Claudine Gay resigned as the president of Harvard. The allegations of Serial Plagiarism were the final straw for Claudine Gay. Gay’s academic writing has been reviewed repeatedly and it was found that she had lifted text blocks from other authors, often without citation or quotation marks. Gay’s problems covered a period of two decades, and they affected passages from more than half her scholarly publications.
Harvard follows long-standing academic conventions that consider plagiarism a serious offense. The rules for students are strict against “mosaic” plagiarism, or copying “bits and parts from a source…changing some words here and there… without adequately paraphrasing and quoting directly.” This practice is almost identical to the allegations made against Gay who appeared to have mosaic-plagiarized paragraph-length passages by other authors. Harvard students who engage in similar behavior can face serious consequences, such as a year-long suspension from class or expulsion. In 2020, the University suspended 27 students, and placed 56 others on academic probation, for honor code violations. Plagiarism was the second most frequent offense, after cheating on tests.
The month-long plagiarism scandal made it increasingly obvious to anyone who was not a part of the story that Claudine gay no longer had the moral authority necessary to lead Harvard University under its policies or to uphold the longstanding standards of academic ethics. The board of Harvard Corporation instead adopted an Orwellian strategy to defend itself by trying to redefine plagiarism in order to exclude the president’s transgressions. Gay’s work, they admitted, had “duplicative words” and “instances where inadequate citations” that required correction. But it lacked the “intentional fraud” which, according to the university, is a requirement for a determination on research misconduct.
[elementor-template id="1446"]This novel rendering is in stark contrast to Harvard’s published guidelines for students which states: “Taking credit or anyone else’s works is theft, and is unacceptable for all academic situations whether it’s done intentionally or accidentally.”
Harvard’s leadership aren’t alone in their attempts to avoid the P-word. Gay’s resignation has been used by several commentators to divert attention from her transgressions. They portray her as the victim of right-wing smear campaigns. By ignoring the evidence, these commentators push academic ethics to absurdity. Consider the Associated Press which renamed plagiarism as a new conservative weapon to undermine higher education. Nikole Hann-Jones , a New York Times writer, claims that “academic liberty” also protects the ability to plagiarize. Many supporters of Gay, both in journalism and academia, have attacked the journalists who exposed her transgressions. Aaron Sibarium and Chris Rufo and Chris Brunet and others have acted in “bad faith,” and they must be excluded from the discussion, regardless of the evidence.
Labeling critics “bad faith” actors is a weapon that has been used by the left to bury factually accurate allegations of academic misconduct. This defensive pattern was evident in the controversy surrounding Emory University history professor Michael Bellesiles during the early 2000s. Bellesiles’s book Arming America became a bestseller in academia primarily because it bolstered current arguments for firearms regulations. After researcher Clayton Cramer found evidence that Bellesiles had falsified sources and made unsupported statements based on nonexistent historical records the academic community rallied around him. American Historical Association adopted a resolution portraying Bellesiles a victim of harassing, and many scholars attacked Cramer for his “bad faith” criticism with connections to the firearms industry. The American Historical Association only changed its tune after the evidence was too overwhelming to ignore. This led to Bellesiles resigning and his Bancroft Prize being revoked.
Last year I found evidence of possible plagiarism in the work of Kevin M. Kruse. He is a Princeton historian, and a left-wing Twitter celebrity. Kruse, like Claudine, copied text without citations or quotation marks. Kruse, in one instance, copied the thesis from another author’s dissertation, changing only its location from Detroit, to Atlanta. The Chronicle of Higher Education reviewed Kruse and concluded “What Kruse did is plagiarism by any definition”; to Kruse supporters, however, I was considered a “bad-faith act” for simply disagreeing with Kruse’s progressive politics. Princeton’s deflection was a copy of Harvard’s. defended the plagiarism by claiming that it was “careless pasting and cutting.”
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Sadly, these and other cases show that faculty who have the “correct” ideology are often exempted by otherwise rigid academic integrity standards at elite institutions. Claudine Gay, the latest victim of leftwing intellectual privileges that excuse research misconduct and attempt to place the blame on the party who made the discovery – regardless of whether the evidence is valid – is just the latest example.
This epistemic fluidity, which is the result of “critical theory”, is characteristic of a large part of the academic world. It is also the willingness to disregard long-standing rules against plagiarism if they cause one’s teammates inconvenience. All other decisions are based on the ideology of the person making the judgment. It is no longer important whether the evidence supports or undermines a political goal. It is common to hear academics defend Gay with fervor, even though they have been vocal in their criticism of Neil Gorsuch or Melania Donald for much less serious allegations of plagiarism. In these circumstances, the substance of the accusation is not important. Only its utility to the political cause.
Ironically, the shift to the left in higher education in the past two decades has reinforced the need for outside voices when screening for misconduct in scholarly research. It is outside voices who are needed to step in when academia refuses, for political reasons, to monitor its own, as was the case with Claudine gay. In such circumstances, the real “bad-faith actors” are not those who criticize a plagiarist for blatantly political reasons, but instead, it is those who change the rules to hide unflattering facts about their team.
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