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.

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.)

Christopher Rufo:

I’ve obtained documents alleging that Harvard DEI administrator Shirley Greene plagiarized more than 40 passages in her PhD thesis, making her the third black woman at Harvard to be accused of academic fraud.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

“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.

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

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

hxstem

This is, of course, a far clearer case of plagiarism than what Harvard’s website defines as the standard for academic dishonesty. Moreover, Dr. Gay flipped the entire conclusion of the source material, changing the word “decrease” to the word “increase.” In total, Dr. Gay has plagiarized in at least five out of her eleven total publications. Veritas, right?

What are the standard punishments for plagiarism dealt out to undergraduates? Of the 99 students found guilty of academic dishonesty (which constitutes many offenses, plagiarism being the most severe) by the University’s Ad Board in the 2021-22 school year,27 were required to withdraw from the college and 56 were put on probation. The punishments for older students at other Harvard schools are usually a lot more severe. Harvard Law’s website notes, “In a case of academic dishonesty, the Board will begin its deliberations over sanction with a presumption of a one-semester suspension” (emphasis added). Of course, if a student plagiarized in five papers as Dr. Gay did, the punishment would likely be more severe.

We would love to know why, in an email to the Harvard family, the members of the Harvard Corporation deliberately minimized the importance of the president’s misconduct.

The statement of the Harvard fellows on President Gay makes an absolute mockery of this document on Harvard's website addressed to students: "When you write papers in college, your work is held to the same standards of citation as the work of your professors." pic.twitter.com/dfOQJgvWNY

— Jeryl Bier (@JerylBier) December 12, 2023

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

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.

Jack Cashill:

The one obvious clue that President Joe Biden did notattend an Ivy League University is this: When busted for plagiarism, Biden suffered real-world consequences. In a 1987 Democratic primary debate, while very much a viable candidate, Biden famously lifted a passage from a speech by Neil Kinnock, the former leader of Britain’s Labour Party, and tried to pass it off as his own.

The Michael Dukakis campaign caught the theft, and the media, still in their journalism phase, went digging for more purloined pearls of Biden wisdom. They were not hard to find. Under pressure, Biden had to confess that he had plagiarized a paper while in law school — the Syracuse University Law School, that is — and he was out of the presidential race even before the corn stalks withered in Iowa.

As Biden learned the hard way, a Syracuse University affiliation offers no immunity to the plagiarism bug. Harvard’s does. Yale’s does. And Princeton’s will likely do the same. But even the Ivy schools require the individual to boost his/her/their natural Ivy immunity with renewable doses of progressive toxins.

No Ivy Leaguer has done more to earn his immunity than “History’s Attack Dog,” Princeton University professor Kevin Kruse. In addition to his more prosaic tasks at Princeton, Kruse has assumed the responsibility of patrolling the daily news. “Online,” observes Emma Pettit in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “the historian specializes in serialized posts, called threads, that lend historical context to breaking news or skewer a version of history spouted by right-wing agitators.” It is the skewering that has netted Kruse his 502,000 followers on Twitter.

In May 2017, Kruse took particular pleasure in slicing and dicing former Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke. Clarke set himself up for the kill by announcing his likely appointment as assistant secretary in the Department of Homeland Security under President Donald Trump. As a conservative and an African American, he made a tempting target for leftists eager to show Blacks the consequences of thinking for themselves.

Andrew Kaczynski of CNN’s KFile took the first stab at Clarke’s reputation, accusing him of having “plagiarized portions of his master’s thesis on homeland security.” This was a low blow. A police officer by profession, Clarke never pretended to be a scholar. In fact, he didn’t graduate from college until he was 43 and only then through a continuing education program. The mistakes he made on the thesis were amateurish, the sort one routinely sees on papers at this level. Still, compared to Dr. Jill Biden’s botch of a doctoral dissertation, Clarke’s thesis was downright Aristotelian.

Compelled to review the two cases, then-Harvard Law School Dean Elena Kagan and then-Harvard President Larry Summers dithered for months before finally declaring the offenses of their legal luminaries “inadvertent.” At this level, “inadvertent” was no worthier an excuse for Tribe and Ogletree than it had been for Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server. Nonetheless, it provided cover enough to allow the media to look the other way. (READ MORE from Jack Cashill: ‘Roots,’ ‘Dreams,’ and the Unequal Punishment of Fraud)

Additional notes.

Related: Ivy League Summary: Tax Break Subsidies And Government Payments: “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.”

Christopher Rufo:

Journalism, in part, is the work of turning up stones. Sometimes a reporter finds nothing underneath. Other times, he uncovers shock, scandal, or corruption.

An entire twentieth-century lore, beginning with The Jungle and culminating in the Watergate reporting, portrays the reporter as a man who stands against the corruption of institutions. But as the Left, which invented muckraking, has consolidated its power over those same institutions, the story has been recast.

Now, reporters for prestige publications defend, rather than interrogate, the organs of power. They seek to propagate official narratives and to discredit those who would question them. The establishment’s watchdogs have become its guard dogs.

I have observed this dynamic in recent months regarding academic plagiarism. I have been one of a handful of reporters, including Christopher Brunet, Aaron Sibarium, and Luke Rosiak, who flipped the rock in academia and discovered widespread fraud, plagiarism, and dishonesty. We exposed the president of Harvard, several DEI administrators, and professors in the grievance disciplines.

——-

It’s true: by failing to plagiarize, Harvard’s white African-American studies professor, @Jenniferhochsc2, is contributing to racial disparities in plagiarism. She is the new face of white supremacy.

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.

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.

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. 

Richard Phelps:

Recent revelations of suspicious, unattributed text borrowings at academe’s pinnacle of prestige—the president’s office at Harvard University—once again draws attention to the pestilence of plagiarism. Plagiarism scandals among elites are nothing new, of course, and pop up frequently in the news both here and abroad, often with serious negative consequences for the accused.[1]

Of course, plagiarism is unethical—it misdirects credit for the work and misrepresents the accomplishments of the perpetrator. But I will argue it is not the worst sin scholars commit in reference to the wider research literature, though it is more likely to be punished.

Plagiarism stands out among the pantheon of unethical scholarly shortcuts in part because it is relatively easy to catch, and with improving internet textual search tools, it is getting even easier. To catch a plagiarist, one only needs to find the original copied source.

Though malevolent, each incidence of plagiarism misrepresents only one piece of work in the wider research literature. Other, rarely punished research behaviors can misrepresent several other works, even entire research literature.

With a dismissive literature review, an author declares at the outset of an article that previous research on the topic is either nonexistent or no good. Typically, no evidence supports the claim, such as where or how—or even if—the author looked for previous work.

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.

Carla Johnson:

Allegations of research fakery at a leading cancer center have turned a spotlight on scientific integrity and the amateur sleuths uncovering image manipulation in published research.

Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, a Harvard Medical School affiliate, announced Jan. 22 it’s requesting retractions and corrections of scientific papers after a British blogger flagged problems in early January.

The blogger, 32-year-old Sholto David, of Pontypridd, Wales, is a scientist-sleuth who detects cut-and-paste image manipulation in published scientific papers.

He’s not the only hobbyist poking through pixels. Other champions of scientific integrity are keeping researchers and science journals on their toes. They use special software, oversize computer monitors and their eagle eyes to find flipped, duplicated and stretched images, along with potential plagiarism.

A look at the situation at Dana-Farber and the sleuths hunting sloppy errors and outright fabrications:

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

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.

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

Balaji:

It can be done by anyone online.
It pits academics against each other.
It can bring even Harvard to heel.
And it can be scaled up with code.

So, now the people can cancel the professors.

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

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.

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.

Jeffrey Flier:

The Hamas terror attacks of October 7 and the ensuing war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza caused disruptions on many university campuses that moved concerns about campus speech from a limited constituency to front page news, exposing it to new audiences. The grilling of the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and Penn by a Congressional committee on the topic of campus antisemitism generated intense coverage, and a near unanimous conclusion—by actors across the political spectrum—that the presidents did a poor job of explaining campus turmoil, how antisemitic speech and conduct were handled under prevailing campus policies, and what they might have done differently to protect their students. Public uproar, the resignation of both the UPenn president and board chair and a narrow escape from that fate by the Harvard president ensure that campus speech won’t soon recede back into the shadows. But the ability to create a campus environment in which students can express their views free of harassment depends on understanding the role of free speech and academic freedom in higher education.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

Nathaniel Stein:

From: The Dean of Harvard College
To: The Faculty
In light of the controversy regarding so-called grade inflation, please take a moment to review the grading guidelines rubric, reproduced below:
¶ The A+ grade is used only in very rare instances for the recognition of truly exceptional achievement.
For example: A term paper receiving the A+ is virtually indistinguishable from the work of a professional, both in its choice of paper stock and its font. The student’s command of the topic is expert, or at the very least intermediate, or beginner. Nearly every single word in the paper is spelled correctly; those that are not can be reasoned out phonetically within minutes. Content from Wikipedia is integrated with precision. The paper contains few, if any, death threats.
A few things can disqualify an otherwise worthy paper from this exceptional honor: 1) Plagiarism, unless committed with extraordinary reluctance. 2) The paper has been doused in blood or another liquid, unless dousing was requested by the instructor. 3) The paper was submitted late (with reasonable leeway — but certainly by no more than one or two years).
An overall course grade of A+ is reserved for those students who have not only demonstrated outstanding achievement in coursework but have also asked very nicely.

Harvard Youth Poll:

This wave of the youth poll shows the lowest levels of confidence in most public institutions since the survey began. In the last twelve months alone, trust in the U.S. military and the Supreme Court to do the right thing “all” or “most of the time” has fallen by 10 and nine percentage points, respectively.

Only one (the United Nations) of the eight institutions in our survey is more trusted today than in 2015. The level of trust for the UN has increased by 17% over the decade. The remaining institutions saw steep declines:

• Trust in the President has declined by 60% since 2015 (it now stands at 20%);
• Trust in the Supreme Court declined 55% (now at 24%);
• Trust among Wall Street is down 43% (now at 9%);
• Trust in the U.S. military (now at 36%) and the federal government (now at 17%) both declined 38%;
• Trust in Congress is down 34% (now at 12%);
• Trust in the media is down 18% (now at 10%).

—-

Harvard has been in the news recently over plagiarism issues.

Kyle Baek and Benjamin Isaac

Embattled Harvard Business School professor Francesca Gino was accused of multiple counts of plagiarism in an analysis published in Science Magazine on Tuesday, claims that compound existing allegations of data misconduct against her.

According to Science, Gino “borrowed text” from dozens of academic sources. The plagiarism allegations add to a growing number of academic fraud accusations against Gino, as well as recent scrutiny on the integrity of scholarly work produced by Harvard professors and affiliates.

An initial investigation conducted by Erinn L. Acland, a psychologist at the University of Montreal, and Science Magazine found that a book chapter co-authored by Gino may contain plagiarized text.

The investigation found that the chapter, titled “Dishonesty Explained: What Leads Moral People to Act Immorally,” borrowed extensively from 10 other works, including academic papers and student theses.

–

More.

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.”

Bill Osmulski:

The latest plagiarism scandal at Harvard University has implicated one current and two former diversity officials at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

LaVar Charleston is UW-Madison’s current Deputy Vice Chancellor for Diversity & Inclusion, Vice Provost and Chief Diversity Officer. He is married to Sherri Ann Charleston, who is Harvard’s Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer. Sherri Ann had also previously worked as a diversity official at UW-Madison before getting the job at Harvard in 2020. This week, she was accused of committing plagiarism throughout her academic career. Her husband, LaVar, allegedly helped her to commit fraud at least one of those times in a 2014 study.

Another former diversity official from UW-Madison, Jerlando Jackson was also listed as a co-author of the study in question. Jackson was UW-Madison‘s Director & Chief Research Scientist, Wisconsin’s Equity and Inclusion Laboratory. He was hired as the Dean of the College of Education at Michigan State University in 2022.

All three individuals were with UW-Madison at the time the article was published.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.”

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.

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:

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.

In the March 14, 2001, issue of Education Week, Victor Henningsen, director of the history department at Phillips Academy in Andover, had this to say about term papers: “There’s no substitute for the thrill that comes from choosing a topic of your own and wrestling with a mass of evidence to answer a question that you have posed, to craft your own narrative and your own analysis. We’ve been teaching kids to write research papers here for a long time. Kids don’t remember the advanced placement exam, but they do remember the papers they have written, and so do I.”
Teacher Magazine
March 1, 2002
It seems likely that the history research paper at the high school level is now an endangered species. Focus on creative writing, fear of plagiarism, fascination with PowerPoint presentations, and lack of planning time have been joined by a notable absence of concern about term papers in virtually all of the work on state standards. As a result, far too many American high school students never get the chance to do the reading and writing that a serious history paper requires. They then enter college with no experience in writing papers, to the continual frustration of their professors, and of the employers who later hire them. The Ford Motor Co., for example, had to institute writing classes to ensure that their people are able to produce readable reports, memos, and the like.
A few years ago, a survey of English and social studies standards by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation showed that term papers are, indeed, ignored. The Pew Charitable Trust’s Standards for Success program, with its focus on high school and college articulation of standards and expectations, likewise includes no term papers. Neither has the American Diploma Project in Washington, D.C., working to define the expectations of high schools, colleges, and employers, yet found a place in its deliberations for history research papers. One problem for these groups and others, of course, is that serious term papers cannot be assessed in a one-hour objective test. But their impact on students and the consequences of never having done one can be incalculable.
In the early 1980s, while I was teaching American history to high school sophomores in Concord, Massachusetts, each of my students had to write a biographical paper on a U.S. president. One student chose John F. Kennedy, and I lent him a copy of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s A Thousand Days. The boy took a look at the rather large book, and told me, “I can’t read this.” I said, “Yes, you can,” and eventually, he was able to finish it. Five or six years later, out of the blue, I got a letter from the student. He was now a Junior at Yale, and he wanted to thank me for making him read Schlesinger’s book. It was the first serious work of nonfiction he had ever read, and being able to get through it had done something for his self-confidence. Of course, he was the one who had forced himself to read the book, but the anecdote points up one of the great advantages of working on a history term paper. The experience often will mark the first time a high school student discovers that he or she is capable of reading a book on an important topic.
When I was an alumni interviewer for Harvard College, I asked one high school boy what he thought he might major in. History, he replied. I had said nothing about my own interest in the subject, and all he knew about me was that I was an alum. But after he gave me his answer, I naturally asked what his favorite history book was. Before long, it became clear that, while this student had achieved good grades and advanced placement scores, he had studied only textbooks. No one had ever handed him a good history book and encouraged him to read it, apparently. More than likely, he had never had to write a serious history paper either. If he had, he might have been forced to read a book or two in the field.
In the March 14, 2001, issue of Education Week, Victor Henningsen, director of the history department at Phillips Academy in Andover, had this to say about term papers; “There’s no substitute for the thrill that comes from choosing a topic of your own and wrestling with a mass of evidence to answer a question that you have posed, to craft your own narrative and your own analysis. We’ve been teaching kids to write research papers here for a long time. Kids don’t remember the advanced placement exam, but they do remember the papers they have written, and so do I.”
Since 1987, I have been the editor of The Concord Review, a quarterly journal of history research papers written by high school students. We’ve published 528 [1,044] papers (averaging 5,000 words, including endnotes and bibliography) by students from 42 [46] states and 33 [38] foreign countries. Out of some 22,000 public and private high schools in the United States, we receive about 600 essays a year, from which we publish 11 in each issue. If you do the calculation, that means that more than 21,000 high schools do not even submit one history essay for consideration in a given year. While this may not prove that exceptional history essays are not being written at those schools, it is not an encouraging sign.
As for what teachers expect in their high school history classes in lieu of research papers, I have only anecdotal evidence. I met with the head of the history department at a public high school in New Jersey once, a man very active in the National Council for History Education, and asked him why he never sent papers from his best students to The Concord Review. He said he didn’t have his students do research papers anymore; they make PowerPoint presentations and write historical fiction instead. When I asked the now-retired head of history at Scarsdale High School in New York, why, even though he subscribed to The Concord Review, he never submitted student papers for consideration, he too said he no longer assigned papers. After the AP exam, he would hold what he called the Trial of James Buchanan for his role in helping to precipitate the Civil War. His students would then write responses on that subject instead.
After I published her paper on the Women’s Temperance Union, the class valedictorian at a public high school on Staten Island wrote me to say she felt weak in expository writing and offered some reasons. Here are her words: “I attend a school where students are given few opportunities to develop their talents in this field. It is assumed students will learn how to write in college.” I feel confident in saying that, on the college side, there is the expectation that students will learn at least the rudiments of putting together a research paper while they are still in high school. College humanities professors, slow to learn perhaps, are routinely surprised when they find that this is not the case. And rightly so. What is at work here?
For one thing, creative writing often rules at the high school level (and earlier in many cases). Even the director of Harvard’s Expository Writing program for undergraduates has said she thinks that teenagers don’t get enough chances to write about their feelings, anxieties, hopes, and dreams, and that they shouldn’t be pushed to work on research papers until college. The National Writing Project in Berkeley, California, a program that reaches hundreds of teachers each year, takes a postmodern approach to what it calls “Literatures,” and never comes within a mile of considering that students could use some work on research skills and expository writing.
I have actually seen what teenagers can do, and it is more like the following, an excerpt from an essay published a few years back in The Concord Review. (more examples at www.tcr.org) This passage concludes an essay by a high school Junior who went on to major in civil engineering at Princeton, get a Ph.D. in earthquake engineering at Stanford, and she is now an assistant professor of engineering at Cornell.
As is usually the case with extended, deeply-held disagreements, no one person or group was the cause of the split in the woman suffrage movement. On both sides, a stubborn eagerness to enfranchise women hindered the effort to do so. Abolitionists and Republicans refused to unite equally with woman suffragists. Stanton and Anthony, blinded for a while by their desperation to succeed, turned to racism, putting blacks and women against each other at a time when each needed the other’s support most. The one thing that remains clear is that, while in some ways it helped women discover their own power, the division of forces weakened the overall strength of the movement. As a result of the disagreements within the woman suffrage movement, the 1860s turned out to be a missed opportunity for woman suffragists, just as Stanton had predicted. After the passage of the 15th Amendment, they were forced to wait another 50 years for the fulfillment of their dream.
High school kids are fully capable of writing long, serious history papers. And they will get a lot out of doing so, not only in terms of reading nonfiction, but also in learning to write nonfiction themselves. These days, too many of our students are not given that chance to grow. Colleges may continue doing what they can to help teenagers master the rudiments of expository writing, but much of what these high school students have lost can never be recouped in remedial coursework.
————————-
“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics™
blog: www.tcr.org/blog

Perhaps the first caution to note on this subject is that when giving advice to the gifted, it is wise to remember that they are gifted, and should not be loaded up with unnecessary advice. In fact, my own first preference in encouraging gifted students to do academic expository writing (e.g. history research papers) is to give them the papers of other gifted students to read. This way the goal becomes clear in a way that it often does not when one starts with buckets and bags of technical advice on “How To Write a Paper.”
One problem is that by the time one has gone through all the advice about footnotes, endnotes, bibliography, plagiarism, etc., any motivation to write a paper will very sensibly have evaporated, in all likelihood.
Like other people, gifted students like to see if there is any point in doing something, in this case, writing a long serious academic research paper. I believe that the point is best illustrated by showing them what the finished product looks like, and, by having them read some exemplary papers by their peers, showing them how very interesting serious history can be, even to people their age.
To follow my own advice, and to do unto you as I would have you do unto gifted students, allow me to place a sample of such writing here (from a 6,904-word paper written by a New York ninth-grader who later graduated from Harvard):

“Within this nineteenth-century intellectual context, Cesare Lombroso’s work greatly influenced how Europe’s criminologists and jurists perceived criminals. L’Uomo Delinquente (“The Criminal Man”), published in 1876, was the most influential of his many publications. It was so popular and well regarded that it grew from two hundred pages in its first edition to over three thousand in its fifth. A later work, Le Crime, Causes et Rémédies, ‘Crime, Its Causes and Remedies,’ published in 1899, was also highly influential. By the 1880s he had gained world renown through his studies and theories in the field of characterology, the relation between mental and physical characteristics, criminal psychopathy, the innate tendency of individuals toward sociopathy and criminal behavior. Lombroso’s conclusions stimulated debate among academics, lawyers, judges, prison directors, all those interested in public policy, as well as the general public. In fact, criminal anthropology, the field Lombroso created, received such attention that it was the focus of an international conference every four years for over three decades before World War I.
Extraordinary amounts of documentation in the form of pages of statistics and illustrations strongly influenced readers to believe “that many of the characteristics found in savages and among the coloured races are also to be found in habitual delinquents.” Lombroso used statistics so well that many scientists accepted his conclusion that criminality is biological. Although Lombroso’s theories have now been discredited, they had mass appeal at the turn of the century.
While his ideas were widely popular, Lombroso’s many credentials helped to establish his influence with professional colleagues. Cesare Lombroso, born on November 6, 1835, in Verona, Italy, studied at the universities of Padua, Vienna, and Paris (1862-1876). In 1876 he became a professor of psychiatry, forensic medicine, and hygiene at the University of Pavia. Moving to the University of Turin, he held professorships in psychiatry from 1896 and in criminal anthropology from 1906. He also directed a mental asylum in Pesaro, Italy. Lombroso died on October 19, 1909, in Turin, Italy.
Originally, Lombroso became involved with the classification of criminals after being assigned to do a post-mortem on a criminal named Vilella, who had died in the insane asylum in Pavia. While examining Vilella’s skull, Lombroso discovered an abnormality common to lower apes, rodents, and birds. Lombroso named this abnormality the “median occipital fossa.” Later, Lombroso recognized the importance of his discovery…”

And for those of you who got interested in the story, as I did when I was publishing this paper, here is the conclusion:

“Lombroso may have been refuted by science, but his influence on popular culture remains.
Why does this pseudo-science from the nineteenth century remain so powerful at the end of the twentieth century? Lombroso gave society a visual key for identifying people it feared. It is likely that Lombroso’s descriptions caused “nice people” to avoid tattoos, gentlemen to be either clean-shaven or to have well-kept beards, and good citizens to avoid obviously excessive drinking. Perhaps part of the 1960s antagonism to the hippie movement came from Lombrosian antagonism to unkempt hair and tattoos, especially on women. These were also easy visual signals to identify “bad” people. Even today, people want easy visual keys to identify villains. For instance, after Littleton, many school districts have banned the wearing of black trenchcoats, as if trenchcoats have anything to do with murder. Lombroso’s influence remains because people look for easy answers to complex problems.
Darwin’s The Origin of Species had an extraordinary effect on nineteenth-century attitudes toward man, society, and science. His empirical model required observations over many examples to test hypotheses and to come to validated conclusions that support overall theoretical claims. While Darwin’s work has become influential for many modern sciences from biology to geology to physics, Lombroso’s is no longer considered valid. On the other hand, the questions Lombroso sought to answer–and those which arose from his studies–remain very modern concerns. As Tolstoy wrote in Resurrection in 1899:
‘He also came across a tramp and a woman, both of whom repelled him by their half-witted insensibility and seeming cruelty, but even in them he failed to see the criminal type as described by the Italian school of criminology….’
He bought the works of Lombroso, Garofalo, Ferri, Liszt, Maudsley, and Tarde, and read them carefully. But as he read, he became more and more disappointed…He was asking a very simple thing: Why and by what right does one class of people lock up, torture, exile, flog, and kill other people when they themselves are no better than those whom they torture, flog, and kill? And for answer he got arguments as to whether human beings were possessed of free will or not. Could criminal propensities be detected by measuring the skull, and so on? What part does heredity play in crime? Is there such a thing as congenital depravity?
It is a hundred years since Tolstoy’s hero posed these questions, a hundred years in which we have sought ways to use science to identify criminals and prevent crime. Our understanding of science has dramatically increased and Lombroso’s fame has largely died, but answers to these questions remain just as pressing.”
(endnote citations removed–Ed.)

In my view, the chances of getting a student to write to a history/story/analysis like this, by starting with the mechanics of the well-written essay, are slim to less than slim. I can’t see any historian beginning any history with a study or review of the techniques of the properly-constructed history book.

This is not to throw out those babies of some instructional value with all the bathwater of pedagogical technique. Of course it is important for students to have an outline, take notes in their readings, construct their endnotes and bibliographies in the accepted (Chicago) manner, and so on.
It is my contention that, in order to inspire students to do the hard work of research and writing necessary to produce a good, scholarly, readable history paper, one should start by encouraging them to read history, perhaps starting with some of the better work of others their age who have written successful history papers already.

Too often, it seems to me, the step of having students read history to find out how interesting it can be, and the next step of having them read about a topic in history on which they think they might want to write a paper are the most important ones.
After the motivation to read and report on some historical topic is in place, and a strong first draft is written, then the gods of Rhetorical Correctness can descend and do their duties. But it is not possible to repair a paper written with little research and no enthusiasm, using writing pedagogy alone.
I once talked to a Teachers College expert on reading and writing about the importance of content (knowledge, subject matter, et al) in writing, and she, who had been called, in a national publication, “The Queen of Reading and Writing,” said to me: “I teach writing, I don’t get into content that much.” Here beginneth the death of academic expository writing in the schools.
Educators in the United States talk a lot about “critical thinking,” but I, along with others, believe it is easier to learn and practice thinking of any sort if there is something to think about. If the student has almost no knowledge, then they have almost nothing to think about. When it comes to writing a research paper, if the students has learned a lot about their subject, then when they see whether they have done a good job of presenting what they have learned, that will inspire them to think more about it, and to re-write their paper so it does the job they wanted to do better.
Another difficulty in the United States is that reading and writing in the schools is almost universally in the hands of the English Department, and that means the reading will be fiction and the writing will be personal, creative, or the five-paragraph essay. This set of practices tends to shrink the educators’ vision of the capacities of high school students, so when they see the sort of writing in the following excerpt (from a 7,900-word paper by a New York tenth-grader who later graduated from Harvard and Cambridge), they regard it as the work of some freak and decide it surely has no bearing on the level of expectations in writing they have for their own students:

“Keynes also discusses in The General Theory the danger of excessive saving (which he had emphasized earlier in his Treatise on Money). If an individual saves a greater amount than can be invested by businesses, he or she is failing to return income to the community and the result will be a contraction of the incomes even further. Because of the marginal propensity to consume, everyone else’s savings will also contract. The result will not even be a gain in total savings. Because savings and investment are carried out by different groups in our society, it is often possible that individuals will save more than can be invested. Therefore, thriftiness could lead to a decline in total savings.
The discussions in The General Theory of the marginal propensity to consume, the multiplier, and savings all point to the fact that investment must be increased to increase income and employment. According to Keynes, investment is determined by two considerations–the expected yield of the investment and the rate of interest on the money borrowed for the investment. Economists before Keynes (and also Keynes in his Treatise on Money) believed that excess savings will bring down interest and encourage investment. But Keynes makes the crucial observation that a shortage in investment will cause a decrease in income and, because of marginal propensity to consume, a decrease in savings, which will raise interest rates and further discourage investment. If there is insufficient investment, people will not be able to save as much as they had in the past; in fact, they will begin to use up their past savings. Because of this, even before The General Theory, Keynes advocated the reduction of interest rates by the government to both reduce savings and raise investment. But for Keynes, in The General Theory, even that reduction of interest rates would not be enough to reduce savings or stimulate investment sufficiently. According to Keynes, if certain conditions exist, especially in a depression, a reduction in interest will have little effect on savings. If there was a rise in liquidity preference (people’s desire for cash), such as might be brought about by falling prices, savings would not be reduced no matter how low the interest was. And decreased interest rates would not have a great effect on investment because of the second consideration that affects investment–expectation. The expected yield of the investment is extremely unpredictable. Keynes said of the factors that influence output and employment, “of these several factors it is those which determine the rate of investment which are most unreliable, since it is they which are influenced by our views of the future about which we know so little.” Keynes’s conclusions that neither interest rates nor expected proceeds could sufficiently encourage investment led him to his final conclusion that unemployment could exist at equilibrium–unemployment would not fix itself, and government intervention was necessary to increase employment.
In The General Theory, Keynes contrasts his main arguments with the traditionally held “classical” beliefs. The General Theory is filled with passages in which Keynes shows the inadequacies of what he calls the “postulates of the classical theory.” According to Keynes, “the classical economists” is a name traditionally given to Ricardo, James Mill, and economists before them. Keynes, however, says that he has also come to call more recent economists who “adopted and perfected the theory of Ricardian economics” classical. These economists include John Stuart Mill, and closer to Keynes’s time, Alfred Marshall and Arthur Pigou. Unlike some heretical economists of the past, Keynes had been brought up on classical ideas and had, in fact, remained consistent with them in most of his writings before The General Theory. Keynes’s father, John Neville Keynes, was a noted economist at Cambridge University. And when Keynes attended King’s College at Cambridge, he was a student of Marshall and Pigou, whom Keynes included in his definition of classical economists. Thus Keynes was doubtless taught classical theory from his childhood through the time that he was a student…” (endnote citations removed–Ed.)

It should be said again that these are quite brief excerpts from history papers of 6,000 to almost 8,000 words by students in the ninth and tenth grades. I have published 791 (1,000) such papers by high school students from 35 (39) countries in the last 20 (25) years, and these students have greatly exceeded the expectations I started with in 1987. However, if I had decided to publish the standard five-paragraph essays or the short little “college essays” required by college admissions officers, naturally I would never have discovered what high school students could do.
Which leads me to state another caution when dealing with gifted students. It is important not to try to decide in advance what they are capable of doing. If, in the case of history research papers at the high school level, the choice of topic is left up to the student and there is no specified length, the result will be, in my experience, a huge variety of interesting and serious historical topics, and the longest paper I have published, by a twelfth-grader in this case, was a bit over 22,000 words.
Educators who are accustomed to defining assignments in advance might want to consider my experience, especially when suggesting work for gifted students. Of course, 22,000-word papers take much longer for the teacher to read and comment on, but we might want to make assignments that test the academic efforts and capacities of students rather than choosing them for their demands on us.
Another thing to keep in mind about these gifted students, while we wonder how much to teach them about outlining, note-taking, endnotes and bibliography, is that these are the same students who are taking honors physics and chemistry and preparing for Calculus BC exams. They are not stupid, and they can pick up what they need to know about endnotes et al, in a few moments, especially if they have models in front of them.
They do not need a semester of Writing Techniques Instruction before they pick a topic and start reading about it. We must remind ourselves not to load them up with our own limitations. In addition, they are quite capable of asking questions to find out what they need to do when presenting a research paper. They have been doing that (asking questions), often to the irritation of the adults around them, since they were little kids, after all.
It is also important, at least when working with gifted high school students doing history research papers, to stay out of their way.
“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
www.tcr.org/blog