Everyone’s past, no matter how far back, is an open book.
Everyone’s past, no matter how far back, is an open book.
A fter Claudine Gay’s disastrous congressional testimony a few weeks ago in which the (now former) president of Harvard University downplayed antisemitism on her campus, she offered an apology.
“I am sorry,” Gay told the Harvard campus newspaper. “Words matter.”
They certainly do. Especially when those words are stolen from other authors.
Gay’s resignation on Tuesday brought with it all the expected takes from the media: Bad-faith conservatives were “pouncing,” attacking Gay was racist (as if all black academics are serial plagiarists), Gay was guilty only of a few missing citations, and so on.
But the most entertaining part of Gay’s downfall is just how surprised everyone was by her well-documented instances of plagiarism. That’s because the academic profession is propped up by a system in which scholars crank out worthless, universally unread articles that then form the foundation for their careers. Clearly nobody had actually read anything Gay had written in the 1990s as she completed her graduate work. (And in doing her “research,” Gay probably read only parts of the articles she consulted so she could yank from them.)
In fact, Gay was probably so convinced nobody was ever going to read her papers that she actually stole from an award-winning book. The number of people who read both Gay’s scholarship and one of the works from which she pilfered, Carol Swain’s 1993 book Black Faces, Black Interests: The Representation of African Americans in Congress, would probably be fewer than the number of attendees at an Asa Hutchinson campaign rally.
These scholarly works, by their very length and soporific prose, typically defend themselves against the risk of being read. (That’s a Winston Churchill paraphrase, for internet plagiarism sleuths.) But in a world of “publish or perish,” Gay managed an academic rarity, a case of publish (very little) and perish.
Yet as a graduate student in the 1990s, Gay couldn’t possibly have known that the internet would develop such that a large sample of academic papers would become available to anyone who wanted to compare them with one another. The mind reels at how much wholesale theft took place in the Wild West of pre- and early-internet academic research — there is undoubtedly an ocean of academics out there who sloppily copied other papers, thinking that nobody would ever notice. (The only people who read these things are journal editors, and given the quality of the work product that makes it into these publications, it’s hard to believe some have even been touched by the hand of an editor.)
But now these academic papers, once available only to a closed society of scholars, are available to investigative journalists seeking out instances of citational malfeasance. And a lot of those who will be found guilty of theft will be those high up in university administrations, helming universities where such plagiarism would (and should) get a student sent home in the first Uber available. (Christopher Rufo, who with Christopher Brunet first publicized Gay’s plagiarism in her doctoral dissertation, has said he is setting up a fund to go after other academics.)
Without a doubt, any academic found guilty of plagiarism should get the boot. Gay herself deserved it based on her congressional testimony alone, before any allegations of plagiarism even surfaced.
But when one zooms out, l’affaire Gay is an interesting glimpse of what the future might look like for all of us. There was a time when a person was allowed to have what was called a “past”: Whether that was a trail of youthful indiscretions or lapses in judgment or whatever, people could typically bury them and move on.
To wit: There are people (particularly of my age) who are comforted by the fact that their formative years didn’t take place during the era of Facebook or Instagram, where their bad decisions would be documented in perpetuity for the world. But this is seeming more like desperate naïveté. Now, technology can reach back and find your former self whether you want it to or not. And now everyone carries his full life’s résumé around with him at all times.
Did you once get convicted of drunk driving or go through a messy divorce and decide to move to another town to start over? Do people have risqué photos of you from a quarter century ago? With facial-recognition technology, the internet does not forget. There will be no Mad Men–style “Don Draper turns out to be the former Dick Whitman” twists in real life (sorry for the spoiler, but c’mon, it’s been 16 years), as your entire history will be laid bare and accessible to whoever wants it.
There is little about you today that isn’t available online, and the glut of information can go back decades. It can even go back centuries, as newspaper databases now preserve every bad take anyone has ever written in print. Yearbook databases contain millions of pages of high-school photos — if you had an especially bad haircut or an embarrassing quote under your picture, someone you know will probably find it. If there’s an actress you especially revere, within a few clicks you may be able to find her in what would now be seen as a racist or homophobic Saturday Night Live sketch from 40 years ago.
And, of course, the same concept holds true of technologies such as DNA sequencing, which will undoubtedly blow up a lot of family histories and significantly alter our conception of political history. Imagine how many cold cases are sitting in evidence rooms across America that can be solved with modern DNA science. Just wait until your DNA test shows you that Grandma may have been up to a little misadventure when Grandpa was away on business trips.
And think of the political mysteries that lie there, waiting for technology to solve them — we may learn a lot about historical figures who engaged in a bit of child-producing sneakin’ and creepin’.
There is no statute of limitations on ex post facto technological discoveries. Just ask Claudine Gay — mistakes committed 25 years ago are given fresh life when adjudicated online.
But this is why some European countries have adopted “right to be forgotten” laws, which require search engines to remove an individual’s name from search results if the person requests it. One Pew Research poll from 2020 suggested that three-quarters of Americans would support such a law in order to “keep things about themselves from being searchable online.”
So while the revelations that led to Gay’s loss of her high perch (she will still be a professor) may confirm everything you thought about the ivory tower, be warned: We are entering an era in which your personal history will follow you forever, even if what you did happened before you could even imagine any technology capturing it.
One of the most common plot devices used in 19th-century literature was that of the “fetch,” or doppelgänger — a character who is two people at once. Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Double makes use of this device, as does Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
Often, when a literary character meets his double, it is a sure sign that death is upon him. This turned out to be the case for Gay’s career as the president of Harvard once Gay’s past as a scholar walked into the room. In her case, what happened next was justified. When it’s you, you may think otherwise.
With the rise of technology, it now appears we are all two people, often fighting with each other: The person you used to be, and the person you are now. As Gay found out, these days, there is no escaping you.