Some bells you can't unring
The tragedy of the Claudine Gay saga isn't plagiarism; it's that she was the president of an Ivy League school in the first place.
Just before noon today, MST, my DM’s started lighting up. “What did I think of Claudine Gay’s resignation as president of Harvard?”
Gee. What took her so long?
Actually, my thoughts aren’t quite that simple. The fact that her resignation, after a catastrophic turn before Congress (in testimony that should have been a layup) and subsequent revelations of plagiarism, took several weeks, which included a sham investigation conducted by the Harvard Corporation and many citation “adjustments” to her grand total of 11 publications, is embarrassing.
All that happened today was that Ms. Gay succeeded in finally doing something that she was inexplicably, for an Ivy League university president, unable to do in front of Congress: read the room.
Right up until the end, Ms. Gay still had many defenders, among them a few plagiarism “experts” and even a few from whom she had lifted work without attribution. This is as stunning as Ms. Gay’s missteps.
The real problem here isn’t that Gay relied on a DEI crib sheet instead of common sense when discussing antisemitism on her campus before Congress, or, really, that she’s a serial plagiarist. The problem is that she became president of one of the premier universities in all of the world based on stupors and vapors—a position for which she was eminently unqualified and completely out of her depth. The academy is on life support if Gay is, indeed, supposed to be among the cream of the crop.
Gay’s relevant academic experience, in addition to a paltry 11 publications (stunningly, not a book among them), largely consisted of using her position as Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Harvard, for which she was also unqualified, to punish black scholars who didn’t toe the DEI line.
Scholars such as Roland Sullivan, Dean of Winthrop House, the first black faculty dean of a house at Harvard. Gay terminated Sullivan, an attorney, because he chose to represent Harvey Weinstein. I guess Gay never read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. If she had, she’d know that in America, “Even a &*$damn werewolf is entitled to legal counsel.”
Next, Gay went after Economics Professor Roland Fryer. Professor Fryer, a genuine Rags to Riches inspirational tale, a man supremely qualified and deserving of his tenured professorship, came into the crosshairs of Gay for having the temerity to publish scholarly research that ran against the prevailing narrative of racism driving the killings of unarmed black men.
Though tenure did what it was supposed to do in Fryer’s case, his lab was shut down, and his reputation besmirched. Fryer’s travails echo the tale of David and Goliath, except in this rendering, David is a small and pitiful pinhead and Goliath a true giant.
One of the DMs I received this morning was from an old friend and former colleague who has traveled a path parallel to mine in terms of disenchantment from the academy, except from the administrative side. I noted that my CV was just about as good as Gay’s and that his was better.
Perhaps we should apply for her old job.
Oh, wait, we’d need CVs with a good track record of research, service, publications, and citations galore for the job. And even that might not do, since Gay got the job despite the fact that others with all the goods were around when she was hired.
Some bells you can’t unring. Getting rid of Gay does next to nothing to address the real problem here: the hostile takeover of higher education by DEI, it’s attendant postmodern horseshit, and it’s assault on merit. Until all of that is addressed, Claudine Gay is just the tip of the iceberg. With the rest of us on an ocean liner, bearing down on it.
Associated Press and Idaho Press Club-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer, and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time with family, riding bicycles and motorcycles, and arranging and playing music. Follow him on Twitter @MartinHackworth and on Substack at martinhackworthsubstack.com
Good observations.
Yes to all
Of this !