Claudine Gay’s Defenders Are Telling on Themselves

By the first week of 2024, Harvard had sustained all the damage it could absorb by standing behind its president, Claudine Gay. On Tuesday, the embattled academician resigned following weeks of sustained criticism of her handling of antisemitic episodes on campus and amid mounting allegations of plagiarism. But Gay is hardly disgraced. The university will allow her to retain her faculty position despite violating academic standards expected of her students, and she will still reportedly draw her nearly $900,000 salary. And yet, to hear her defenders tell it, a grave injustice has been done to Gay and, by association, all who share her demographic traits. In the process, her defenders are exposing themselves.

Some of Gay’s supporters don’t appear to understand their own definitions of what constitutes racial discrimination — at least, not insofar as they apply to Gay’s case. Celebrated author and Boston University lecturer Ibram X. Kendi is among them. The many allegations of plagiarism surrounding Gay’s modest oeuvre of published works were only a “seemingly legitimate” guise designed to justify the actions of a “racist mob,” he insisted. “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.”

Kendi seeks to establish a critical standard — one that is easily met. Scholars have found themselves in far more dire straits when a “pattern of plagiarism” is uncovered. Academic publications have been withdrawn. Degrees have been rescinded. Careers were lost.

Kendi is quick to dismiss the overwhelming evidence of plagiarism — evidence that neither Harvard nor Gay denied. Indeed, the university’s initial decision to allow their president to revisit her long-ago published works to update them with proper citations is tantamount to an admission of guilt. But some of Gay’s defenders insist it wasn’t the plagiarism accusations wot done it at all. Rather, it was those who wield accusations of antisemitism like a “weapon to attack education and diversity” who scuttled her presidency. That was Daily Beast columnist Wajahat Ali’s takeaway from this affair. “Congrats, America,” he snarked. “You keep getting played.” The novelist Celeste Ng echoed the charge. “Bad-faith bigots pretending they’re concerned about antisemitism will happily use women of color — especially Black women — as a scapegoat and lightning rod for large systemic issues,” she insisted. “And that people invested in maintaining those systemic issues will comply.”

For good or ill, Gay did not lose her post as a result of her performance before a congressional committee investigating episodes of antisemitic harassment on American campuses. If she had, she’d have found herself on the outs weeks ago alongside former University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill. Despite her white complexion, Magill’s position became untenable after her institution’s stakeholders withdrew their support for her presidency after a glib performance in which she maintained that antisemitism on campus only becomes actionable when it manifests in violence. Gay turned in the very same performance. But unlike Penn, Harvard was willing to weather that storm. Of all the things that says about both Gay and Harvard, we can conclude that hypersensitivity to charges of anti-Jewish intimidation was not the foremost factor leading to Gay’s resignation.

Far too many of Gay’s defenders appear to see her not as an individual capable of agency and responsible for her own actions. Rather, she has been abstracted into a symbol around which every black woman in America is expected to rally.

“This is an attack on every Black woman in this country who’s put a crack in the glass ceiling,” said National Action Network president Al Sharpton in a statement. Buried in this claim is the assumption that any other black female academic could easily find themselves in Gay’s position, which betrays a suspiciously low estimation of the quality of work produced by black female academics.

Sharpton promised to dispatch his organization to protest one of Gay’s critics, the investor Bill Ackman, to shame him for what Sharpton alleges is Ackman’s claim that Harvard’s outgoing president was little more than a diversity hire. If that’s an insult, it’s hard to tell given NPR correspondent Eric Deggans’s demand that Harvard replace Gay with someone possessed of her precise demographic profile. “The intimidation is the point,” he wrote. “Will the next president at Harvard stand for diversity? Will that person be female? Will that person be Black? If not, they have forced several steps back. And everyone across the school gets the message.”

Harvard and its defenders do not get to promote Gay’s hiring on the grounds that it represents a victory for all those who share her accidents of birth while also theatrically feigning offense in response to anyone who responds skeptically to the premise. If Gay’s demographic profile is less relevant than her body of work, as it should be, then it would not be a “step back” to replace her with a candidate possessing more sterling academic credentials.

In lunging for the most hyperbolic language to describe Gay’s ordeal, some of her defenders have minimized the experience endured by black Americans in centuries past. “The lynch mob that came for Claudine Gay will not be satisfied with her resignation,” wrote the former editor of Foreign Affairs, David Rothkopf. The analogy would be grotesque even if Gay was not benefiting from special dispensation even now, but it’s in comically poor taste given the meager consequences visited on Gay for the charge of serial plagiarism.

They have demonstrated that they have a malleable definition of what constitutes intellectual theft — even those who work in occupations in which that is a prerequisite. “We should note that Claudine Gay has not been accused of stealing anyone’s ideas in any of her writings,” CNN reporter Matt Egan explained. “She has been accused of sort of more like copying other people’s writings without attribution.” Given his tenuous grasp of the concept, CNN would be well-advised to apply additional scrutiny to Egan’s contributions.

They’ve even gone so far as to demonstrate that what they resent is the equal application of academic standards across the board. “If we’re going to start scrutinizing every detail of college presidents’ past writings for technical attribution issues, then let’s do it,” author and commentator Keith Boykin declared. “Let’s go look at everyone’s past writings, not just Claudine Gay at Harvard. Let’s put them all under a microscope and see how they hold up.” Yes, let’s. Indeed, why weren’t we? What possible factors might have led academia to subordinate the standards it maintains for students and faculty alike to other unrelated concerns?

These dramatic displays stand in marked contrast to the banality of Gay’s condition. The only remarkable thing about her belated decision to stop subjecting Harvard to reputational harm was how long it took her to reach that conclusion. In reducing Gay to a series of abstract genetic markers and insisting that academic standards be only selectively applied, her defenders are doing Harvard’s outgoing president no favors.