Claudine Gay May Be in More Trouble Than She Realizes

Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard University, has had what can be fairly described as a rough week. It began last Tuesday, when she spoke in front of a House committee on the subject of campus antisemitism and proceeded to barf all over her own lapels with hours of mulishly nonresponsive testimony, highlighted most acutely by her lawyered refusal to acknowledge that calling for or celebrating the wanton slaughter of Jews was “unacceptable speech” on a Harvard campus where microaggressions like “accidental misgendering” are otherwise doggedly policed. In the aftermath of her inexplicably self-destructive performance, she has received support from the faculty of Harvard, 500+ members of which signed a petition backing her continued tenure as president.

Meanwhile, a few conservative commentators mused idly about how someone so utterly incompetent had been promoted to be the face of America’s most prestigious academic institution, a question that became ever more curious when it was pointed out that Gay, unlike any previous president of Harvard, had produced almost zero actual scholarship — a mere ten pieces in boutique academic journals since acquiring her Ph.D. from Harvard in 1998, no monographs or extended scholarly works to her name, and nothing whatsoever since 2016. In the hypercompetitive publish-or-perish world of academia, her rapid ascent from graduate student to professor to full tenure to a chair at Harvard to the presidency of the university in 2023 was quite the remarkable climb, one that most scholars would envy. Since I majored in Russian history when I was in college and not African-American studies (her field of expertise), I felt unqualified to judge her scholarship, but I just assumed that those ten post-graduation pieces of hers must have been some truly landmark, field-defining work, the sort of stuff that immediately goes from the academic journals into freshman-year class syllabi.

So you can imagine my disappointment when I read notorious party-crasher Christopher Rufo’s piece this morning about Claudine Gay’s award-winning Harvard Ph.D. thesis — the Charonic coin all scholars must pay to cross the threshold into a career in academia — which apparently contains several sections of plagiarized material. Perhaps some charity is called for, however inconvenient; the three examples cited by Rufo and his co-author Christopher Brunet are only technical violations of the Harvard student manual on plagiarism, insofar as they are unquoted (albeit footnoted, which matters), near-verbatim reprints of factual assertions from earlier works.

There is a genuine laziness in Gay’s refusal to take the extra time to properly restate a cited author’s works in her own words (or at the very least throw proper quotes around them), but I would argue that, realistically, there is also an obviously cognizable difference between the absent-minded copying of dry factual summaries three times in one 400-page thesis versus the wholesale plagiarism of another writer’s rhetorical flourishes or entire chunks of that scholar’s uncited research. Some of her own peers are not so charitable, however: One anonymous tenured Harvard professor said, ”This looks really bad for her, and speaks to the fact that at worst she is a plagiarist, and at best, her worse-than-mediocre record as a scholar is highly derivative.”

And it’s fair to ask whether such a charitable standard would be used for those outside the faculty guild. None of us were born into this life ten minutes ago, so we understand that the answer is no. The “spirit of the law” in these cases is always less observed than the hard letter of it when it comes to people outside the fraternity of enforcement (whether because they are lowly undergraduates or political exiles). So hypocrisy reigns yet again, as it has in the nature of human tribalism. Recall the saga of disgraced Princeton historian Kevin Kruse, who built his social-media brand over years of “professional historian here to inform you!” and “anti-plagiarism” online scolding only to be revealed to have himself plagiarized significant chunks of his own Cornell University graduate thesis from other, better scholars. Princeton and Cornell circled the wagons, conducted quiet, in camera reviews, and absolved him of the same crime they regularly expel or discipline their students for. Some animals are more equal than others.

So I am confident that, as embarrassing as these new revelations are, Gay will survive them without breaking much of a sweat. After all, it was her graduate thesis from 1997, 26 years ago and before she formally began her professional career. What might hurt Gay, however, is the possible emergence of more examples of plagiarism, especially from her years as a professional academic and not merely as a student. Gay, as noted, has a notoriously small publication history — it did not go unnoticed at the time of her appointment as president, and is not unnoticed now — and the real peril for her lies in that remaining (and rather easily surveyable, because so small) body of work. Should a pattern of professional plagiarism throughout her work be established, then everything is up for grabs again, because then she has become provably a career-long fraud and not just a one-time blunderer.

Let us hope, for her sake, that there are no further academic skeletons remaining in her closet.