"It was a political attack on a symbol. It was a campaign of abrogation. It was and is a project of displacement and defilement meant to reverse progress and shame the proponents of that progress."
--Charles M. Blow,"The Persecution of Harvard’s Claudine Gay", New York Times, January 3, 2024
All,
For the record: My personal take on this obviously grotesque and utterly predictable public attack on and defamation of Dr. Gay---and by all too easy extension African American scholars, teachers, intellectuals and artists in general who categorically refuse or otherwise inadvertedly fail to toe the vicious white supremacist rightwing line of meek submission to their demagogic rule and domination--is that her entire tenure as President of Harvard (both before and after the brutal attack of the terrorist group Hamas on Israel on October 7, and since then the even more brutal mass genocidal assault by the Israeli government on thousands of innocent Palestinian civilians in Gaza) was yet another attempt on the part of Harvard University to cynically use Dr. Gay as a mere token surrogate as the president of their institution which she was originally chosen for in December, 2022 and actually began serving as president on July 1, 2023 where just two days later the heinously racist and also utterly predictable decision of the Supreme Court to end Affirmative Action at Harvard and the University of North Carolina was made, thereby permanently gutting the reform minded academic program on a national level.
As a result Dr. Gay was brought in from day one of her presidential appointment by the aptly named Harvard Corporation to stand all too obviously as a feeble attempt by the governing board of Harvard to give the fake, gaslighting and cringe inducing "impression" that Harvard "still cared" about the fate of its black students, faculty, and staff administrators and their own besieged and deeply scapecoated by the right larger DEI initiatives on the campus in light of the national frankly openly fascist attacks on both public and higher education generally led by the GOP, Donald Trump, and his craven political acolytes and fellow racist assholes like Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy.
However the fact that Dr. Gay still took the gig despite all the rabbit hole chaos, bad faith, and stomach turning hypocrisy demonstrated by the white supremacist right as well as the clueless 'gliberals'/neoliberals indicates perhaps a certain personal overriding ambition on Dr. Gay's part, and which wound up via the obvious trap set by GOP demagogue Rep. Stefanik of making her at least partly complicit with what the University was doing and why contrary to whatever good intentions she may have had otherwise to make a go of an obviously deeply fraught and dangerously toxic situation Dr. Gay was as she clearly stated in her NYT op-ed today foremost a victim of the wider rightwing war on diversity and equality that white supremacists and rightwing activists have been ruthlessly engaged in for many years now and especially since the Israeli-Hamas war broke out in October 2023.
That being said it's very important that we all continue to make the very necessary effort to fully contextualize and critique what this entire episode actually says and represents both ideologically and politically about the overall direction of this country. These clearly fascist and massively organized forces on the right are in fact the essential reason why Dr. Gay and so many others like her in this society who are either/or black, female, and progressive are being bullied, ridiculed, defamed, and dismissed in the public sphere in the name as always of an egregiousy indefensible system of oppression and exploitation on the basis of race, class, and gender.
Stay tuned because we haven't seen anywhere near the end of these vile rightwing propaganda campaigns both in our educational institutions as well as the larger society writ large...
For the gory details and the varied responses to the social and cultural fallout emanating from this public attack check out the following commentary below by Dr. Gay and others on this debacle and what it really means.
Kofi
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/03/opinion/claudine-gay-harvard-president.html
Guest Essay
Claudine Gay: What Just Happened at Harvard Is Bigger Than Me
January 3, 2024
New York Times
[Dr. Gay is a former president of Harvard University, where she is a professor of government and of African and African American studies.]
On Tuesday, I made the wrenching but necessary decision to resign as Harvard’s president. For weeks, both I and the institution to which I’ve devoted my professional life have been under attack. My character and intelligence have been impugned. My commitment to fighting antisemitism has been questioned. My inbox has been flooded with invective, including death threats. I’ve been called the N-word more times than I care to count.
My hope is that by stepping down I will deny demagogues the opportunity to further weaponize my presidency in their campaign to undermine the ideals animating Harvard since its founding: excellence, openness, independence, truth.
As I depart, I must offer a few words of warning. The campaign against me was about more than one university and one leader. This was merely a single skirmish in a broader war to unravel public faith in pillars of American society. Campaigns of this kind often start with attacks on education and expertise, because these are the tools that best equip communities to see through propaganda. But such campaigns don’t end there. Trusted institutions of all types — from public health agencies to news organizations — will continue to fall victim to coordinated attempts to undermine their legitimacy and ruin their leaders’ credibility. For the opportunists driving cynicism about our institutions, no single victory or toppled leader exhausts their zeal.
Yes, I made mistakes. In my initial response to the atrocities of Oct. 7, I should have stated more forcefully what all people of good conscience know: Hamas is a terrorist organization that seeks to eradicate the Jewish state. And at a congressional hearing last month, I fell into a well-laid trap. I neglected to clearly articulate that calls for the genocide of Jewish people are abhorrent and unacceptable and that I would use every tool at my disposal to protect students from that kind of hate.
Most recently, the attacks have focused on my scholarship. My critics found instances in my academic writings where some material duplicated other scholars’ language, without proper attribution. I believe all scholars deserve full and appropriate credit for their work. When I learned of these errors, I promptly requested corrections from the journals in which the flagged articles were published, consistent with how I have seen similar faculty cases handled at Harvard.
I have never misrepresented my research findings, nor have I ever claimed credit for the research of others. Moreover, the citation errors should not obscure a fundamental truth: I proudly stand by my work and its impact on the field.
Despite the obsessive scrutiny of my peer-reviewed writings, few have commented on the substance of my scholarship, which focuses on the significance of minority office holding in American politics. My research marshaled concrete evidence to show that when historically marginalized communities gain a meaningful voice in the halls of power, it signals an open door where before many saw only barriers. And that, in turn, strengthens our democracy.
Throughout this work, I asked questions that had not been asked, used then-cutting-edge quantitative research methods and established a new understanding of representation in American politics. This work was published in the nation’s top political science journals and spawned important research by other scholars.
Never did I imagine needing to defend decades-old and broadly respected research, but the past several weeks have laid waste to truth. Those who had relentlessly campaigned to oust me since the fall often trafficked in lies and ad hominem insults, not reasoned argument. They recycled tired racial stereotypes about Black talent and temperament. They pushed a false narrative of indifference and incompetence.
It is not lost on me that I make an ideal canvas for projecting every anxiety about the generational and demographic changes unfolding on American campuses: a Black woman selected to lead a storied institution. Someone who views diversity as a source of institutional strength and dynamism. Someone who has advocated a modern curriculum that spans from the frontier of quantum science to the long-neglected history of Asian Americans. Someone who believes that a daughter of Haitian immigrants has something to offer to the nation’s oldest university.
I still believe that. As I return to teaching and scholarship, I will continue to champion access and opportunity, and I will bring to my work the virtue I discussed in the speech I delivered at my presidential inauguration: courage. Because it is courage that has buoyed me throughout my career and it is courage that is needed to stand up to those who seek to undermine what makes universities unique in American life.
Having now seen how quickly the truth can become a casualty amid controversy, I’d urge a broader caution: At tense moments, every one of us must be more skeptical than ever of the loudest and most extreme voices in our culture, however well organized or well connected they might be. Too often they are pursuing self-serving agendas that should be met with more questions and less credulity.
College
campuses in our country must remain places where students can learn,
share and grow together, not spaces where proxy battles and political
grandstanding take root. Universities must remain independent venues
where courage and reason unite to advance truth, no matter what forces
set against them.
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Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard who announced her resignation on Tuesday after her problematic congressional testimony about antisemitism and mounting questions about missing citations and quotation marks in her published work, was, in part, pushed out by political forces beyond academia and hostile to it.
But the campaign against her was never truly about her testimony or accusations of plagiarism.
It was a political attack on a symbol. It was a campaign of abrogation. It was and is a project of displacement and defilement meant to reverse progress and shame the proponents of that progress.
As Janai Nelson, the president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc., posted online, “The project isn’t to thwart hate but to foment it thru vicious takedowns.”
When Gay and the presidents of M.I.T. and the University of Pennsylvania botched their responses before Congress, some on the political right sensed a weakness, and it quickened them. This was their chance not only to burn a witch but to torch a coven.
The presidents’ failure to provide clear, simple answers to questions whose answers would seem obvious — opting instead for halting, overlawyered responses — was pilloried as a symptom of a disease, the descent of liberalism into a form of cultural insanity driven by an obsession with identities and protection of the perverse.
When Bill Ackman, a billionaire investor and Harvard alumnus, published a Nov. 4 letter to then-President Gay, a month before the congressional testimony, he gave away the game with a swipe at Harvard’s Office for Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging, complaining that it “does not support Jewish, Asian and non-L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. white students.”
Diversity, equity and inclusion, or D.E.I. — the effort to assist and support the underrepresented — turns out to be the ultimate target.
And to underscore that the vilification of the college presidents was about something more than their remarks about antisemitism, just two weeks after Ackman published his letter, he defended Elon Musk, saying that the controversial electric car maker “is not an antisemite,” even after Musk replied approvingly, on his social media platform, X, to the statement that Jewish communities “have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.”
When I spoke with the U.C.L.A. Law and Columbia Law School professor Kimberlé Crenshaw last year about the battle in Florida over the teaching of Black history, she warned that this scapegoating of academics would spread to D.E.I. efforts beyond academia, including in corporate America. “This thing will not be satisfied by one victory,” she said. “This is just one skirmish in a wider, broader battle” to make discussions about the legacy of racism in this country taboo and “to contain the power of Black folks, queer folks, women and pretty much everybody else who doesn’t agree to the agenda of reclaiming this country that the MAGA group claims.”
At the time, I didn’t fully appreciate just how prescient her words were.
When the plagiarism allegations against Gay arose, the campaign against her went from being something survivable into something that wasn’t. Her problems could now be labeled multifactorial, her appointment fundamentally flawed — misguided cultural elites had bent the puzzle to make the piece fit, and now it was coming undone.
Conservatives would be the sun to Gay’s Icarus, demonstrating just how hot they could make things for her.
At a time when Black women are ascendant in the culture, they have become, for some, the emblems of unwelcome change; their presence in positions of power represents a threat to the power traditionally clustered in the hands of a few.
As such, Black women see their credentials relentlessly attacked, their characters impugned, their lives scoured. The issue is not that the bar is lowered for them to succeed but rather raised so that any imperfection can be inflated into a fundamental flaw. These women are trapped in prisons of others’ demands for perfection.
Call it the Wonder Woman requirement.
And these attacks are unceasing: In 2020, President Donald Trump amplified the racist theory that then-Senator Kamala Harris wasn’t eligible for the vice presidency because her parents were immigrants. She was born in California.
Trump also used the racist conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was not a natural-born American citizen to begin his foray into presidential politics.
On the day that President Biden nominated Ketanji Brown Jackson to serve on the Supreme Court, Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, called her a “radical judge” and said that the Senate should reject her because “her limited judicial record” revealed that she “consistently ignored the Constitution.” Now a think tank run by a former Trump administration official has called for an ethics investigation into the source of her husband’s income and funding for an event held to mark her swearing-in.
Where is that energy when it comes to Clarence Thomas’s multifarious ethical issues?
The Democratic governor of California, Gavin Newsom, committed to appointing a Black woman to the Senate if Dianne Feinstein’s seat became vacant. After she died, one headline from the far-right publication The Federalist blared, “Dianne Feinstein’s Senate Replacement Will Be Defined by the Racist, Sexist Criteria She Fits.”
Even private attempts to lift Black women are under attack: Edward Blum, the man behind the case against Harvard and the University of North Carolina that led to the end of affirmative action in college admissions, filed a lawsuit last year against an Atlanta venture capital fund that gave grants to businesses owned by Black women. The suit claims that the grants violate the Civil Rights Act of 1866.
As Black women have raised their profiles, they’ve raised some right-wing hackles, making them targets of political aggression. And unfortunately, Gay’s resignation will be like blood that further chums the water. As Crenshaw put it, this thing will not be satisfied.
Source photographs by Tristan Spinski for The New York Times and The Boston Globe, via Getty Images.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Charles M. Blow is an Opinion columnist for The New York Times, writing about national politics, public opinion and social justice, with a focus on racial equality and L.G.B.T.Q. rights. @CharlesMBlow • Facebook
How a GOP Campaign Ousted Harvard’s Claudine Gay
Plagiarism charges downed Harvard’s president. A conservative attack helped to fan the outrage
VIDEO: Harvard President Claudine Gay resigned Tuesday amid plagiarism allegations and outrage that came not from her academic peers but from her political foes, led by conservatives who put her career under intense scrutiny.
WASHINGTON (AP) — American higher education has long viewed plagiarism as a cardinal sin. Accusations of academic dishonesty have ruined the careers of faculty and undergraduates alike.
The latest target is Harvard President Claudine Gay, who resigned Tuesday. In her case, the outrage came not from her academic peers but her political foes, led by conservatives who put her career under intense scrutiny.
Reviews by Harvard found multiple shortcomings in Gay’s academic citations, including several instances of “ duplicative language.” The university concluded the errors “were not considered intentional or reckless” and didn’t rise to misconduct. But the allegations continued, with new ones as recently as Monday.
PHOTO: A passer-by walks through a gate to the Harvard University campus, Tuesday, Jan. 2, 2024, in Cambridge, Mass. (AP Photo/Steven Senne)
Conservatives zeroed in on Gay amid backlash over her congressional testimony about antisemitism on campus. Her detractors charged that Gay — who has a Ph.D. in government, was a professor at Harvard and Stanford and headed Harvard’s largest division before being promoted — got the top job in large part because she is a Black woman.
Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist who helped orchestrate the effort against Gay, celebrated her departure as a win in his campaign against elite institutions of higher education. On X, formerly Twitter, he wrote “SCALPED,” as if Gay was a trophy of violence, invoking a gruesome practice taken up by white colonists who sought to eradicate Native Americans and also used by some tribes against their enemies.
“Tomorrow, we get back to the fight,” he said on X, describing a “playbook” against institutions deemed too liberal by conservatives. His latest target: efforts to promote diversity, equity and inclusion in education and business.
“We must not stop until we have abolished DEI ideology from every institution in America,” he said. In another post, he announced a new “plagiarism hunting fund,” vowing to “expose the rot in the Ivy League and restore truth, rather than racialist ideology, as the highest principle in academic life.”
In a New York Times op-ed published Wednesday, Gay acknowledged making mistakes. She said her published work contained passages where “some material duplicated other scholars’ language, without proper attribution.” But she said she never had claimed credit for others’ work, and she stands by her original research. And at the December congressional hearing that started the onslaught of criticism, she wrote, “I neglected to clearly articulate that calls for the genocide of Jewish people are abhorrent and unacceptable.”
Her departure comes just six months after becoming Harvard’s first Black president.
As the figureheads of their universities, presidents often face heightened scrutiny, and numerous leaders have been felled by plagiarism scandals. Stanford University’s president resigned last year amid findings that he manipulated scientific data in his research. A president of the University of South Carolina resigned in 2021 after he lifted parts of his speech at a graduation ceremony.
In Gay’s case, many academics were troubled with how the plagiarism came to light: as part of a coordinated campaign to discredit Gay and force her from office, in part because of her involvement in efforts for racial justice on campus. Her resignation came after calls for her ouster from prominent conservatives including Rep. Elise Stefanik, a Harvard alumna, and Bill Ackman, a billionaire hedge fund manager who has donated millions to Harvard.
The campaign against Gay and other Ivy League presidents has become part of a broader right-wing effort to remake higher education, which has often been seen as a bastion of liberalism. Republican detractors have sought to gut funding for public universities, roll back tenure and banish initiatives that make colleges more welcoming to students of color, disabled students and the LGBTQ+ community. They also have aimed to limit how race and gender are discussed in classrooms.
Walter M. Kimbrough, the former president of the historically Black Dillard University, said what unfolded at Harvard reminded him of an adage from his mother, a Black graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, in the 1950s.
As a Black person in academia, “you always have to be twice, three times as good,” he said.
“There are going to be people, particularly if they have any inkling that the person of color is not the most qualified, who will label them a ‘DEI hire,’ like they tried to label her,” Kimbrough said. “If you want to lead an institution like (Harvard) … there are going to be people who are looking to disqualify you.”
The allegations against Gay initially came from conservative activists, some who stayed anonymous. They looked for the kinds of duplicated sentences undergraduate students are trained to avoid, even with citation.
In dozens of instances first published by The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative website, Gay’s work includes long stretches of prose that mirror language from other published works. A review ordered by Harvard acknowledged she duplicated the language without using quotation marks.
Harvard previously said Gay updated her dissertation and requested corrections from journals.
Among her critics in conservative circles and academia, the findings are clear evidence that Gay, as the top academic at the pinnacle of U.S. higher education, is unfit to serve. Her defenders say it isn’t so clear-cut.
In highly specialized fields, scholars often use similar language to describe the same concepts, said Davarian Baldwin, a historian at Trinity College who writes about race and higher education. Gay clearly made mistakes, he said, but with the spread of software designed to detect plagiarism, it wouldn’t be hard to find similar overlap in works by other presidents and professors.
The tool becomes dangerous, he added, when it “falls into the hands of those who argue that academia in general is a cesspool of incompetence and bad actors.”
John Pelissero, a former interim college president who now works for the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, said instances of plagiarism deserve to be evaluated individually and that it’s not always so cut and dried.
“You’re looking for whether there was intentionality to mislead or inappropriately borrow other people’s ideas in your work,” Pelissero said. “Or was there an honest mistake?”
Without commenting on the merits of the allegations against Gay, President Irene Mulvey of the American Association of University Professors said she fears plagiarism investigations could be “weaponized” to pursue a political agenda.
“There is a right-wing political attack on higher education right now, which feels like an existential threat to the academic freedom that has made American higher education the envy of the world,” Mulvey said.
She worries Gay’s departure will put a new strain on college presidents. In addition to their work courting donors, policymakers and alumni, presidents are supposed to protect faculty from interference so they can research unimpeded.
“For presidents to be taken down like this, it does not bode well for academic freedom,” she said. “I think it’ll chill the climate for academic freedom. And it may make university presidents less likely to speak out against this inappropriate interference for fear of losing their jobs or being targeted.”
Balingit reported from Sacramento.
The Rise and Fall of Harvard President Claudine Gay
Six months ago, Claudine Gay was celebrated as an obvious choice to serve as Harvard’s 30th president. On Tuesday, she resigned, ending the tenure of Harvard’s first Black president less than 200 days after it began.
Gay announced her resignation in an email to Harvard affiliates Tuesday afternoon, though a source close to the former president said she reached the decision last week. University Provost Alan M. Gaber ’76 will act as interim president until a search selects a permanent successor.
Gay’s brief presidency, a historic first, will be remembered as taking place during a particularly difficult and controversial moment in the University’s 388-year history.
Gay’s first national crisis was confronting the future of Harvard’s admissions policies after the Supreme Court’s ruling on affirmative action just two days before she assumed office. But it was the University’s response to the Israel-Hamas war and the emergence of allegations of plagiarism that would prove fatal for Gay’s presidency.
Gay first faced calls to resign just days after she marked her 100th day as Harvard’s president. Though Gay — and Harvard — tried to move past the numerous controversies she faced over her brief tenure, the criticism ultimately proved impossible to brush off.
In the weeks leading up to her resignation, Gay’s personal scholarly integrity and the merits upon which she was selected to serve as Harvard’s president have all been called into question.
Before the Presidency
When Gay was officially announced as Harvard’s next president in December 2022, her appointment was seen as the beginning of a hopeful new era for the University. Many believed Harvard found its leader for at least the next decade.
Gay was born in New York City to Haitian immigrant parents, and attended Phillips Exeter Academy — an elite private school — before college.
After graduating from Stanford, Gay completed her Ph.D. at Harvard, receiving the Toppan Prize for best political science dissertation in 1998.
The dissertation would later come under scrutiny as Gay faced allegations of plagiarism toward the end of her tenure. She requested three corrections to her dissertation in December, following a review by the Harvard Corporation and an independent panel.
Since writing her dissertation, Gay has published 11 peer-reviewed academic articles, two of which she has also requested corrections on.
After joining Harvard’s faculty in 2006, Gay rose quickly in Harvard’s ranks, rising from dean of Social Sciences to dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences — a position widely considered the most important deanship at the University — to president all within a decade.
As FAS dean, Gay steered the faculty through numerous sexual misconduct scandals, the Covid-19 pandemic, and championed the development and expansion of ethnic studies at Harvard.
“I am also filled with hope for our students, who can now take from Dean Gay as president a shining example of what ethical, impactful leadership can be,” wrote Taeku Lee, a Government professor hired in 2022 as part of Gay’s ethnic studies cluster hire, in a statement to The Crimson last year.
When Gay was tapped to lead Harvard after the shortest presidential search in the University’s history, her appointment came as no surprise to her colleagues. Having previously occupied the most powerful deanship at the University, she was a top contender for the presidency.
“We are confident Claudine will be a thoughtful, principled, and inspiring president for all of Harvard, dedicated to helping each of our individual schools thrive, as well as fostering creative connections among them,” Harvard Corporation Senior Fellow Penny S. Pritzker ’81 wrote in a December 2022 email announcing Gay’s appointment.
While Gay faced a looming Supreme Court decision on affirmative action and the task of spearheading fundraising post-Covid 19, her selection as president was widely considered a sign of positive change in the coming years.
Israel-Palestine Backlash
When Gay assumed the presidency on July 1, she was tasked with maintaining Harvard’s commitment to diversity after a Supreme Court’s ruling effectively ended the use of race-conscious admissions practices.
“Our commitment to that work remains steadfast, is essential to who we are, and the mission that we are here to advance,” Gay said in a video message following the decision.
Rethinking Harvard’s admissions practices was Gay’s first major challenge as president. But the landmark Supreme Court ruling against Harvard would later pale in comparison to crises Gay would face just months later.
On Oct. 7, Hamas — which the U.S. designates a terrorist organization — launched an attack on Israel, killing an estimated 1,200 people. Israel responded by declaring war on Hamas, and has since killed more than 20,000 people in Gaza.
In the days following the attack, eyes turned toward Harvard when more than 30 student groups signed onto a statement from the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee holding Israel “entirely responsible” for the violence that occurred on Oct. 7.
Harvard’s first official statement, two days after Hamas’ initial attack, was widely criticized as being too ambiguous and too slow. Gay’s administration never fully recovered from the backlash to its initial statement.
Garber, who became interim president upon Gay’s resignation on Tuesday, acknowledged that the first statement did not go far enough in an interview with The Crimson on Nov. 9.
In a slew of subsequent statements, Gay took a more definitive stance against Hamas and the student groups’ statement, but also alienated multiple student groups and professors by condemning the phrase “from the river to the sea” as campus tensions continued to rise.
Then, Gay appeared before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce on Dec. 5 for a hearing about antisemitism on college campuses, in what has now become known as one of the most damaging congressional testimonies in years.
In response to a line of questioning from Rep. Elise M. Stefanik ’06 (R-N.Y.), Gay said that calls for genocide of Jewish people would not automatically be in violation of Harvard’s code of conduct, instead insisting that it depended on the context.
Her response, for which she later apologized, went viral just hours after the hearing, and amplified calls for Gay’s resignation. Less than a month later, just one of the three presidents who testified at the hearing — MIT President Sally A. Kornbluth — remains in her position.
The Crimson also reported that the Corporation’s former Senior Fellow William F. Lee ’72 played an outsized role in Gay’s testimony preparation alongside other lawyers from WilmerHale, a law firm where Lee is a partner. WilmerHale’s involvement in preparing Gay for her testimony sidelined external public relations and communications experts.
After the testimony, the House of Representatives passed a resolution calling for Gay’s resignation and the House Committee on Education and the Workforce launched an investigation into both the administration's response to antisemitism and later, allegations of plagiarism against Gay.
After staying silent for a week, the Corporation, Harvard’s top governing body, released a statement of unanimous support for Gay, following what they said was “extensive deliberation.” Gay’s position was temporarily secured.
Allegations of Plagiarism
But it was allegations of plagiarism which emerged following Gay’s congressional testimony that may have dealt the final blow to her presidency.
Before the allegations were made public, the University attempted to prevent the New York Post from publishing an article about the charges of plagiarism, days before opening their own investigation into the claims.
That investigation later concluded that Gay’s scholarship contained multiple instances where quotation marks or authors’ names needed to be added.
While the allegations themselves ranged from no more than three repeated words to numerous repeated lines without attribution, the conservative activists at their root made close to 50 plagiarism allegations in total.
Christopher F. Rufo, a right-wing activist known for popularizing — and demonizing — the phrase “Critical Race Theory,” was one of the first to publish the allegations online, claiming in a Substack post with journalist Christopher Brunet that Gay had plagiarized portions of her dissertation on Dec. 10. Rufo wrote in a post on X that the announcement, which came as the Corporation met to deliberate on Gay’s fate, was timed so it would do the most damage to Gay and her presidency.
Additional allegations of plagiarism followed soon after in reports from the Washington Free Beacon and the New York Post, calling into question articles from across Gay’s academic career.
After Tuesday’s announcement, Rufo wrote on X that he would next attempt to “abolish the DEI bureaucracy, expand viewpoint diversity on the faculty, adopt the Kalven principle, restore colorblind equality,” referencing the 1967 University of Chicago “Kalven report” which recommends institutional neutrality.
Both Gay and the Corporation addressed the effect race had on Gay’s treatment in their statements Tuesday. Gay wrote that she has been “subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus” and the Corporation added that she had privately been the subject of “repugnant and in some cases racist vitriol directed at her through disgraceful emails and phone calls.”
Numerous public figures have since questioned if the level of scrutiny on Gay’s scholarly work would have been as intense if she were not a Black woman in the University’s most prestigious and high profile position.
In an X post following Gay’s resignation, author Ibram X. Kendi wrote that the backlash against Gay was fueled by racism and criticized media outlets for platforming such claims.
“The question is whether all these people would have investigated, surveilled, harassed, written about, and attacked her in the same way if the Harvard president in this case would have been White,” he wrote.
“I. Think. Not,” Kendi added.
NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund President Janai Nelson also wrote on X that Gay’s resignation sets a “dangerous precedent” for higher education.
“Attacks against Claudine Gay have been unrelenting & the biases unmasked,” Nelson wrote. “This protects no one,” she added.
Gay served as Harvard president for 185 days.
—Staff writer Emma H. Haidar can be reached at emma.haidar@thecrimson.com.
Follow her on X @HaidarEmma.
—Staff writer Cam E. Kettles can be reached at cam.kettles@thecrimson.com.
Follow her on X @cam_kettles or on Threads @camkettles.
