The Claudine Gay problem goes way beyond Harvard

Do you really think that people like Claudine Gay are found only at Ivy League universities? We should all be so lucky.

Harvard President Claudine Gay testifying before Congress.

Claudine Gay messed up. She has a sweet deal as, almost inarguably, the least-qualified president of an Ivy League school ever. And all she had to do in order to sustain her well-compensated, knowledge-free easy ride in perpetuity was have enough sense to read an audience outside of the woke bubble of higher education.

You’d think that an easy task for almost any college president. But it was not for Gay, or, for that matter, her peers from MIT and UPenn, when they testified before Congress in a recent hearing concerning antisemitism on college campuses. It was as close to a layup as one generally gets in congressional testimony. Yet this hearing was a debacle for higher education, revealing with crystal clarity how the deck is stacked in favor of wokeness when it comes to free expression in higher education.

President Gay, a political scientist, is no scholar. Don’t take my word for it either; you may view her CV here. Her record of publications and talks is stunningly austere for even a community college president. It’s no mirage either. All you had to do was watch the hearing to figure out that she lacks the gravitas to be anywhere near a leadership position in almost anything. Claudine Gay is the president of Harvard for one reason and one reason only: she checked all of the right boxes for the Harvard DEI bureaucracy.

Identity > scholarship.

In the aftermath of Gay’s disastrous testimony before Congress, it has come to light that Gay is actually good at something besides checking the right boxes on an Ivy League hiring form—she has a genuine knack for plagiarism. In several papers, including her doctoral dissertation, Gay paraphrased or quoted over a dozen authors without proper attribution.

A hastily created, under-the-radar review of this by an internal committee at Harvard has cleared Gay, at least for the time being, of plagiarism. But when lawyers representing Harvard start threatening newspapers reporting on this with legal action, you know that the circling of wagons is on.

I’ve looked at the papers written by Gay and the source material she used. In a few cases, I’d attribute the problem to sloppy attribution rather than outright plagiarism, but I’m more generous than Harvard’s plagiarism policy, of which she is in clear violation. But in several cases, she lifts entire paragraphs, nearly verbatim, from the source material without any attribution.

There’s no getting around this. It’s blatant plagiarism. No ifs, ands, or buts. When my students pulled anything like this, it was a bad day for them when I found out about it. But for Gay and others like her who exist in a world where merit and actual accomplishment matter way less than what the DEI mafia thinks, it does not appear to be the least bit of an impediment to her career, at least as far as Harvard is concerned, and at least for now.

But I’m not here today just to bash Claudine Gay; I take no personal pleasure in it, and you have to get in line to do that anyway. I’m here with the bad news that there are, unfortunately, Claudine Gays everywhere anymore.

You pick a profession beyond education: medicine, law, science, or business, and I’ll show you people at or near the top of it that make Claudine Gay look like Einstein. I and everyone else who’s been a part of any large professional organization where DEI had a foothold in the past two decades had front-row seats for the competition between merit and identity, which identity won.

That’s why the AMA, in ignorance of biology, has a woke policy on gender. It’s why Bud Lite had advertising executives who thought that it was a good brand move to trash their core consumers. It’s why university physics and math departments, representing two of the most rational and objective fields in academia, are awash with “scholars” who couldn’t explain string theory or quantum entanglement to save their lives but can spin up a mean yarn about the decolonization of light.

So the bad news is not that Claudine Gay is a complete bust out as an Ivy League president and scholar; it’s that people like Claudine Gay are not just confined to Ivy League universities. We should all be so lucky. Unfortunately, we are not.

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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