Mark Schiefelbein/AP Photo
Harvard President Claudine Gay speaks during a hearing of the House Committee on Education on Capitol Hill, December 5, 2023, in Washington.
The microscopic reviews of Gay’s dissertation and her published papers are persisting.
The pattern appears to be that Gay will occasionally cite a source but neglect to put a short passage in quotes. Once again the Harvard Corporation, the university’s top governing body, reviewed the latest allegations and found that they didn’t rise to the level of plagiarism.
On Wednesday, the school issued a statement that in a few cases Gay had not rigorously followed the Harvard Guide to Using Sources. Gay has now submitted a total of seven corrections to scholarly articles adding quotation marks and revising citations.
In a letter to Penny Pritzker, head of the Harvard Corporation, Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) cites the definition of plagiarism in the school’s honor code and asks, “Does Harvard hold its faculty—and its own president—to the same standards?”
Assuming that nothing worse is unearthed, the Harvard Corporation has decided to stand by its president, at least for now. Meanwhile, the donor pressure continues. The hedge fund manipulator William Ackman, a major Harvard donor, has been saying out loud what others have whispered: that Gay got the Harvard post because of her race.
Donors have far too much influence at universities. In a just world, Harvard would tell Ackman where to shove his money. But in this corrupted world, Gay will also need to repair relations with other donors if she is to survive.
Let’s also be honest about how affirmative action works. An institution’s leadership will admit that it is far too white and far too male, and make systematic efforts to identify qualified candidates who are nonwhite and female or both. Ackman is right that some white male, somewhere, had better credentials than Gay, at least on paper.
Four hundred years after slavery, the diversification of the top leadership of top institutions is still far from complete. Black leaders who break ceilings are expected to be above reproach, as Barack Obama was. As John McWhorter writes in The New York Times, “If she stays in her job, the optics will be that a middling publication record and chronically lackadaisical attention to crediting sources is somehow OK for a university president if she is Black.”
However, there’s an instructive comparison with one failed white male Harvard president whom the governing corporation gave chance after chance to clean up his act before finally deciding in a divided vote that he had to go.
Though Larry Summers (or his legions of research assistants) made sure not to forget the quotation marks, his errors of scholarship were far more serious than Gay’s. They included assuming that deregulation of finance, which he relentlessly promoted, would not lead to a financial collapse; and that pushing postcommunist Russia to helter-skelter privatization would not lead to a deep depression that ended with Putin. Lately, Summers has failed to correct his egregious errors in his assessment of the recent bout of inflation and his calls for austerity.
Summers also cost the Harvard endowment far more than whatever donors have bailed on Gay, with reckless speculations that overruled Harvard’s professional investment staff. It was his high-handedness with faculty and boorish sexist comments that finally did Summers in as Harvard president. But Harvard’s governing board, led at the time by Summers sponsor Robert Rubin, cut the arrogant Summers far more slack than it has cut Gay.
It’s painful to have to parse whether Harvard’s first Black woman president technically committed plagiarism. Assuming that Gay survives this hazing, her long-term survival in the job will depend on what kind of leader she turns out to be, and whether she can turn the antisemitism crisis into a constructive opportunity for dialogue.
If the Harvard powers do decide she has to go, they will follow the usual establishment protocol and find the kind of nice soft landing for Gay that they arranged for University Professor Lawrence Summers.
