Do we really need another opinion piece about the resignation of Claudine Gay? The Harvard train wreck has transfixed the nation since early October, and even as the punditry piles up, the gulf seems to be widening between those who excoriate Gay, the Harvard Corporation, and the university generally and those who praise Gay as a martyr and defend the practices of the institution she led.
Few people, however, have said nice things about the Harvard Corporation, and one lesson to learn from the New York Times exposé into this secretive body’s quick, behind-the-scenes shift from expressing confidence in Gay’s presidency to pushing her out is that the public pressure of punditry can work. The arguments from the commentariat reached the eyes and ears of the skiers in Aspen—the Times reports that the “dramatic change of heart” happened as “board members flew to ski towns and beaches for the holidays, . . . scatter[ing] to vacation homes and resorts around the world”—and these arguments made a difference. So let’s keep up the rhetorical drumbeat.
Because there’s so much more to do.
In the first place, the corporation itself needs a thorough overhaul. I naively imagined that some of the so-called Fellows of Harvard College, prima inter pares Penny Pritzker, might resign along with Gay. After all, that’s what happened at the University of Pennsylvania a month earlier: Liz Magill stepped down as president and, less than an hour later, so did the chair of the Board of Trustees, Scott Bok.
While there have so far been few conspicuous cracks in the corporation, the official statements about Gay and the barely visible actions of the normally invisible fellows have been so obtuse that I predict—again, many will say naively, I know—that at least some will resign before the end of the current academic year. In any event, I expect there is a story to tell behind the fact that, according to the Times, the two fellows who came out most strongly against Gay are Timothy R. Barakett and Paul J. Finnegan. The paper describes Barakett as “Harvard’s treasurer and a relatively new member of the corporation” but does not note that he apparently stepped down at the end of 2023 after only four years; as for Finnegan, who was Barakett’s predecessor as treasurer, he is, as far as I can tell, the only fellow who will reach the end of his maximum service of two six-year terms on June 30. (The Wall Street Journal now reports that the latest addition to the board, Tracy Pun Palandjian, also “privately questioned” Gay’s ability to continue in the job.)
Bill Ackman, a Harvard College and Business School alumnus who has been one of the university’s fiercest critics, is in my view entirely correct to state in his recent manifesto “How to Fix Harvard” that “the board chair, Penny Pritzker, should resign along with the other members of the board who led the campaign to keep Claudine Gay, orchestrated the strategy to threaten the media, bypassed the process for evaluating plagiarism, and otherwise greatly contributed to the damage that has been done.” In a strong recent piece that has the neat twist of contrasting the Harvard Corporation and the Somali Ministry of Sports, Ayaan Hirsi Ali suggests that what is most holding back Harvard’s leadership is “the three-letter acronym that has been menacing American and other Western institutions of higher education for the past decade: DEI.” And “the result” of the corporation’s recent action and inaction? “At least a billion dollars in withdrawn commitments from various donors, more congressional probing, a slump in applications from prospective students, and the trashing of its reputation.” At any normal business corporation—and Harvard proudly boasts that its is “the oldest corporation in the Western Hemisphere”—there would be a considerable shakeup.
Minus (I assume) the plagiarism, the members of the corporation knew exactly what Gay stood for when they hired her in “the shortest Harvard presidential search in almost seventy years.” In a painfully amusing blog post published shortly before Gay resigned, John H. Cochrane made this point especially well.
So what should a reconstituted Harvard Corporation do next? For starters, its members should work to clarify the definition of “plagiarism,” reconsider appropriate punishments for academic misconduct, and ensure that the rules are applied fairly. These standards matter, and students especially need new guidance on what is expected of them.
This is all the more true now that Gay has taken to the pages of the Times to downplay her malfeasance. Everyone should be grateful to the opinion editor, Kathleen Kingsbury, for publicly expressing dissatisfaction with the tenor of Gay’s words—and for doing so just weeks after the publication of an explosive account of the very public meltdown at the paper in June 2020 by her predecessor, James Bennet, who was forced to resign.
I am unable to judge myself whether it is in fact “a fundamental truth,” as Gay puts it, that her work has had a real “impact on the field” of American politics, though there is ample reason to doubt this self-assessment. I am also unable to judge whether she has “never misrepresented [her] research findings,” though there is some reason to doubt this as well. What is clear is that it takes chutzpah to write, “My critics found instances in my academic writings where some material duplicated other scholars’ language, without proper attribution”—as though “some” were an appropriate quantifier for what are now close to fifty examples across eight works in a startlingly thin and narrow record of publication and as though the material had somehow “duplicated” itself.
But what most sticks in my craw is this blatant lie: “When I learned of these errors, I promptly requested corrections from the journals in which the flagged articles were published.” It is not merely that Gay requested only a few corrections: initially, on or around December 15, the addition of citations and quotation marks in four places in two articles. Nothing was yet said regarding her dissertation, the subject of the first piece about her plagiarism by Christopher F. Rufo and Christopher Brunet, which had been published on December 10. (The corporation announced on December 20 that Gay would also “request three corrections” to her dissertation.) Nor was anything said about the rest of the twenty-nine possible instances of plagiarism across four articles that Aaron Sibarium described in the first of what are so far four pieces on the subject, dated December 11.
Not merely this. It is also that Gay did not “promptly” request any corrections at all. On the contrary, when Harvard learned on October 24 that Isabel Vincent of the New York Post had received a dossier of her plagiaristic behavior—at that early point a mere twenty-seven possible instances across three works—the corporation hired Clare Locke, America’s preeminent defamation law firm, to defend itself and Gay. Three days later, the eponymous Thomas Clare sent the Post a cease and desist letter that called the allegations of plagiarism “demonstrably false” (!) and threatened a suit for “immense” damages. And thus was the story buried until December.
Harvard needs to make clear that plagiarism is not acceptable, for anyone. Really, Gay should not remain on the Harvard faculty—let alone keep her annual salary of roughly $900,000, as it has been suggested she might. And no, I’m not a naturally harsh person: for what it’s worth, I don’t think it advisable to suspend (never mind expel) a student who failed on one or two occasions to put quotation marks around a sentence taken from a work that he or she otherwise cited.
Then there’s the bigger picture. The Harvard Corporation should look to the manifestos issued by four prominent figures in the last month: Bari Weiss, Steven Pinker (a Harvard professor and graduate alumnus), Jeffrey S. Flier (a Harvard professor), and (as already mentioned) Bill Ackman. It should also consider the new proposed “constitution” for the University of Pennsylvania that over seventeen hundred people have signed (Weiss and Pinker are the first two signatories; Flier’s name is there, too) as well as “The Constitution of Academic Liberty” by Niall Ferguson (a former Harvard professor), which is specifically about university governance.
The recommendations of these documents are broadly similar, and everyone should read and take in all of them. Here are Weiss’s four: “end DEI,” “end double standards on speech,” “hire professors committed to the pursuit of truth (and allergic to illiberal ideologies),” and “eliminate the ideology that replaced truth as higher education’s North Star.” If the current or new members of the corporation were to do these things, as well as work toward a proper understanding of academic freedom and adopt a policy of institutional neutrality, people might again take pride in what has historically been America’s most important university.
This is an opportunity. The members of the Harvard Corporation are swayable—and changeable. Keep the opinion pieces coming.
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Source: newcriterion.com
