School Information System

RSS

Search Results for: Claudine Gay

‘Our Forever President’: Black Harvard Graduates Celebrate Claudine Gay at Affinity Ceremony

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 […]

Before Claudine Gay retroactively corrected her plagiarized PhD thesis… there was Terrell Strayhorn

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 […]

Not Just Claudine Gay. Harvard’s Chief Diversity Officer Plagiarized and Claimed Credit for Husband’s Work, Complaint Alleges

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 […]

Not Just Claudine Gay. Harvard’s Chief Diversity Officer Plagiarized and Claimed Credit for Husband’s Work, Complaint Alleges

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 […]

Plagiarism probe finds some problems with former Harvard president Claudine Gay’s work

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 […]

Unraveling the DEI Web: Harvard and Claudine Gay’s Resignation

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 […]

Claudine Gay’s resignation offers a chance for an educational reset

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 […]

Why Donald Trump and Claudine Gay are two peas in a pod

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 […]

The Claudine Gay Affair

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 […]

Harvard Couldn’t Save Both Claudine Gay and Itself

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 […]

Legacy Sulzberger New York Times Commentary on Harvard’s Claudine Gay, and….

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 […]

Harvard President Claudine Gay Resigns

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 […]

If Harvard’s Claudine Gay were to fall, it could topple the entire house of cards…

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 […]

Plagiarism and Harvard’s Claudine Gay

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 […]

These scholars asked Claudine Gay for her data. She said no.

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 […]

Here’s why Obama stepped in to save Harvard prez Claudine Gay

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 […]

Why Harvard Can’t Fire Claudine Gay

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 […]

Harvard cleared Claudine Gay of plagiarism BEFORE investigating her — and its lawyers falsely claimed her work was ‘properly cited’

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 […]

Congress Widens Investigation into Harvard to Include Plagiarism Allegations Against President Claudine Gay

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 […]

Fresh Allegations of Plagiarism Unearthed in Official Academic Complaint Against Claudine Gay

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 […]

Statement on Harvard’s Claudine Gay from Philip Dybvig, Winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Economics

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 […]

‘This is Definitely Plagiarism’: Harvard University President Claudine Gay Copied Entire Paragraphs From Others’ Academic Work and Claimed Them as Her Own

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 […]

Half of Harvard President Gay’s published works now implicated in growing scandal

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, […]

I Vote on Plagiarism Cases at Harvard College. Gay’s Getting off Easy.

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 […]

Dissent: For Harvard’s Sake, It’s Time to Let Gay Go

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 […]

I Vote on Plagiarism Cases at Harvard College. Gay’s Getting off Easy.

“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 […]

Harvard Corporation Breaks Silence, Stating Support for Gay While Addressing Plagiarism Allegations

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 […]

As northeastern universities decline, Florida picks up the slack

Ilya Shapiro American higher education is in crisis. Pathologies that had been growing for decades and were catalyzed by Covid mania burst into the open after Hamas’s attack on Israel. As financier-activist and Harvard alumnus Bill Ackman wrote following Claudine Gay’s resignation, anti-Semitism tends to erupt where political cultures decay. At many “elite” universities, that decay has […]

The Corrupting Influence of DEI on Military Education

JA Cauthen: By now, the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) industry’s capture of academia, business, and government is obvious to most Americans. From former Harvard president Claudine Gay’s televised equivocations before Congress to the unhinged, violent student and faculty occupations in support of Hamas at some of America’s most elite universities, many are no doubt wondering if DEI is […]

Notes on Harvard

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 […]

Harvard Faculty Slam Social Science Dean’s Proposal to Limit Faculty Speech

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 […]

Why Plagiarism Matters

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 […]

Fourth Black Female Harvard Scholar Accused of Plagiarism Amid Assault on DEI Initiatives

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 […]

A Conservative Thought Experiment on a Liberal College Campus

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 […]

On Reforming Harvard

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 […]

Universities Are Making Us Dumber

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 […]

Harvard Extension School Administrator Accused of Plagiarism in Anonymous Complaint

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 […]

Should We Teach to Empower Students or to Keep Them as “Sacred Victims”?

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 […]

The Intellectual Rot of the Industrially Necessary University

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 […]

College Is All About Curiosity. And That Requires Free Speech.

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, […]

Colleges are here to be places of learning, not performative politics

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 […]

Harvard Releases New Details of Plagiarism Review in Filing to Congress

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 […]

The Harvard of the Unwoke

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 […]

Notes on the DIE bubble

Andy Kessler: Have we reached peak DEI? The unraveling of “diversity, equity and inclusion” initiatives had already begun—five states banning DEI programs; Google, Facebookand 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 […]

Harvard Teaching Hospital Seeks Retraction of 6 Papers by Top Researchers

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 […]

Who’s Holding Up the Ivory Tower?

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 […]

American Universities Are Post-truth

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 […]

Academic dishonesty and crime are alike: No one will prosecute them if justice is hard to come by

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, […]

Harvard offers a liberal hypocrisy masterclass

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 […]

Come for the destruction of DEI, stay for academia’s collapse

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 […]

“These allegations of plagiarism are demonstrably false.”

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 […]

Reaping what we have taught

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 […]

“Conservatives can prevail in the culture wars by understanding how power works—and using it”

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 […]

Academics should think more about what their industry has done to lose the trust of Americans

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 […]

Academics should think more about what their industry has done to lose the trust of Americans

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 […]

Higher education, veracity and the public square

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 […]

The nation’s oldest institution of higher learning talks a good game about diverse views, but it doesn’t actually protect them.

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 […]

Time to Re-Embrace Merit, Free Speech, and Universalism

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 […]

“the rise of bureaucrats over intellectuals at top universities”

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

Professors say they know how to save Harvard. Top leaders are listening.

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 […]

Catholic schools like Assumption offer the education Jewish tradition prizes.

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 […]

A can-do attitude is more important than race or social class

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 […]

The Harvard Corporation deserves to be in a much tougher spot.

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 […]

“Play DIE games, win DIE prizes”

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 […]

“I have some free unsolicited advice for Harvard University”

Carol Swain: More.

Higher Education’s Slide From ‘Veritas’ to ‘My Truth’

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 […]

Harvard’s embattled president quietly built “diversity” ideology into every facet of campus life.

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 […]

The Ivy League Mask Falls

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 […]

Higher education’s ideological rot has been exposed for Americans to see—but the elites who adhere to such thinking retain control of these institutions

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 […]

The progressive coalition is splitting over Israel and identity politics.

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 […]

Bill Ackman’s Ruthless Quest to Oust College Presidents

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 […]

America Gets a Harvard Education

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 […]

What Is Plagiarism?

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 […]

We’ve lost the talent for mutual respect on campus. Here’s how we get it back.

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 […]

Make Like Henry: Dissolve the Ivy League

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 […]

Roland Fryer at Harvard

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

Higher Ed Governance: “Universities of Wisconsin” edition

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 […]

Harvard Bans ‘Cisheterosexism’ but Shrugs at Antisemitism

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 […]

Harvard’s Double Standard on Free Speech

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 […]

Complaint Alleges University of Wisconsin DEI Czar, Husband of Harvard’s DEI Chief, Has Decades-Long History of Research Misconduct

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 […]

Copy and Paste: Another Harvard racial-justice scholar is accused of plagiarism.

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, […]

Can Harvard Learn Anything From Ralph Waldo Emerson?

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 […]

Harvard Crisis Signals Broader Fight Over What a University Should Be

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 former Harvard president’s defense reveals why elite educators have lost so much public respect.

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 […]

“was elected senior fellow of the Harvard Corporation last year, months after she had donated $100 million to the university”

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 […]

A five-point plan to save Harvard from itself

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 […]

Diversity at Harvard

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 […]