claudine Gay’s defense has amounted to smearing her opponents as racist, let’s put it to the test, comparing Claudine Gay’s racism to that of her critics.

Evidence that Gay is racist:

–Oversaw a discriminatory admissions program ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court
–Led a discriminatory DEI bureaucracy that sought, among other things, to reduce the visual presence of “white men” on campus
–Minimized antisemitism and the call for the violent “decolonization” of Jews
–Supported policies that reduce individuals to racial categories and judge them on the basis of ancestry, rather than individual merit

Evidence that Claudine Gay’s critics are racist:

–Claudine Gay claiming, but providing no hard evidence, that some unknown person or persons sent her mean emails

Emma H. Haidar and Cam E. Kettles:

Harvard President Claudine Gay will resign Tuesday afternoon, bringing an end to the shortest presidency in the University’s history, according to a person with knowledge of the decision.

University Provost Alan M. Garber ’76 will serve as Harvard’s interim president during a search for Gay’s permanent successor, the Harvard Corporation — the University’s highest governing body — announced in an email on Tuesday.

Harvard spokesperson Jonathan L. Swain declined to comment on Gay’s decision to step down.

Gay’s resignation — just six months and two days into the presidency — comes amid growing allegations of plagiarism and lasting doubts over her ability to respond to antisemitism on campus after her disastrous congressional testimony Dec. 5.

Gay weathered scandal after scandal over her brief tenure, facing national backlash for her administration’s response to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack and allegations of plagiarism in her scholarly work.

Gay is expected to announced her decision to step down to Harvard affiliates in an email later today. The Corporation is also expected to make a statement about the decision.

Good riddance. https://t.co/3F88NeAKvW

— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) January 2, 2024

Notes and links on Claudine Gay and Harvard.

More.

New Year, Same Discrimination. State of Wisconsin has 262 new job openings for "diversity internships."
Run by Gov. Tony Ever's "Bureau of Equity and Inclusion." pic.twitter.com/9T87btrsHE

— Dan Lennington (@DanLennington) January 2, 2024

Benjamin Weingarten:

Why would former President Barack Obama spend his time and political capital defending a protector of genocidal Jew-haters — “depending on the context” — later exposed to be a serial plagiarist?

That became a live question with Jewish Insider’s revelation Obama had “privately lobbied” for Harvard President Claudine Gay to keep her job amid calls for her head following the mealymouthed and morally bankrupt testimony she delivered before Congress — testimony illustrating exactly why Jew-hatred had erupted and been allowed to fester on campuses following Hamas’ barbaric Oct. 7 attack.

She showed that Harvard, like its elite peers, had become a “safe space” for one group above all others — Hamasniks and their bigoted intersectional allies — putting Jewish students under threat of not only harassment but bodily harm in the name of an absolute commitment to free speech afforded to virtually no one else on the heavily censorious campus.

In the New York Post, I explain why Obama interceded on Gay’s behalf to defend an indefensible presidency.

As I wite in part:

Douglas Belkin and Arian Campo-Flores:

From the time she began carving her path through the most elite private schools in the nation to the presidency of Harvard University, Claudine Gay earned plaudits and promotions.

She also amassed detractors who were skeptical of her work and qualifications and outraged by what they saw as the political decisions she made as an increasingly powerful administrator.

Those two forces collided in spectacular fashion this month after plagiarism allegations that began circulating online about a year ago spilled into public view due to the efforts of conservative activists including Christopher Rufo, who has said he wants to damage Gay’s career. The allegations have sparked criticism of Harvard over the process that led to Gay’s selection as president, the first Black person to hold the post, and the university’s transparency around how it responded to the plagiarism claims.

Harvard said it first learned about allegations of plagiarism against Gay in October and that the Harvard Corporation, the school’s 12-member governing board, engaged three political scientists from outside the university to carry out their own investigation. The school has declined to identify them or release their review.

DEI in hiring is particularly insidious because it creates an end-to-end problem: if you hire someone incompetent based on race, you cannot easily fire that person, because of the same racial calculation. When you put identity over competence, your institution is compromised.

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) December 29, 2023

While looking at Gay's important 2001 paper, I became skeptical of the whole research approach.

I am not a political scientist, and it is possible that I am mistaken. If I am not mistaken, it is such an obviously flawed method, that I don't understand why the paper could pass…

— Jonatan Pallesen (@jonatanpallesen) December 28, 2023

Christopher Brunet:

She was granted tenure at Stanford in 2005 with just 4 peer-reviewed political science articles to her name: 1998 PolPsych, 2001 APSR, 2002 AJPS, 2004 APSR.

Her 2001 APSR paper, which was central to her already-meager tenure case, was debunked by Michael C. Herron, the Remsen 1943 Professor of Quantitative Social Science at Dartmouth, and Kenneth W. Shotts, the David S. and Ann M. Barlow Professor of Political Economy at Stanford Graduate School of Business, in a paper presented at the 2002 conference of The Society for Political Methodology (PolMeth) after she would not share her data or code with them.

Benjamin Weingarten

Why would former President Barack Obamaspend his time and political capital defending a protector of genocidal Jew-haters — “depending on the context” — later exposed to be a serial plagiarist?

That became a live question with Jewish Insider’s revelation Obama had “privately lobbied” for Harvard President Claudine Gay to keep her job amid calls for her head following the mealymouthed and morally bankrupt testimony she delivered before Congress — testimony illustrating exactly why Jew-hatred had erupted and been allowed to fester on campuses following Hamas’ barbaric Oct. 7 attack.

She showed that Harvard, like its elite peers, had become a “safe space” for one group above all others — Hamasniks and their bigoted intersectional allies — putting Jewish students under threat of not only harassment but bodily harm in the name of an absolute commitment to free speech afforded to virtually no one else on the heavily censorious campus.

One explanation for Obama backing Gay is he shares her tolerance for the pro-Palestinian Israel-haters and their woke comrades on the radical left, with whom he may well feel a kinship.

John Hindraker:

If Claudine Gay were to fall, it could topple the entire house of cards the left, led by Barack Obama, helped build.

To fire her would be to acknowledge the evil hatred of the West at DEI’s core; admit DEI elevates politics over merit, given Gay has proven to be something of an academic fraud; and therefore delegitimize the movement as a whole given Gay’s and Harvard’s symbolic and substantive prominence in it.

I think that is right, and I would add more regarding Harvard’s interests specifically. If you read Gay’s writings and transcripts of her speeches, she has made her purpose plain. Her mission, as she sees it, is to transform Harvard from an intellectual institution into an activist organization. She means for Harvard to be retooled as an explicit engine of left-wing change. And the Harvard Corporation is on board with this change. In fact, it is the very reason why Gay was hired as president.

Jason Riley:

That universities take race into account to fill job openings might be the worst-kept secret in academia. As CNN’s Fareed Zakaria put it recently, a “white man studying the American presidency does not have a prayer of getting tenure at a major history department in America today.” Hiring for new faculty positions, particularly in humanities departments, “now appears to center on the race and gender of the applicant, as well as the subject matter, which needs to be about marginalized groups.”

Earlier this year, the Supreme Court scolded Harvard for using racial preferences to admit students. Why wouldn’t it have been doing the same thing to hire faculty, staff and administrators? On campus, that appears to be the assumption. After Ms. Gay landed the top job last year, the school newspaper hailed the appointment of “the first Black president and president of color in the history of the University” and editorialized that it “feels as though it heralds the start of a more progressive era at Harvard, one that understands representation, diversity, and inclusion as essential to creating the kind of vibrant intellectual community that can in turn create a better world.”

Isabel Vincent:

Days later Gay herself asked for an investigation and Harvard tore up its own rules to ask outside experts to review her work, saying it had to avoid a conflict of interest. 

And the experts then found she did need to make multiple corrections to her academic record.

The bare-knuckled law firm Harvard employed to try to keep the plagiarism allegations from ever coming to light told The Post it would sue for “immense” damages.

Harvard never revealed an investigation had been launched as the lawyers put pressure on The Post to kill its reporting.

Emma H. Haidar and Cam E. Kettles:

“If a university is willing to look the other way and not hold faculty accountable for engaging in academically dishonest behavior, it cheapens its mission and the value of its education,” Foxx wrote in the letter.

University spokesperson Jonathan L. Swain declined to comment on the investigation.

The committee initially opened a probe into antisemitism at Harvard on Dec. 7 following Gay’s testimony before the committee two days earlier. In an interview with The Crimson the same day, Gay said the University would “comply with whatever information is called for.”

Foxx requested Harvard produce “all documents and communications” related to the plagiarism allegations or related to the review by members of the Corporation.

The committee also warned that Harvard could lose federal funding if it is found to not have taken the claims of widespread plagiarism against Gay seriously.

The tipping point is here. It'd really be good if Claudine Gay resigned now. The mere 11 papers was unseemly, but just maybe a university president doesn't need to be a top-class scholar. But the sheer volume of the plagiarism ON TOP OF THIS is a really bad look.

— John McWhorter (@JohnHMcWhorter) December 21, 2023

Aaron Sibarium:

Harvard University on Tuesday received a complaint outlining over 40 allegations of plagiarism against its embattled president, Claudine Gay. The document paints a picture of a pattern of misconduct more extensive than has been previously reported and puts the Harvard Corporation, the university’s governing body—which said it initiated an “independent review” of Gay’s scholarship and issued a statement of support for her leadership—back in the spotlight.

The new allegations, which were submitted to Harvard’s research integrity officer, Stacey Springs, include the examples reported by the Washington Free Beacon and other outlets, as well as dozens of additional cases in which Gay quoted or paraphrased authors without proper attribution, according to a copy of the complaint reviewed by the Free Beacon. They range from missing quotation marks around a few phrases or sentences to entire paragraphs lifted verbatim.

The full list of examples spans seven of Gay’s publications—two more than previously reported—which comprise almost half of her scholarly output. Though the Harvard Corporation said earlier this month that it initiated an independent review Gay’s work in October and found “no violation of Harvard’s standards for research misconduct,” that probe focused on just three papers.

Christopher Brunet:

Dr. Dybvig told Karlstack:

‘‘I realize I have been too pure. I assumed that a lot of people shared my dream (expressed for example by Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King) of ending oppression. However, the dream of most people (especially but not exclusively the oppressed) seems to be becoming the oppressor. This is why there is a strong correlation between abusers of children and people who were abused as children.

Claudine Gay has power now and she is the oppressor of any group not favored by her and other people in power. This is a common pattern in governments heading for totalitarianism. First, say you represent the oppressed. Then you get power and oppress non-favored groups. This leaves you in a morally indefensible position that could not survive given free speech, so you do what you can to destroy anyone (“counterrevolutionaries”) who disagrees with your narrative.’’

Aaron Sibarium

In four papers published between 1993 and 2017, including her doctoral dissertation, Gay, a political scientist, paraphrased or quoted nearly 20 authors—including two of her colleagues in Harvard University’s department of government—without proper attribution, according to a Washington Free Beacon analysis. Other examples of possible plagiarism, all from Gay’s dissertation, were publicized Sunday by the Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo and Karlstack’s Chris Brunet.

The Free Beacon worked with nearly a dozen scholars to analyze 29 potential cases of plagiarism. Most of them said that Gay had violated a core principle of academic integrity as well as Harvard’s own anti-plagiarism policies, which state that “it’s not enough to change a few words here and there.”

Rather, scholars are expected to cite the sources of their work, including when paraphrasing, and to use quotation marks when quoting directly from others. But in at least 10 instances, Gay lifted full sentences—even entire paragraphs—with just a word or two tweaked.

In her 1997 thesis, for example, she borrowed a full paragraph from a paper by the scholars Bradley Palmquist, then a political science professor at Harvard, and Stephen Voss, one of Gay’s classmates in her Ph.D. program at Harvard, while making only a couple alterations, including changing their “decrease” to “increase” because she was studying a different set of data.

Aaron Sibarium:

Harvard University president Claudine Gay was hit with six additional allegations of plagiarism on Monday in a complaint filed with the university, breathing fresh life into a scandal that has embroiled her nascent presidency and pushing the total number of allegations near 50. 

Seven of Gay’s 17 published works have already been impacted by the scandal, but the new charges, which have not been previously reported, extend into an eighth: In a 2001 article, Gay lifts nearly half a page of material verbatim from another scholar, David Canon, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin.  

That article, “The Effect of Minority Districts and Minority Representation on Political Participation in California,” includes some of the most extreme and clear-cut cases of plagiarism yet. At one point, Gay borrows four sentences from Canon’s 1999 book, Race, Redistricting, and Representation: The Unintended Consequences of Black Majority Districts, without quotation marks and with only minor semantic tweaks. She does not cite Canon anywhere in or near the passage, though he does appear in the bibliography.

Anonymous via the Crimson:

I have served as a voting member of the Harvard College Honor Council, the body tasked with upholding the College’s community standards of academic integrity.

In my time on the Council, I heard dozens of cases. When students — my classmates, peers, and friends — appear before the council, they are distraught. For most, it is the worst day of their college careers. For some, it is the worst day of their lives. They often cry.

It is because I have seen first-hand how heart-wrenching these decisions can be, and still think them necessary, that I call on University President Claudine Gay to resign for her numerous and serious violations of academic ethics.

Let’s compare the treatment of Harvard undergraduates suspected of plagiarism with that of their president.

A plurality of the Honor Council’s investigations concern plagiarism. In the 2021-22 school year, the last year for which data is publicly available, 43 percent of cases involved plagiarism or misuse of sources.

By Brooks B. Anderson and Joshua A. Kaplan

University President Claudine Gay should resign.

It has been less than half a year since Gay assumed one of the most prestigious posts in all of academia. Since then, scandal after scandal has plagued our beloved university.

The president of Harvard must be a formidable leader, capable of managing thousands of the brightest minds on the planet, a widely revered international brand, and a multi-billion-dollar bureaucratic behemoth. Further, by way of its field-leading eminences, Harvard exerts influence — and encounters controversy — at the highest levels of politics and policymaking, which often presents challenges for its leader and public face.

In other words, Harvard’s presidency is no mere empty honor; it is a deeply challenging managerial job with deeply challenging duties, not least of which is navigating national outcry.

“we made the decision to grant this author anonymity”

I have served as a voting member of the Harvard College Honor Council, the body tasked with upholding the College’s community standards of academic integrity.

In my time on the Council, I heard dozens of cases. When students — my classmates, peers, and friends — appear before the council, they are distraught. For most, it is the worst day of their college careers. For some, it is the worst day of their lives. They often cry.

It is because I have seen first-hand how heart-wrenching these decisions can be, and still think them necessary, that I call on University President Claudine Gay to resign for her numerous and serious violations of academic ethics.

Let’s compare the treatment of Harvard undergraduates suspected of plagiarism with that of their president.

A plurality of the Honor Council’s investigations concern plagiarism. In the 2021-22 school year, the last year for which data is publicly available, 43 percent of cases involved plagiarism or misuse of sources.

by Rahem D Hamid, Nia L Orakwue, and Elias J. Schisgall

arvard President Claudine Gay is facing allegations of plagiarism after a report in the Washington Free Beacon on Monday and a Sunday post on Substack claimed she plagiarized portions of four academic works over 24 years, including her 1997 Ph.D. dissertation at Harvard.

The allegations come at a uniquely perilous time for Gay, who has been called on to resign by alumni, donors, and members of Congress following her controversial remarks at a congressional hearing on antisemitism on college campuses last Tuesday.

Though The Crimson reported early Tuesday morning that the Harvard Corporation, Harvard’s highest governing body, will express confidence in Gay’s leadership and not remove her, the allegations of plagiarism represent yet another scandal for an increasingly weary president just reaching the end of her first semester.

In a statement to affiliates Tuesday, members of the Harvard Corporation reaffirmed their support for Gay’s leadership. Still, they addressed concernsraised regarding Gay’s scholarship, writing that the “University became aware in late October of allegations regarding three articles.”

“At President Gay’s request, the Fellows promptly initiated an independent review by distinguished political scientists and conducted a review of her published work,” they wrote.

Miles J. Herszenhorn and Claire Yuan:

The Harvard Corporation expressed concerns about allegations of plagiarism in University President Claudine Gay’s academic work Tuesday morning, even as the board declared its unanimous support for Harvard’s embattled president, providing Gay with a path forward to remain in office.

“As members of the Harvard Corporation, we today reaffirm our support for President Gay’s continued leadership of Harvard University,” the board wrote in a University-wide statement on Tuesday. “In this tumultuous and difficult time, we unanimously stand in support of President Gay.”

The Corporation — the University’s highest governing body — finally broke its silence one week after Gay’s controversial congressional testimony, giving Gay some immediate job security while raising new questions about the integrity of her scholarly work and bringing into doubt whether her tenure will be safe in the long term.

KEY FINDINGS:
1. Ivy League payments and entitlements cost taxpayers $41.59 billion over a six-year period (FY2010-FY2015). This is equivalent to $120,000 in government monies, subsidies, & special tax treatment per undergraduate student, or $6.93 billion per year.

Why Did Harvard University Go After One of Its Best Black Professors?

I rarely get angry, but I am angry 😡 right now about the racial double standards that are TEMPORARILY giving #ClaudineGay an opportunity to resign. White progressives created her and white progressives are protecting her. The rest of us have had to work our rear ends off to… pic.twitter.com/5ls2f4PUtB

— Dr. Carol M. Swain (@carolmswain) December 12, 2023

By Samuel J. Abrams & Steven McGuire:

Harvard’s year has been one for the history books. It ranked last in the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s annual college free speech survey, earning its own category of “abysmal.” It had quite possibly the worst response to Hamas’s October 7th terrorist attack on Israel in all American higher education. Its former president, Claudine Gay, rightly resigned after a disastrous appearance before Congress and plagiarism revelations in her weak academic record. It has lost major donors. It is facing lawsuits and Department of Education investigations for anti-Semitism. Many of its own faculty, including a former president, have publicly declared the need for significant reforms.

All of this might have been enough to convince the people who run Harvard that they needed to make some changes, and, in fairness, they have made a few small ones. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences did away with mandatory diversity statements in faculty hiring but replaced them with a service statement that could easily be used to weed out candidates on the same grounds. And it partially adopted institutional neutrality, leaving out a key and currently essential part: that political divestment to get the university to take sides is off the table—National Association of Scholars President Peter Wood saw this coming.

Tilly Robinson;

Several Harvard faculty members blasted Dean of Social Science Lawrence D. Bobo for suggesting certain faculty speech should face “sanctionable limits” and argued that his proposals would restrict academic freedom.

Bobo argued in a Friday op-ed that some faculty members should face penalties from Harvard’s administration for issuing statements that incite external intervention into the University, singling out former Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers for his fierce condemnation of Claudine Gay’s initial response to the Oct. 7 attack on Israel.

Bobo’s op-ed comes as Harvard weathers political attacks, including a monthslong congressional investigation and threats to its federal funding — a campaign which has seized on criticisms lodged by the University’s own faculty, including Summers. Meanwhile, the end of the semester was marked by student protests over the war in Gaza, culminating in a pro-Palestine encampment in Harvard Yard and a walkout at Commencement.

Bobo took aim at Summers — who has charged Harvard with allowing rampant antisemitism and accused its top brass of mishandling the leadership crisis last winter — for his role as one of the University’s highest-profile critics.

Jon Murphy:

Over the past few years, numerous plagiarism scandals have rocked the world of higher education. Prominent public intellectuals and university scholars have been caught improperly citing passages or even straight-up wholesale copying from other scholars’ works in their academic writing. The most high-profile of these scandals involved Claudine Gay, the former president of Harvard University. She resigned her position under pressure due to her academic misconduct, which involved lifting quotes from other authors and not attributing other writers’ work.

Many of Claudine Gay’s supporters were quick to minimize her actions. For example, D. Stephen Voss, associate professor of political science at the University of Kentucky (and one of the people Gay plagiarized), dismissed her actions as “no big deal.” It’s a fairly common practice, and she only borrowed a few words, Voss argued. If Gay’s behavior is no big deal and (as the series of scandals shows) is indeed a fairly common occurrence in higher education, why waste so much digital ink discussing it?

Colleges need to uphold moral standards, including respect for the property of others.The problem is that “borrowing” the words written by others and passing them off as your own is dishonest. It’s intellectual theft. Colleges and universities need to uphold and exemplify moral standards, including respect for the property of others. Plagiarism cannot be allowed any more than more tactile forms of stealing.

I contend that Gay’s behavior is a big deal. In fact, Harvard University itself seems to think so. The university’s own guide to freshman students on plagiarism states: “When you fail to cite your sources, or when you cite them inadequately, you are plagiarizing, which is taken extremely seriously at Harvard.” Voss’s statements aside, Gay’s mistake is an important failing and must be treated that way. Why? Because the rule of law matters.

Tilly R. Robinson and Neil H. Shah

Harvard Sociology assistant professor Christina J. Cross was accused of plagiarism in an anonymous complaint to Harvard’s Office of Research Integrity, conservative activist Christopher F. Rufo reported in the City Journal — the fourth Black woman at Harvard who studies race or social justice to be accused of plagiarism.

The allegations against Cross mark the fourth in a rapid series of anonymous plagiarism complaints of varying severity lodged against Black women at Harvard amid a growing right-wing attack against diversity, equity, and inclusion in higher education.

Cross follows former Harvard president Claudine Gay; Sherri A. Charleston, Harvard’s Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer; and Shirley R. Greene, a Title IX coordinator at the Harvard Extension School, who have all faced plagiarism allegations since December.

Though the allegations against Cross are the weakest of the four, plagiarism expert Jonathan Bailey said, Rufo’s posts on X received more than a million views and were amplified by X owner Elon Musk.

Rachel Slade:

Twitchy and youthful with a quick wit, Hersh is a 40-year-old Tufts graduate and political science professor renowned on campus for his tightly structured lecture classes, which draw impressive crowds. While co-teaching a seminar class with him a couple of years ago, I learned how he’d carved out a place for himself as a self-styled “right-leaning centrist” who is working to counteract what he sees as the overabundance of liberal thinking on campus.

Hersh is not quite a code-red alarmist, à la Bill Ackman—the Harvard-educated hedge-fund billionaire who told New York magazine that after his daughter came home from Harvard “an anti-capitalist…practically a Marxist,” he decided to wage war on higher ed, which he said had all but indoctrinated his daughter into a “cult.” Already vocal about his opposition to Harvard’s DEI initiatives, he became the poster boy of the conservative attack on higher ed when he spearheaded calls for a plagiarism investigation of the school’s then president, Claudine Gay, which resulted in her resignation in January.

Hersh hasn’t come to quite the same conclusion as Ackman, but he does know that there’s a paucity of conservative teaching on campus—liberal professors, after all, outnumber conservative professors 28 to 1 in New England, according to a 2016 study of data from the Higher Education Research Institute—and he believes it’s pedagogically important to offer diverse perspectives and voices. “Sometimes good ideas emerge from the right, and sometimes they emerge from the left,” Hersh tells me. “And you’ve got to burst the bubble that either democracy or the good life for American society is going to emerge exclusively from the left.”

By Frederick Hess and Michael Q. McShane

Former Harvard President Lawrence Summers recently tweeted, “I cannot think of a worse stretch in Harvard history than the last few months.”

He has a point.

Last summer, the Supreme Court ruled in Students for Fair Admission v. Harvard that the university’s race-based admissions criteria violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. Then in December, President Claudine Gay struggled to condemn the harassment and threats that Jewish students faced on campus from pro-Palestinian activists after Hamas instigated a war against Israel. Apparently, the university rated as the worst in the nation for free speech by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression had finally encountered some speech it felt obliged to protect.

Harvard has also come under justifiable criticism for suspect and inconsistent academic standards. Gay resigned in January when reports emerged that her sparse publication record was rife with plagiarism. The university’s chief diversity officer and a prominent neuroscientist there are also facing serious allegations of research malpractice.

In the wake of all this, it can be tempting to just say, “Burn it all down.” For years, progressives at Harvard and its peers have sought to use these institutions as a platform to promote political and social agendas, cultivate groupthink, and marginalize conservative thought. 

Sergiu Klanerman:

Lifting the Iron Curtain from academia won’t be easy. Then again, we have no choice.

In the wake of Harvard, Penn, and MIT’s congressional testimony debacle, followed by the plagiarizing travails of Harvard’s President Claudine Gay and her reluctant and ungracious resignation, it is broadly recognized that America’s elite universities are afflicted by a rapidly metastasizing cancer. Harvard, our oldest and most admired university, is now the poster child for this terrible affliction.

Calls for reform are widespread, with some pointing, correctly, to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives as a uniquely destructive bureaucratic instrument that needs to be abolished. Specific measures to improve our campuses include reviving free speech, institutional neutrality, viewpoint diversity, and individual merit as the only admissible criteria of selection for hiring and promotion. Such reforms are all self-evident within the framework of the traditional telos of the university, which prizes uncompromising dedication to truth and the pursuit of wisdom. If these ideas are controversial at all, it is only because the old telos has been eroded by new demands made in the name of social justice, in which every visible disparity between groups has its origin in discrimination.

As direct forms of discrimination are now virtually nonexistent in academia, discrimination has been redefined as an invisible, structural form of bigotry that is suddenly everywhere. Like witchcraft, this form of prejudice cannot be observed directly. Rather, it manifests instead through unequal outcomes. Once justice was reformulated in terms of equality of results, it became untenable to insist on merit and the pursuit of truth; these values had to be abandoned or redefined, whenever they came into conflict with the new orthodoxy. 

Tilly R. Robinson and Neil H. Shah

Harvard Extension School administrator Shirley R. Greene was accused of 42 instances of plagiarism in her 2008 University of Michigan dissertation in a complaint sent to the University Friday — the latest in a string of anonymous plagiarism complaints against Black Harvard officials.

All three anonymous complaints — against former University President Claudine Gay, Harvard Chief Diversity Officer Sherri A. Charleston, and now Greene, who handles Title IX complaints at the Extension School — were leveled at Black women who hold or held leadership positions at the University.

Unlike Gay, Charleston and Greene are administrators and do not hold academic appointments at Harvard.

The complaint was submitted anonymously to the chair of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ professional conduct committee Friday afternoon and obtained by The Crimson.

George Leef:

Among the many destructive ideas that “progressive” thinking has unleashed on education in America is that it’s unfair to hold students from “underrepresented groups” to the same standards as others. Schools and colleges should “help” minority students succeed by lowering expectations for them—somehow atoning for wrongs done to their ancestors in the distant past. That is how Claudine Gay wound up as president of Harvard.

The notion that academic standards should be lower for minority students has swept through our educational institutions, but there are some dissenters who argue that this doesn’t help but hurts. One of them is Professor Erec Smith of York College. He teaches rhetoric and composition and has written a book challenging the belief that minority (especially black) students are somehow harmed by teaching them to use standard English. Smith argues in his book, A Critique of Anti-Racism in Rhetoric and Composition, that standard English empowers those students by giving them another tool to accomplish their objectives.

Much as woke professors want to stamp out racism, they’re going about it the wrong way.As Smith sees things, professors in his field, eager to display their “anti-racist” zeal, have adopted the trendy idea that “whiteness” is the enemy of progress for blacks. They’re passionate and sincere, but they have allowed their emotions to trample over reason in evaluating the pros and cons of their pedagogy. Smith writes that “feelings and opinions have replaced critical thinking in attempts to decenter whiteness and challenge hegemonic forces in academia.” Much as those professors want to stamp out racism, they’re going about it the wrong way.

That way entails an exclusive focus on the racial identity of students. Black students are assumed to be victims of white, racist social forces against which they are helpless. Therefore, they must band together in group solidarity to be empowered against “whiteness.” The trouble with that, Smith shows, is that it actually disempowers them. It leads to fallacious interpretations of texts and situations (seeing racism everywhere) and an inability to communicate and persuade. Instead of enabling black students to succeed, it infantilizes them. They’re trapped in an identity of victimhood, always looking for excuses and villains.

——

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

Underly and our long term disastrous reading results….

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Ben Hunt:

I’ve never met Claudine Gay, but I know Claudine Gay. 

We both went to grad school at Harvard in the government department (what they call political science pretty much everywhere else), me from 1986-1991 and Gay from 1992-1998. We both got a masters degree and Ph.D. there. We both had the same dissertation advisor, famed statistical methodologist and all around nice guy Gary King, yet neither of us were statistical methodologists at heart. We both used regressions and econometrics as a toolkit to help us answer questions that we wanted to explore, Gay in American politics and me in international relations, and we were perfectly proficient with the tools, but we didn’t really care about the tools. We cared about the questions. I didn’t overlap with Claudine Gay chronologically at Harvard, but I overlapped 100% with the classes and the places and the people and the life.

After graduation we both did the tenure track publish-or-perish thing, but here the close similarities stop. Gay had a significantly more successful academic career than I did. I had a good start at NYU but ended up with tenure at SMU, which is pretty much a dead end in prestige academic terms. Looking back now, I can see how impatient I was with the game of academia and how poorly I played it. Gay started at Stanford and ended up with tenure at Stanford, which is anything but a dead end. Harvard brought her back with a full professorship within two years of that. Gay was patient, and she played the game extremely well.

Interestingly, we both stopped teaching a few years after getting tenure. Me to co-found a software company, which required leaving academia completely, Gay to go into university administration as a dean, which locked her into academia for life. There but for the grace of God … I am SO lucky that I got out when I did.

Stephen:

I have served happily as a professor at Yale for most of my adult life, but in my four-plus decades at the mast, I have never seen campuses roiled as they’re roiling today. On the one hand are gleeful activists on the right, taking victory laps over the tragic tumble from grace of Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay. On the other is a campus left that has spent years crafting byzantine and vague rules on hate speech that it suddenly finds turned back on its allies. For those of us who love the academy, these are unhappy times. 

The controversy began with criticisms of some universities, Harvard included, for soft-pedaling their responses to the horrific Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, and for then ignoring the overheated rhetoric of many pro-Palestinian protesters on campus. It has since spiraled into a full-bore battle in the never-ending culture wars.

There’s something sad but deeply American about the way that the current crisis stems not from the terror attacks but from a subsequent congressional hearing at which the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology gave such cautious responses that it was hard to understand their positions. It was all very embarrassing; and, in its way, very McCarthyist.

Still, some good may yet come of the debacle. I have in mind not, as the left might think, a fresh rallying of the angry troops; nor, as the right might think, an eager readiness for the next battle. Rather, the controversy provides us with an opportunity to engage in a serious debate about what higher education is for.

Frederick Hess:

In December, the presidents of Harvard, Penn and MIT went before Congress to address antisemitism on campus. Their studiedhypocrisy on the issue of free speech triggered a bipartisan avalanche of criticism, ultimately leading to the ousters of Penn’s Liz Magill and Harvard’s Claudine Gay. 

The fallout has made the college campus the momentary front line in our polarized culture clashes. This is a good moment to step back and ensure that our principles don’t get sacrificed in the name of point-scoring. 

Professors insisting that plagiarism isn’t always “plagiarism” (at least not when it involves right-wingers criticizing the president of Harvard) have risked lasting damage to the principle of academic integrity. So, too, do we risk undermining campus free speech if we’re not clear about what it’s for and why it matters. 

Oddly absent of late has been any evident recognition that the historic rationale for campus speech is not to provide protesters with bucolic backdrops, but to enable scholars to challenge received wisdom, students to ask uncomfortable questions, and classrooms to serve as places of genuine learning.

Melissa Korn:

“We worked to address relevant questions in a timely, fair, and diligent manner. We understand and acknowledge that many viewed our efforts as insufficiently transparent, raising questions regarding our process and standard of review,” the school told the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, according to a copy of the material reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

Claudine Gay, a political scientist who served as Harvard’s president until earlier this month, was accused in late October of plagiarizing a number of passages in published academic articles over the course of decades. Additional allegations were made in subsequent weeks. The firestorm over her research ignited around the same time she was being criticized for how she handled concerns about antisemitism on campus.

The House committee, before which Gay testified in early December on the antisemitism issue, launched an investigation into how the school was addressing antisemitism, as well as the plagiarism allegations. The narrative submitted Friday was accompanied by other documents responsive to the committee’s request, a school spokesman said.

James Taranto:

Would calls for the genocide of Jews be a violation of the University of Florida’s bullying and harassment policy?

“Yes,” says Ben Sasse, UF’s president.

Three university heads equivocated when lawmakers asked that question in a congressional hearing last month. So far two of them, the University of Pennsylvania’s Liz Magill and Harvard’s Claudine Gay, have been demoted to the faculty. Mr. Sasse—who came to Florida a year ago after eight years as a U.S. senator from his native Nebraska—is a deft enough politician to parry a gotcha question.

Yet when I follow up by raising the issue of free speech, he acknowledges the answer isn’t so simple. Regarding the First Amendment, he says, “I’m a pretty libertarian zealot.” He emphasizes that the Constitution “draws a deep, deep line at speech and action,” that “threats are the front edge of action,” and that “orchestrated plans, or getting to a definable way of targeting specific people, is when speech ceases to be deliberation.”

Which isn’t that different from Ms. Gay’s testimony last month: “We are deeply committed to free expression. But when speech crosses over into conduct that violates our policies—policies against bullying, harassment, intimidation—we do take action.”

Andy Kessler:

Have we reached peak DEI? The unraveling of “diversity, equity and inclusion” initiatives had already begun—five states banning DEI programs; Google, Facebook
and others cutting DEI staff; Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard—well before Harvard President Claudine Gay was demoted.

Author Christopher Rufo, echoing 1960s student activists, called the rise of DEI a “long march through the institutions”—a 50-plus-year ideology infiltration into universities, K-12 schools, government, media and corporations with the goal of telling us all how to live. That’s why I enjoy that the word “rot” is back in style to describe what is happening inside the walls of academia.

Like everything based on the writings of Karl Marx—seeing oppressors and colonial struggles everywhere—DEI was doomed to fail. The uniformity of thought known as intersectionality, fostered by DEI, meant all oppressed people must support all others who are oppressed. But that idea burst on Oct. 7 when Hamas raped, murdered and kidnapped Israelis. Many liberals, especially Jewish ones, couldn’t support genocidal “colonized” terrorists. Pop! The long march is in retreat.

By the way, ESG, or investing based on “environmental, social and governance” principles, peaked last June, when BlackRock CEO Larry Fink said he would stop using “the word ESG anymore, because it’s been entirely weaponized.” Never mind that performance of ESG funds has been sketchy and that BlackRock had been adding the label “sustainable” or “ESG” to funds and charging up to five times as much. Then a study published in December by Boston University’s Andrew King found “no reliable evidence for the proposed link between sustainability and financial performance.” Pop!

Deeper Dive.

Nidhi Subbaraman:

More than 50 papers, including four co-authored by CEO and President Dr. Laurie Glimcher, are part of an ongoing review, according to Dr. Barrett Rollins, the cancer institute’s research integrity officer. Some requests for retractions and corrections have already been sent to journals, he said. Others are being prepared. The institute has yet to determine whether misconduct occurred.

Also under investigation are papers co-authored by Chief Operating Officer Dr. William Hahn; Director of the Clinical Investigator Research Program Dr. Irene Ghobrial; and Dr. Kenneth Anderson, program director of the Jerome Lipper Multiple Myeloma Center.

All four researchers have faculty appointments at Harvard Medical School, making it the latest tranche of misconduct allegations leveled at Harvard researchers. Claudine Gay resigned as Harvard University president early this year, facing allegations of plagiarism. Last year, Harvard Business School placed professor Francesca Gino on administrative leave after accusations that her work contained falsified data.

Glimcher and the other researchers didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Dana-Farber’s disclosure about its probe arrived after a data sleuth pointed to irregularities in the researchers’ papers.

In early January, molecular biologist Sholto David published a blog post describing what he said were signs of image manipulation in papers by the Dana-Farber researchers. David contacted Dana-Farber and Harvard Medical School with his concerns, submitting a list of papers he said contained problems.

The most serious, he said, had to do with images of experimental results that had signs of copy-and-pasting by software such as Adobe Photoshop. “Those are pixel-perfect matches for the same area, but it’s supposed to be a different sample,” he said.

Well, the level of data forgery is pathetically amateurish and excessive

Harvey Mansfield:

Claudine Gay herself best stated the issue of her brief presidency of Harvard. When her appointment was announced, she declared that “the idea of the Ivory Tower, that is the past, not the future, of academia.” We must be a “part” of society, not outside it. What is the difference she invokes?

The Ivory Tower is often used to dismiss academia, and the metaphor is rarely examined for its virtue. Ivory is a natural substance that is rare, precious and pure. It’s also fragile: An ivory tower probably wouldn’t stand without a mix of steel and concrete. It signifies a university that is indeed in society but towers above it because it seeks to find truth out of what society takes for granted. A university doesn’t possess truth as much as it honors it. Society’s interest above all is justice—the Declaration of Independence states “self-evident” truths that serve justice—and society surely wants its justice to be true, but it doesn’t honor truth as Harvard does by having “Veritas”as its motto.

Honoring anything implies inequality and isn’t very democratic. Honor can best be understood as doing good in a way that is against your interest. Honoring truth as a professor isn’t lucrative, though our prosperous society keeps academics out of penury. Nor is questioning popular belief the avenue to popularity. But living a life of honoring truth offers a peculiar satisfaction that does you no worldly good. You realize that you could have sought money or acclaim but doing so would have a cost that can be appreciated only from the Ivory Tower. Still, thanks to good-hearted Americans, you won’t have to suffer the fate of Socrates. They will honor you as a professor even though they wouldn’t vote for you as dogcatcher.

Josh Barro

Over the past few years, conservatives have rapidly lost trust in higher education. From 2015 to 2023, Gallup found that the share of Republicans expressing “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education fell by 37 points, from 56 to 19 percent. As conservatives have come to look negatively at these institutions, Republicans have engaged in political attacks on the sector, most recently in the fact-finding and pressure campaign that caused Claudine Gay to resign as president of Harvard.

This decline is something close to common knowledge. Less discussed is the fact that public confidence in colleges has fallen significantly across all ideological groups since 2015. Though Republicans’ confidence cratered the most, Gallup found that it fell by 16 points among independents (from 48 to 32 percent) and nine points among Democrats (from 68 to 59 percent, not far from where Republicans were nine years ago).

Allysia Finely:

The Harvard Crimson published an op-ed on Dec. 31, written by an anonymous undergraduate, titled “I Vote on Plagiarism Cases at Harvard College. Gay’s Getting Off Easy.” Two days later, Claudine Gay resigned as president. Could it have been the catalyst?

“When my peers are found responsible for multiple instances of inadequate citation, they are often suspended for an academic year,” wrote the student who sits on Harvard’s honor council, which adjudicates peer academic-integrity violations. “When the president of their university is found responsible for the same types of infractions, the fellows of the Corporation ‘unanimously stand in support of’ her,” as the body declared in a Dec. 12 statement.

By shrugging at Ms. Gay’s plagiarism, the Harvard Corp. showed that its commitment to academic integrity was as phony as its other ideals.

Hadley Freeman:

The saga of Claudine Gay — the outgoing president of Harvard, who lasted a record-breakingly brief six months — has become a news story hall of mirrors, in which everyone sees in it exactly what they want. According to the BBC, “Dr Gay — who is black — represents much of what [the right-wing] loathes about modern American higher education”. Others blame the influence of Harvard donors, who over the past month became increasingly critical of her. The Rev Al Sharpton insisted that Gay’s resignation “is an attack on every black woman in this country who has put a crack in the glass ceiling”.

Don Surber:

I come to praise Claudine Gay, not condemn her. The now ex-president of Harvard did our nation a great service by being smug and arrogant at a congressional hearing. Her hubris revealed what a farce DEI is as Harvard overlooked qualified candidates and chose her simply because she is a black lady.

This is Bidenism. He chose his vice president and a Supreme Court justice the same way. The latter told Congress she could not define what a woman is. The former’s speeches make her sound like a 10 year old explaining the world to a 7 year old.

(A 10 year old is a person who has lived for 10 years.)

But wait. There’s more Bidenism. He plagiarizes everything, including his biography. Gay plagiarizes too! How do you think a dummy like her got a PhD? Her doctoral dissertation in 1997 from Harvard turned out to steal the work of others in violation of Harvard’s rules.

Her ability to become the top scholar in America — and presiding over Harvard is the cherry atop the Ivy League whipped cream that covers the higher education dessert — raises the question of whether this treat is worth having. Maybe America needs more meat and potatoes.

America has 1 million active medical doctors. They are useful and I would not be surprised if half the 6,020 doctors in West Virginia are foreign born.

America has 3 times as many people with doctorate degrees. I am not saying they are useless. I just would feel better if we had 3 million medical doctors and a million PhDs.

Every one of those PhDs wrote a doctoral dissertation and many of them have written research papers since then and even books. It would be a shame if some used artificial intelligence devices to check to see if those committee approved theses were cut-and-pasted, wouldn’t it?

Spoiler alert: Somebody is.

Steve McGuire posts a letter from Clare Lock LLP:

Re: Claudine Gay and Harvard University

Dear Laura and Adam,

We are defamation counsel to Harvard University and Claudine Gay, the President of Harvard University.

Late Tuesday afternoon, Isabel Vincent, an investigative reporter for The New York Post, notified Harvard that she is preparing for publication a proposed article that would include highly inflammatory and damaging allegations, derived from “complaints” purportedly “received” by The Post from some unidentified source, that “some” of President Gay’s scholarly work “may have been plagiarized from other academics.”!

Let me be perfectly clear so there is no misunderstanding of my clients’ position in any future legal proceeding made necessary by the publication of these defamatory falsehoods.

These

allegations of plagiarism are demonstrably false. The excerpts that Ms. Vincent provided do not support a finding of plagiarism – and the conclusion she proffers rests on a fatally flawed

Harry Lewis:

Let’s go back to how Harvard’s current crisis began: charges of antisemitism.

Why antisemitism seems to be a problem at Harvard and other universities is one of the still-unanswered questions that precipitated the University’s downward spiral.

But, it surely is not Claudine Gay’s fault. It is not because Harvard admits antisemitic students or hires antisemitic faculty. No one is suggesting there are comparable antisemitism problems in other kinds of institutions — such as hospitals or libraries — so there must be something that uniquely happens in universities.

That something must be the source of our woes.

***

Unapologetic antisemitism — whether the incidents are few or numerous — is a college phenomenon because of what we teach, and how our teachings are exploited by malign actors.

Christopher Rufo:

The left has spent decades consolidating power across the institutions of American academic life. The crowning achievement of that effort was the diversity, equity and inclusion bureaucracy—constructed to perpetuate progressive dominance of higher education by keeping conservatives out of the professoriate. Claudine Gay was in some respects the apotheosis of this process. Last year, Ms. Gay, an African-American political scientist with a thin publishing history, became Harvard University’s 30th president. On Monday, following a sequence of scandals involving antisemitism and plagiarism, she resigned.

What changed? First, public support for DEI has cratered. Following the outpouring of sympathy on elite campuses for Hamas’s war of “decolonization” against Israel, many Americans—including many center-left liberals—became aware of the ideological rot within academic institutions. They began to question the sweet-sounding euphemisms of DEI and examine what they mean in practice.

Second, the political right has learned how to fight more effectively. As one of the journalists who first exposed the similarities between Ms. Gay’s published work and that of other scholars, I watched the political dynamics develop from the inside. The key, I learned, is that any activist campaign has three points of leverage: reputational, financial and political. For some institutions, one point of leverage is enough, but, for a powerful one such as Harvard, the “squeeze” must work across multiple angles.

Josh Barro:

Over the last few months, there’s been a lot of talk about how conservatives have grown increasingly alienated from institutions of higher education. Confidence in colleges and universities is now sharply polarized by party; between 2015 and 2023, Gallup found that the share of Republicans expressing “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education fell by 37 percentage points. As conservatives have come to look negatively at these institutions, Republicans have increasingly engaged in political attacks on the sector, most recently, in the fact-finding and pressure campaign that caused Claudine Gay to resign this week as president of Harvard.

Less discussed is the fact that public confidence in colleges has fallen significantly across allideological groups since 2015. Though Republicans’ confidence cratered the most, Gallup found that it fell by 16 points among independents and 9 points among Democrats.

Often, when an issue becomes polarized, you’ll see thermostatic effects in public opinion, as when Democrats became more liberal on immigration in response to Donald Trump’s histrionic attacks on immigrants. But while liberal figures on campus like to talk about themselves as a vanguard in a fight against conservative know-nothings who would take down knowledge and expertise, there is no pro-college backlash among liberals that is apparent in the polls. So it would behoove the champions of knowledge and research and expertise and truth at our nation’s elite universities to be a little less entitled and whiny, and a little more introspective about why everyone seems to like them less than they used to.

Josh Barro:

I personally have also developed a more negative view of colleges and universities over the last decade, and my reason is simple: I increasingly find these institutions to be dishonest. A lot of the research coming out of them does not aim at truth, whether because it is politicized or for more venal reasons. The social justice messaging they wrap themselves in is often insincere. Their public accountings of the reasons for their internal actions are often implausible. They lie about the role that race plays in their admissions and hiring practices. And sometimes, especially at the graduate level, they confer degrees whose value they know will not justify the time and money that students invest to get them.

The most recent debacle at Harvard, in which large swathes of academia seem to have conveniently forgotten what the term “plagiarism” means so they don’t have to admit that Claudine Gay engaged in it, is only the latest example of the lying that is endemic on campus.

Andrew Jack:

Critics of America’s elite universities have been quick to declare that the departure of Harvard University president Claudine Gay last week was just an early victory in a very long campaign.

Gay’s resignation followed criticism of her handling of antisemitism on campus and claims of plagiarism. But her shortlived tenure as the first female black leader of the US’s oldest university has also fed into the country’s broader “culture wars” against higher education.

Christopher Rufo, the conservative activist who helped spark the campaign against her, wrote in the Wall Street Journal: “Gay was a scholar of not much distinction who climbed the ladder of diversity politics, built a [diversity, equity and inclusion] empire as a Harvard dean, and catered to the worst instincts of leftwing ideologues on campus . . . While her resignation is a victory, it is only the beginning.”

Alan Garber, Gay’s interim successor, and the Harvard Corporation, which oversees the university, must rebuild links with faculty, students, alumni, donors and politicians at a time of intense scrutiny over governance, affirmative action, freedom of speech and campus protests that could threaten Harvard’s future applications and revenues.

As Bill Ackman, the billionaire hedge fund manager and a Harvard graduate who has led attacks on the university, wrote on X: “There is a lot more work to be done to fix Harvard than just replacing its president.”

Jonathan Zimmerman:

It’s about Carole Hooven.

Never heard of her? I didn’t think so. But Hooven’s story speaks volumes about the real problem at Harvard, and in American universities more broadly: the lack of academic freedom for diverse perspectives.

We’ve heard the word diverse a lot since Gay stepped down because she was Harvard’s first African American president. I don’t know if she was targeted by her right-wing critics because of her race, as her defenders alleged. Nor do I know if her record of lifting unattributed passages from other scholars should have disqualified her for the presidency.

Here’s what I do know: Harvard talks a good game about diverse views, but it doesn’t actually protect them. And that’s very bad news for higher education.

Hooven had to learn this lesson the hard way. She was a lecturer in the department of evolutionary biology at Harvard when she went on Fox News in 2021 to promote her new book, T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us. During the interview, she said that there are just two biological sexes: male and female.

Hooven made a point of distinguishing sex from gender, which can assume many different forms. “We can treat people with respect and respect their gender identities and use their preferred pronouns, so understanding the facts about biology doesn’t prevent us from treating people with respect,” she said, repeating the term respect three times.

No matter. The director of her department’s diversity and inclusion task force took to Twitter (now X) to denounce Hooven’s “transphobic and hateful” comments. “This dangerous language perpetuates a system of discrimination against non-cis people,” the director added. “It directly opposes our Task Force work that aims to create a safe space for scholars of ALL gender identities and races.”

Victor Davis Hanson:

Thus Claudine Gay’s recent New York Times disingenuous op-ed alleging racism as the prime cause of her career demise, was, to quote Talleyrand, “worse than a crime, it was a blunder.” And her blame-gaming will only hurt her cause and reinforce the public’s weariness with such boilerplate and careerist resorts to racism where it does not exist.

Gay knows that her meteoric career trajectory through prestigious Philips academy, Princeton, Stanford, and Harvard was not symptomatic of systemic racism, but rather just the opposite—in large part through institutional efforts to show special concern, allowances, and deference due to her race and gender.

And she knows well that her forced resignation was not caused by a conspiracy of conservative activists. It came at the request also of liberal op-ed writers in now embarrassed leftwing megaphones like the New York Times and the Washington Post, black intellectuals, and academics—and donors who usually identify, like the vast majority of Harvard philanthropists, as liberal Democrats.

Ruy Teixeira:

Claudine Gay is out as president of Harvard. It’s tempting for Democrats to simply ascribe her fall to the nefarious activities of the right and, of course, to racism as Gay herself alleges in her resignation letter. If so, no rethinking of Democratic positions is necessary, just a ringing affirmation of the party’s noble commitment to, well, diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).

That would be a mistake. In truth, Gay owed her position to her race, gender and, importantly, her role as a DEI enforcer par excellence. Her body of academic work is thin, undistinguished and, as we now know, riddled with instances of plagiarism. As the dean of arts and sciences at Harvard, her position prior to becoming president, Gay presided over a DEI regime where dissenters from the reigning orthodoxy were enthusiastically punished, including the evolutionary biologist Carole Hooven for publicly asserting that there were only two biological sexes and, most egregiously, the brilliant young economist Roland Fryer.

Fryer, like Gay, is black. But unlike Gay, who grew up in a comfortable middle-class household headed by two professionals and attended Phillips Exeter Academy, Fryer came from a broken home, living on and off with his alcoholic father and crack-dealing relatives and was involved in gang life. But he overcame all that to become a profoundly original economist who won the John Bates Clark award for best economist under 40, with innumerable pathbreaking papers to his name. As Glenn Loury observed:

Claudine Gay’s rise to Harvard President was no doubt in part the result of affirmative action, but the more interesting dimension is how it reflects the rise of *bureaucrats* over intellectuals at top universities. Over two decades, Gay published just 10 articles & zero books.…

— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) January 3, 2024

By Mike Damiano

Just before winter break, four prominent Harvard faculty members met for a private dinner with two of the university’s most powerful leaders.

Landing the dinner meeting was something of a coup for the faculty members who are co-leaders of a campaign, launched last spring, to reverse what they see as a rising culture of self-censorship, decreasing tolerance for dissenting views, and a tendency for the university to take official positions on the issues of the day.

When it was launched in March, the campaign might have seemed quixotic, even contrarian. But in the midst of campus tumult in recent months with bitter debates over antisemitism, pro-Palestinian speech, and the future of the school’s president, Claudine Gay, their dinner engagement with Tracy Palandjian and Paul Finnegan, members of Harvard’s insular governing board known as the Corporation, was a sign that their views have taken on new relevance. It was a marker that such efforts are being discussed at the highest levels of academia as possible guidelines that schools could adopt.During the Dec. 19 dinner at Bar Enza in The Charles Hotel, the four faculty members — Jeffrey Flier, a former dean of Harvard Medical School; Steven Pinker, a psychology professor; Jeannie Suk Gersen, a Harvard Law School professor; and Flynn Cratty, associate director of a Harvard research program — made the case for their platform.

Greg Weiner:

The debate over antisemitism at elite universities has largely missed the point. The most important question isn’t how academic administrators respond to antisemitism but why the educations they provide seem to foster such hatred. For American Jews, the question cuts deeper: Given our traditional love of learning, do we care about the quality of education or only the prestige of the institutions providing it?

Former President Liz Magill can hardly be blamed for the failures of the University of Pennsylvania, an institution she led for barely a year. Neither can Claudine Gay of Harvard or Sally Kornbluth of the Massachusetts Institutes of Technology, whose tenures began in July and January, respectively. That lawmakers had to ask about students’ genocidal sympathies at all reveals that some of our most prestigious universities are abjectly failing to cultivate virtue or wisdom.

Menacing mobs on campus suggest an absence of what has, since Socrates, been recognized as the essential prerequisite for learning: a readiness to acknowledge one’s ignorance. Students once aspired to learn what they didn’t know. At some institutions, it now appears the purpose of education is to express views of which the putative learners are already certain.

Carol M. Swain

Political science professor Dr. Carol Swain is one of the academics whom Claudine Gay, president of Harvard, plagiarized. Swain has called for Gay’s firing and a “return to sanity” by Harvard University. Here, she explains how the insanity has spread across higher education — with a philosophy labeled DEI. 

A few months ago, I was invited to apply for a visiting professorship at a major university out west. As part of the application, I had to submit a mandatory diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) statement. 

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It was difficult to write because I believe that all DEI programs should be abolished and that we can achieve diversity without discrimination. As I argued in my co-authored book, “The Adversity of Diversity,” DEI programs are divisive, and many, if not all, of the programs violate our civil rights laws, as well as the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. 

Therefore, I argued that diversity programs should share the same fate as race-based college admissions, which the Supreme Court struck down as unconstitutional last June.

Below are some of the main thoughts I offered in my required DEI statement:

Eliot Cohen:

Like many alumni of Harvard, I have been following the misadventures of President Claudine Gay—first her coolly calibrated reflections on arguments for the genocide of Jews, and now accusations about the intellectual integrity of her published work—with appalled fascination. It is the latter topic on which I can claim some expertise.

I learned about plagiarism at Harvard by an accident of academic politics. The department of government, where I had received my Ph.D., had an opening for an assistant professor in the field of international affairs, and it had (in the department’s opinion) two equally attractive candidates. With Solomonic wisdom, they divided the position in half, offering me and my competitor half-time administrative positions. Mine was as the Allston Burr Senior Tutor in Quincy House.

The Harvard houses are modified versions of Oxford or Cambridge colleges. They are residences but not dormitories. Associated with each house was a group of faculty and visiting fellows who regularly dined and spoke there, and who helped constitute each house’s Senior Common Room. There was a staff of resident tutors, mainly graduate students, who taught sections of major courses and advised students in a variety of ways. And then there were the master and the senior tutor, also resident. The former presided over the collective life of the house; the latter was responsible for the students as individuals.

Max Eden and Jay Greene:

Consider Harvard President Claudine Gay, who evinced no ability to think on her feet or even adjust wording undoubtedly scripted for her by lawyers. Yet despite her brilliant display of dullness, Ms. Gay grinned as though she were the cleverest in the room.

This was, perhaps, understandable. Ms. Gay is, after all, president of Harvard University. Typically, you get to be president of Harvardonly if everyone knows that you are very, very smart. After her shameful performance, however, it should come as no surprise that Ms. Gay rose to this post despite a shockingly unimpressive scholarly record.

Carol Swain:

1. Stop listening to the apologists for plagiarism.
2. Fire Claudine Gay posthaste. She can be relieved of duties until the terms are negotiated.
3. Stop listening to the racist mob of whites and blacks who cry racism while being among the worst offenders.
4. Hire the best man or woman who can steer the university back towards sanity. Appeasing the Marxist identity politics mob should not be a consideration. The person for the job might be a middle to older age white Jewish man who believes in classical liberalism.
5. Have a sit down conversation with the people who have been harmed by the plagiarism of Gay and the system that protects her.
6. Recognize that Harvard’s systematic racism and classism have far reaching effects.
7. Apologize to alumni, students, parents, and donors who have been harmed and embarrassed.

More.

Gerard Baker:

“Great job, Madam President. You absolutely knocked it out of the park. Really exposed those fascist Republicans for the patriarchal white supremacists they are. Thank God we don’t have any of them on the faculty.

“There’s just one small thing. We know this is going to seem petty and annoying after all the magnificent things you said, but some people seem to think you might want to have another go at that moment when you couldn’t say whether calling on campus for the eradication of Jewish people might represent a form of harassment against Jews on campus. We’ve done some brainstorming and we’ve come up with something we think you should say to help you keep your job.”

The damage limitation didn’t work for Liz Magill, president of the University of Pennsylvania, who resigned on Saturday. It shouldn’t work either for Claudine Gay of Harvard or Sally Kornbluth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Christopher Rufo:

Harvard president Claudine Gay has been embroiled in controversy for minimizing Hamas terrorism and plagiarizing material in her academic work on race. Both scandals have discredited her presidency, but neither should come as a surprise. Throughout Gay’s career at Harvard—as professor, dean, and president—racialist ideology has driven her scholarship, administrative priorities, and rise through the institution.

Over the course of her career, Gay quietly built a “diversity” empire that influenced every facet of university life. Between 2018 and the summer of 2023, as the dean of the largest faculty on campus, Gay oversaw the university’s racially discriminatory admissions program, which the Supreme Court found unconstitutional. Even after the court issued its ruling earlier this year, Gay said that it was a “hard day” and defended the university’s policies, which were deemed discriminatory against Asian and white applicants. Gay promised to comply with the letter of the law, while remaining “steadfast” in her commitment to producing “diversity”—a not-so-subtle message that Harvard would find a way, as the University of California has done, to evade the law in practice.

While affirmative action has been a longstanding practice at Harvard, other programs led by Gay were new. Following the death of George Floyd in 2020, Gay commissioned a Task Force on Visual Culture and Signage, which released a series of recommendationsthe following year for engaging in the “historical reckoning with racial injustice.” The recommendations included a mandate to change “spaces whose visual culture is dominated by homogenous portraiture of white men.” In particular, the report maintained, administrators should “refresh” the walls of Annenberg Hall, which “prominently display a series of 23 portraits, none of [which] depict women, and all but three of [which] depict white men.” Who were these white men and why were they honored in the first place? The report does not say—their race and sex alone provided sufficient justification for their banishment.

In 2022, Gay implemented an initiative at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences for “denaming” any “space, program, or other entity” deemed racist by the faculty and administration. According to the report, commissioned by then-president Lawrence Bacow, these decisions would be “based on the perception that a namesake’s actions or beliefs were ‘abhorrent’ in the context of current values.” In other words, Harvard would use the standards of present-day social-justice activism to pass judgment on men who lived hundreds of years prior—at best, an ahistorical and deeply ambiguous method. As part of this project, Gay sent an email to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences community soliciting “requests for denaming,” promising to address the situation “through the lens of reckoning.” Since then, the university has grappled with denaming multiple buildings, including Winthrop House, named after John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and his great grandson, also John Winthrop, a Harvard professor and president.

Wall Street Journal:

The great benefit of last week’s performance by three elite-school presidents before Congress is that it tore the mask off the intellectual and political corruption of much of the American academy. The world was appalled by the equivocation of the academic leaders when asked if advocating genocide against Jews violated their codes of conduct. But the episode merely revealed the value system that has become endemic at too many prestigious schools.

The presidents of MIT, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania hid behind concerns about free speech. But as everyone paying attention knows, these schools don’t protect speech they disagree with. They punish it.

Harvard President Claudine Gay has presided over the ouster of professors for speech that violated progressive orthodoxy. As Elise Stefanik wrote on these pages on Friday, Harvard’s Title IX training says using the wrong pronouns qualifies as abuse. Harvard was 248th out of 248, and Penn was 247th, in the annual college ranking by the free-speech Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

Christopher Rufo

The struggle for Harvard’s presidency is ostensibly about anti-Semitism, freedom of speech, and a rapidly unfolding plagiarism scandal. A group of challengers—most notably, New York representative Elise Stefanik, hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman, and journalists Christopher Brunet, Aaron Sibarium, and myself—has contested the leadership of Claudine Gay, arguing that she epitomizes the moral and intellectual rot within the institution.

Despite the firestorm, the Harvard Corporation has stubbornly defended Gay. And it appears that, for now, the outsider offensive has failed to remove her from power.

Why? To answer that question, one might consult the twentieth-century Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci, who outlined the distinction between the “war of maneuver,” in which a political actor can quickly topple a centralized, weakly structured regime, and the “war of position,” in which a political actor must wage a protracted fight against an entrenched bureaucracy that protects itself via a dispersed yet hegemonic ideology.

At Harvard, the war of maneuver has failed, but there is a silver lining: the institution’s ruling ideology has been exposed to the public. The university has sacrificed its academic integrity to retain a president who minimized genocidal rhetoric against Jews, oversaw a racially discriminatory admissions system, ensnared herself in multiple personnel scandals, and lifted sections of at least four academic papers—all because she is the living embodiment and administrative enforcer of DEI ideology.

Nate Silver:

Last week, the presidents of Harvard, Penn and MIT testified before Congress. In a clip widely shared by the hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, the presidents backpedaled and offered a series of legalistic defenses when asked by Rep. Elise Stefanik about whether calling for the genocide of Jews violated their respective bullying and harassment policies.

You might not expect Stefanik, a once-moderate Republican who became a loyal Trump supporter, to garner much sympathy from liberals. But there was initially an intensively negative reaction to the presidents from nearly everyone save the left wing. That included people who I’d normally consider to be partisan Democrats who rarely criticize their own “team” — indeed, even the White House condemned the presidents. By the weekend, Liz Magill, the president of Penn, resigned under pressure from Ackman and the board.

Part of the problem for Magill, Harvard president Claudine Gay and MIT president Sally Kornbluth is that you could criticize them from several different directions: because they didn’t sufficiently condemn anti-Semitism, because they didn’t sufficiently defend free speech, and because the hearing was a PR disaster. That can lead to some weird coalitions — such as between people who want to see additional consideration for Jewish students within university speech codes and DEI frameworks, and others who want to see those frameworks dismantled.

Cara Lombardo:

Once it became official, the Harvard graduate turned his attention to the other two university presidents who struggled to condemn calling for the genocide of Jews when testifying before Congress last week.

He wrote a letter to his alma mater’s governing board Sunday, reiterating his calls to remove Claudine Gay as president and fired off a tweet warning the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s boards that if they didn’t take action, he could send them a missive next. Harvard decided against removing Gay, it said Tuesday.

Within days of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, Ackman became one of the most vociferous wealthy donors criticizing their alma maters’ handling of antisemitism, using tactics he honed as a shareholder activist—an investing strategy he no longer practices.

He has remade himself as a social crusader and landed a starring role in a roiling debate over free speech and diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives on college campuses through a torrent of tweets and open letters to Harvard that have become increasingly hostile.

“When I started out, this was all about antisemitism,” he told The Wall Street Journal on Monday evening. “The much bigger issue is this ideology on campuses…that has led to free speech being squelched.”

Wall Street Journal:

The Harvard Corporation lined up behind university president Claudine Gay on Tuesday after calls to fire her for her handling of antisemitism on campus and evidence of plagiarism in her academic work. The decision confirms the school’s pattern of putting identity politics above liberal values and its selective support for free speech on campus.

One of the “serious societal issues” is managing the outbreak of antisemitism on campus since the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre of Israelis, an issue on which Ms. Gay has failed. In the days after the terrorist attack, Harvard’s administration was silent, even as Palestinian student groups released statements blaming Israel for the attack.

“The University’s initial statement should have been an immediate, direct and unequivocal condemnation,” the fellows write, but no consequences will be meted out. “President Gay has apologized for how she handled her congressional testimony” in which she said that calls for the genocide of Jews might violate the school’s speech code depending on the “context.”

Christopher Rufo:

On Sunday, Christopher Brunet and I published an exposé revealing that Harvard president Claudine Gay had plagiarized multiple sections of her Ph.D. thesis, in violation of Harvard’s policies on academic integrity.

As the news circulated on social media, Washington Free Beacon reporter Aaron Sibarium followed up with an additional investigation demonstrating that Gay had plagiarized sections of three additional papers. The evidence was damning: multiple verbatim passages copied without proper citation or quotation – textbook plagiarism, in other words.

Sensing vulnerability, the Harvard Corporation responded with a statement conceding that Gay had provided “inadequate citation” in numerous papers and promising that she would request “four corrections in two articles to insert citations and quotation marks that were omitted from the original publications.” The subtext: the university admitted to serious error but would have the public believe that it did not amount to plagiarism.

This raises the obvious question: Is Harvard telling the truth? To answer this question, I reached out to Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars. The following is a lightly edited transcript of his comments:

Danielle Allen

Last week Congress put squarely on the table the question of whether the health of our democracy requires renovation of our colleges and universities. I believe the answer to that question is “Yes.”

On Tuesday, the House Education and Workforce Committee held a hearing to investigate how Harvard University, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania are responding to antisemitism on their campuses. The hearing’s viral moment came when Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) asked a chain of questions that resulted in the three university presidents saying that if someone urged the genocide of Jewish people, that merely might — “depending on the context” — be a violation of campus policies against bullying and harassment. Two of the three presidents — Harvard’s Claudine Gay and Penn’s Liz Magill — issued apologies or clarifications, and Magill has now resigned.

Michael Walsh:

What if we follow his lead, then, and abolish not the monasteries — the current incarnation of the post-Vatican II Catholic Church is taking care of that all by itself — but the Ivy League and a few other “elite” universities, the nests of “progressive” saboteurs who have inflicted incalculable damage on the United States since the arrival of the Frankfurt School on these shores just before World War II.

Surely, the stunning, clueless malfeasance of three female Ivy League presidents would indicate that a thorough housecleaning is in order. The ritual self-immolation of one of the most egregious offenders, Penn’s Liz McGill, was a good start, but let’s face it there’s lots more work to be done, boys and girls. Writes Andrew Sullivan:

It may be too much to expect that the Congressional hearings this week, starring the three presidents of Harvard, MIT, and Penn, will wake people up to the toxic collapse of America’s once-great Ivy League. But I can hope, can’t I? The mediocrities smirked, finessed, condescended, and stonewalled. Take a good look at them. These are the people who now select our elites. And they select them, as they select every single member of the faculty, and every student, by actively discriminating against members of certain “privileged” groups and aggressively favoring other “marginalized” ones. They were themselves appointed in exactly the same way, from DEI-approved pools of candidates. As a Harvard dean, Claudine Gay’s top priority was “making more progress on diversity,” i.e. intensifying the already systemic race, sex and gender discrimination that defines the place.

KEY FINDINGS:
1. Ivy League payments and entitlements cost taxpayers $41.59 billion over a six-year period (FY2010-FY2015). This is equivalent to $120,000 in government monies, subsidies, & special tax treatment per undergraduate student, or $6.93 billion per year.

and this is our investigation into @harvard which STRONGLY suggests claudine gay helped engineer the downfall of a genius black professor named roland fryer because his research kept blowing up wokeness.

this is the (baller) opening. you can watch the full doc here:… pic.twitter.com/FsL4N2os5K

— Rob Montz (@Robmontz) December 8, 2023

commentary

David Blaska:

There is some irony in the presidents of Harvard and Penn defending campus free speech when that speech calls for the destruction of Israel and, by implication, the extermination of Jews. Given that conservative speakers espousing traditional values have been run off our supposedly most enlightened campuses.

The school presidents did such a poor job when subpoenaed before the Republican House of Reps this week that their jobs are in jeopardy, especially at Penn.

What did you expect? The “Universities” of Wisconsin hired $32 million worth of hate-speech monitors with the power to hire and, by denying tenure, fire. To penalize students and ban their clubs. Result? A 42-ton glacial boulder is accused or racism and escorted off campus (via a flatbed truck).

More:

UW Board of Regents rejects system deal struck with Republicans on DEI, UW-Madison engineering building

Kelly Meyerhofer:

In an unexpected move Saturday, the board overseeing state public universities narrowly rejected a deal University of Wisconsin System leaders brokered with the state’s top Republican over campus diversity efforts.

The UW Board of Regents voted 9-8 to strike down an agreement “reimagining” campus diversity efforts, which many saw as selling out students of color in exchange for $800 million in employee pay raises and building projects.

UPDATE: “In a shocking turn of events, the board rejected the proposal 9 to 8, leaving over $800 million on the table and the future of the system’s DEI offices in limbo. The board also voted not to table the vote for further discussion, effectively killing the deal.”… https://t.co/K08LBbRTFy

— Steve McGuire (@sfmcguire79) December 10, 2023

Elite US universities are trend setters in academia and far beyond. Which presents a golden opportunity to lead the way in ending a period of madness in US social, cultural, and educational history. It simply has to declare: 1) Our DEI complex has been abolished. 2) Henceforth,…

— Timur Kuran (@timurkuran) December 10, 2023

Claudine Gay:

This moment offers a profound opportunity for institutional change that should not and cannot be squandered. The national conversation around racial equity continues to gain momentum and the unprecedented scale of mobilization and demand for justice gives me hope. In raw, candid conversations and virtual gatherings convened across the FAS in the aftermath of George Floyd’s brutal murder, members of our community spoke forcefully and with searing clarity about the institution we aspire to be and the lengths we still must travel to be the Harvard of our ideals. It is up to us to ensure that the pain expressed, problems identified, and solutions suggested set us on a path for long-term change. I write today to share my personal commitment to this transformational project and the first steps the FAS will take to advance this important agenda in the coming year.

Amplify teaching and research on racial and ethnic inequality

——-

This seems to be a good example of responding to antisemitism with more DEI instead of more freedom and fairness:

Bill Ackman:

The Curious Case of Claudine Gay. This is a detailed critique of President Gay’s academic and administrative history prior to her becoming President of Harvard.

Kind of odd that UW doubles down on its commitment to its ideology at the same time that it’s falling apart at more prominent schools.

After researching the bios of Evers' appointees to the Board of Regents, it's not only not surprising that they were willing to kill $800m in funding, an engineering building & pay raises for 34K state workers – it was predictable. They're a grab bag of wealthy trial attorneys,…

— Wisconsin Right Now (@wisconsin_now) December 10, 2023

Elise Stefanie:

What constitutes bullying and harassment at Harvard? A mandatory Title IX training last year warned all undergraduate students that “cisheterosexism,” “fatphobia” and “using the wrong pronouns” qualified as “abuse” and perpetuated “violence” on campus.

But when I asked Harvard President Claudine Gay at a congressional hearing whether calls for the genocide of Jews violated the university’s rules on bullying and harassment, she answered: “It depends on the context.” Pressed further, she said it would qualify “when it crosses into conduct.” I received similar answers from the presidents of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania.

This lack of moral clarity is shocking. If only it were surprising. In the months since Oct. 7, the mainstreaming of anti-Jewish hate has been on full display at the poisoned Ivy League and other so-called elite schools, as has the gutless lack of response from university leaders. When 34 Harvard student groups signed a statement that they “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence,” Ms. Gay and other Harvard leaders were silent for days.

Since then, we have heard reports of Jewish students being spat on, verbally accosted and, in a widely circulated video, physically assaulted. We’ve seen students march chanting “There is only one solution: Intifada revolution,” a call for violence against Israel. They follow that with a chant of “Globalize the Intifada,” implying that the hatred of Israel is a hatred of Jews everywhere, including on campus.

John Tierney:

After Harvard student groups blamed Israel for Hamas’s atrocities, the global backlash was so fierce that the university’s president, Claudine Gay, released a video statement that in some ways proved even more puzzling. “Our university rejects the harassment or intimidation of individuals based on their beliefs,” she said. “And our university embraces a commitment to free expression. That commitment extends even to views that many of us find objectionable, even outrageous.”

Really?

This was news to the scholars with unpopular views at Harvard who have been sanctioned by administrators, boycotted by students, and slandered by the Crimson student newspaper. And it was certainly news to anyone who follows the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s annual analyses of threats to free speech on campus.

In this year’s FIRE report, Harvard’s speech climate didn’t merely rank dead last among those of the 248 participating colleges. It was also the first school that FIRE has given an “Abysmal” rating for its speech climate, scoring it zero on the 100-point scale (even that was a generous upgrade, as its actual composite score was -10). That dismal distinction made headlines last month across the United States, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia—but not on the Harvard campus. The Crimson didn’t even publish an article in its news section, much less an editorial; Gay didn’t make a statement, either.

Once upon a time, journalists and scholars on both the left and right were staunchly devoted to free speech and academic freedom, if only out of self-interest. Liberals like Nat Hentoff of the Village Voice defended the rights of Klansmen and Nazis because they knew the First Amendment was their profession’s paramount principle. But in the past decade, that bipartisan devotion has been disappearing, particularly at elite colleges. Harvard’s journalists and scholars adopted the principles that Hentoff criticized in the title of one of his books: free speech for me, but not for thee.

Aaron Sibarium:

The complaint, which was filed anonymously, implicates eight of Charleston’s publications, many of them coauthored, and accuses him of plagiarizing other scholars as well as duplicating his own work. It comes as the university is already investigating Charleston over a separate complaint filed in January, alleging that a 2014 study by him and his wife—Harvard University’s chief diversity officer, Sherri Ann Charleston—is a facsimile of a study he published in 2012.

“This is an extraordinary case of serial misrepresentation and deception,” said Peter Wood, the head of the National Association of Scholars and a former associate provost at Boston University. “The closest analogy would be someone who sells the same real estate to five different buyers, all of whom are unaware of the others.”

In January, Charleston won a lifetime achievement award for “excellence in higher education.” The university trumpeted the award in a press release, praising his “unwavering dedication to creating inclusive environments in academia” and noting his “wealth of academic accolades.”

Christopher Rufo:

Harvard professor Christina Cross is a rising star in the field of critical race studies. She earned a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, secured the support of the National Science Foundation, and garnered attention from the New York Times, where she published an influential article titled “The Myth of the Two-Parent Home.”

Cross’s 2019 dissertation, “The Color, Class, and Context of Family Structure and Its Association with Children’s Educational Performance,” won a slate of awards, including the American Sociological Association Dissertation Award and the ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award, and helped catapult her onto the Harvard faculty.

According to a new complaint filed with Harvard’s office of research integrity, however, Cross’s work is compromised by multiple instances of plagiarism, including “verbatim plagiarism, mosaic plagiarism, uncited paraphrasing, and uncited quotations from other sources.”

I have obtained a copy of the complaint, which documents a pattern of misappropriation in Cross’s dissertation and one other academic paper. The complaint begins with a dozen allegations of plagiarism related to the dissertation that range in severity from small bits of “duplicative language,” which may not constitute an offense, to multiple passages heavily plagiarized from other sources without proper attribution. (Cross did not respond to a request for comment.)

Lance Morrow:

The novelist Henry James said that Ralph Waldo Emerson—who was once the country’s beloved essayist-laureate, author of the iconic American effusion called “Self-Reliance” and the semiofficial philosopher of entrepreneurial individualism—suffered from a fatal flaw. Emerson’s disabling defect, James thought, was innocence: He had no “sense of the dark, the foul, the base.” The novelist said of the essayist: “A ripe unconsciousness of evil is . . . one of the most beautiful signs by which we know him.”

James and Emerson were giants of American literature long ago, but they belonged to different generations. Emerson (1803-82) wrote his important essays (those sun-shot prose miracles of the country’s morning energy) in the years before the Civil War, before that catastrophic crack in American history. James (1843-1916) composed his elaborately shadowed novels well after Appomattox. It was the Civil War that introduced the naive country to its fallen self. The conflict ushered in, among other things, Reconstruction and Jim Crow, the Gilded Age and the robber barons, mass immigration from Ireland, Italy and Eastern Europe. James and Emerson came of age in two different Americas. No wonder, then, that they had different ideas about the country’s capacity for good or evil.

Emerson graduated with Harvard’s class of 1821. James studied at the law school 40 years later, during the Civil War. I mention them because those sons of Harvard framed the issue that haunts the great university now. The controversy that divides Harvard in the 21st century is rooted in the question of American theodicy: How can the country’s evils be reconciled with its core Emersonian ideal of excellence, individualism, freedom of thought and speech, and other foundational notions that—not always honored but always implicitly there—are essential to the country’s future?

Douglas Belkin:

Yet even before those accusations emerged—and before Gay attracted sharp criticism for her testimony at a congressional hearing on antisemitism on college campuses—Gay was at the center of a raging debate on the Harvard campus over a much bigger question: what a university should be.

Gay ascended to the presidency just days after the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action last summer, a ruling that unleashed a roiling debate across the country about the very issues she pursued most stridently. As dean of faculty, Gay had played the role of change agent and pushed progressive ideals, including more racial diversity among faculty and academic disciplines.

The emphasis won fans but also brought detractors, as the school sometimes sanctioned scholars and disinvited speakers with conservative viewpoints, and fell to the bottom of an influential ranking of colleges for free speech.

Under Gay’s leadership, said Avi Loeb, a theoretical physicist in Harvard’s department of astronomy, the mandate of the administrative state of the university continued to expand and shift from serving faculty to monitoring them.

“The message was, don’t deviate from what they find to be appropriate,” Loeb said. “It became more of a police organization.”

Gay’s supporters said she guided efforts to expand student access and opportunity. When she was selected as president, Penny Pritzker, the senior fellow of Harvard’s board, said Gay had already strengthened “Harvard as a fount of ideas and a force for good in the world.”

Wall Street Journal:

Public figures these days, no matter their race, are too often targets of invective and lies. Yet Ms. Gay brushed past the substantive criticism of her leadership and failure to punish antisemitism on campus. So did her bosses at the Harvard Corporation, which issued a statement Tuesday lauding her “insight, decisiveness, and empathy.” Jewish students at Harvard might disagree. (See nearby.)

Ms. Gay was correct in one respect: “The campaign against me was about more than one university and one leader.” Her equivocation before Congress about whether calling for genocide of Jews violated Harvard’s code of conduct made her a symbol of the progressive group-think infecting higher education and American institutions more broadly.

Former New York Times editorial page editor James Bennet wrote in the Economist last month that his former newspaper “is becoming the publication through which America’s progressive elite talks to itself about an America that does not really exist.” The same is true of other once-respected institutions.

Ms. Gay writes that the campaign against her “was merely a single skirmish in a broader war to unravel public faith in pillars of American society” and that “trusted institutions of all types—from public health agencies to news organizations—will continue to fall victim to coordinated attempts to undermine their legitimacy and ruin their leaders’ credibility.”

She blames “opportunists” for “driving cynicism about our institutions.” But elite institutions—from the press to public-health agencies to social media and big business—have undermined their own credibility and fueled public cynicism.

Matthew Kassel:

In her new position, she personally led the search committee that named Gay as president last December, praising her in an announcement at the time as “a remarkable leader who is profoundly devoted to sustaining and enhancing Harvard’s academic excellence.”

Notwithstanding her initial enthusiasm, Pritzker has in recent weeks avoided personally defending the newly installed president, who has faced calls to resign, instead joining a statement signed by the 11 members of Harvard’s top board, which has been criticized for a lack of transparency.

In their unanimous decision to back Gay last week, the board members affirmed their “confidence” in the university president, dismissing the plagiarism charges and accepting her apology for widely criticized comments at a congressional hearing on campus antisemitism earlier this month, where she equivocated on whether calls for the genocide of Jews would violate Harvard’s code of conduct.

Before the Harvard Corporation had released its statement, however, Pritzker had dodged repeated questions from a reporter for the school’s student newspaper on whether she would ask the president to step down, even as Gay had claimed to have her support.

Steven Pinker:

The fury was white-hot. Harvard is now the place where using the wrong pronoun is a hanging offense but calling for another Holocaust depends on context. Gay was excoriated not only by conservative politicians but by liberal alumni, donors, and faculty, by pundits across the spectrum, even by a White House spokesperson and by the second gentleman of the United States. Petitions demanding her resignation have circulated in Congress, X, and factions of the Harvard community, and at the time of this writing, a prediction market is posting 1.2:1 odds that she will be ousted by the end of the year.

I don’t believe that firing Gay is the appropriate response to the fiasco. It wasn’t just Gay who fumbled the genocide question but two other elite university presidents — Sally Kornbluth of MIT (my former employer) and Elizabeth Magill of the University of Pennsylvania, who resigned following her testimony — which suggests that the problem with Gay’s performance betrays a deeper problem in American universities.

Congressional inquiries are often televised ambushes, and as Gay walked into the line of fire she had been rendered defenseless by decades of rot in campus policies. In the exchange that went viral, Republican Representative Elise Stefanik of New York asked Gay whether “calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules on bullying and harassment.”

Philip Greenspun:

A friend is an alumni interviewer for Harvard. He sent me the Interviewer Guidebook for 2028.

Let’s keep in mind that Harvard was so passionate about the critical need for diversity that they fought all the way to the Supreme Court for the right to do what was ultimately found unconstitutional, i.e., select people by skin color. Here’s the team that the diversity experts assembled…

Could a Harvard graduate who questioned school closures, lockdowns, mask orders, and vaccine papers checks be an interviewer? No:

[you must disclose and will be rejected if] Your internet presence might be considered inappropriate, problematic or if other considerations might affect the perception of Harvard’s integrity. Many applicants Google their alumni interviewer in preparation for the interview.

[Advocating the liberation of Palestine by whatever means are necessary, on the other hand, is the kind of “free expression” that Harvard officially supports and, perhaps, the only freedom of expression that is tolerated at Harvard.]