Breaking nooz, and from the Harvard Crimson. The revelations of plagiarism, and accusations of withholding/manipulating data, apparently rendered her ineffective as President. And her status as Harvard’s first black woman President didn’t save her. I heard rumors that she refused to resign, and had procured a lawyer and would sue, but those apparently weren’t true. (Whether she can bring a lawsuit is beyond me.)
It wasn’t her performance during the House hearings that made me think she should resign, but the ever-growing accusations of academic misconduct. Let’s hope Harvard chooses carefully next time.
Click to read:
The article:
Harvard President Claudine Gay will resign Tuesday afternoon, bringing an end to the shortest presidency in the University’s history, according to a person with knowledge of the decision.
It is not clear who will be appointed to serve as interim president.
University spokesperson Jonathan L. Swain declined to comment on Gay’s decision to step down.
Gay’s resignation — just six months and two days into the presidency — comes amid growing allegations of plagiarism and lasting doubts over her ability to respond to antisemitism on campus after her disastrous congressional testimony Dec. 5.
Gay weathered scandal after scandal over her brief tenure, facing national backlash for her administration’s response to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack and allegations of plagiarism in her scholarly work.
The Corporation — the University’s highest governing body — is expected to announce the resignation to Harvard affiliates in an email later today. Gay is also expected to make a statement about the decision.
The announcement comes three weeks after the Corporation announced unanimous support for Gay after “extensive deliberations” following the congressional hearing.
I didn’t realize she’d only been President since last July 1. That doesn’t look good on the old CV. I am sure she’ll be able to find a better one.
So the next boss will be a female Hispanic?
Or a man who identifies as one…
You two are funny!
Bill Ackman had tweeted a post a few days back tentatively reporting the possibility of her refusal to resign and the hiring of a lawyer…which did not materialize, as Dr. Coyne writes.
But who will the Harvard Corporation (Board, I believe) choose next? Will it be more, far more, of the same ideology? Perhaps members of the Corporation should themselves step-down.
But here is something that I find intriguing: The scoops and reporting that led to her resignation were reported overwhelmingly outside of legacy media. Had the tips gone to let’s say, The New York Times, Would it have covered them up or downplayed them?
Anyway, the main individual orchestrating the reporting were Christopher Rufo(loathed by the progressive online left), and 2 young writers/reporters, Christopher Brunet and Aaron Sibarium of the Washington Free Beacon.
Alan M. Garber, Provost and Chief Academic Officer, will be the Interim President.
Thanks, Roz!
Frances Menton’s Manhattan Contrarian blog published the dish on Prof. Gay’s academic and administrative record over a year ago, a good six months before she took office. (He’s a Harvard Law alumnus.)
Ouch! That piece by Menton really lays out the problems: https://archive.ph/K1M7Z
Maybe the NYT did indeed get the tips and didn’t act on them….
I have two comments:
1. The Harvard Board is composed largely of businesspeople and financiers, not unusual given that Board members, as in most other places, are expected to give generous donations to the University. But these people don’t know much about what it takes to run an academically sound university. There’s only one scientist on the whole board. There should be more academics and fewer capitalists.
2. This shows that the right-wing media should not be dismissed simply because they’re conservative, as many here have done. Some dismissed the allegations of plagiarism because some came from the right-wing Christopoher Rufo. Never dismiss an allegation simply becauses it comes from a part of the political spectrum you don’t like.
Peter Boghossian and I are both disappointed to learn that Harvard will no longer be led by such a perfect representative of today’s academic establishment. I offer odds of 6:1 that the Board of Overseers will find an equally qualified paragon for the post.
Actually, one suspects that Dr. Gay took John McWhorter’s assessment seriously: i.e., that her presidency, in the face of all her citation errors and duplicative language, was
simply bad for the standing of non-white scholars generally. [My apologies in advance
to the disability community for using the term “standing”.]
I just saw that Christopher Rufo has posted her resignation letter….and you will never guess what she accuses her critics of….
“This is Claudine Gay’s resignation letter. Rather than take responsibility for minimizing antisemitism, committing serial plagiarism, intimidating the free press, and damaging the institution, she calls her critics racist. This is the poison of DEI ideology. Glad she’s gone.”
https://twitter.com/realchrisrufo/status/1742252162066063702
With all due respect – and I want to make clear that what I am about to type is not aimed at you, dd – in my opinion, Rufo mischaracterized part of Gay’s resignation letter.
Yes, she did write that “it is frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus” as part of a much longer statement about her decision to resign.
I choose to give her the benefit of the doubt. I don’t think she’s claiming *all* her critics are racist, and, given the current state of public discourse, I can certainly believe she received threats motivated by racism.
To be clear, I am not defending Gay’s academic missteps, nor asserting that that calls for her resignation were misguided. She needed to go.
I’m just feeling particularly discouraged about how some on opposing sides of important issues will distort the other side’s stance. Last night I spent an hour listening to a conversation between proponents of free speech on campus (Jonathan Haidt was one of the participants on that side) and two advocates of blocking certain exponents of extreme right-wing positions. One of the supporters of limiting speech on college campuses referred to the “hysterical” response to trigger warnings.
Now, I’m pretty far to the left politically, but my immediate response to that assertion was, I’ve never heard any critic of trigger warnings being “hysterical.”
How can we resolve our differences if we assign the worst motives to those we disagree with?
Okay, I’ll get off my rickety soapbox now. Like I wrote, I’m just feeling a bit sensitive about this topic.
I am sincerely interested in other’s interpretation of Gay’s letter. Am I wrong, is she really blaming her leaving her position on racism?
There is no acknowledgement of plagiarisms and about the only time she mentions a direct reason for the resignation is to speak of racial animus. And there is no acknowledgment of the harassment that Jewish students at Harvard have felt in the last few weeks.
Strikes me as a solipsistic and self-serving letter.
(And yes, a few sarcastic joker types on the internet are speculating is she plagiarized any of it…..)
Let’s be fair. She might have used ChatGPT.
Absolutely correct and there was no acceptance of any wrongdoing and so modest!! She must have composed it herself.
I think, by default, she is. She doesn’t give any other reasons for her departure. She doesn’t mention the plagiarism, which I guess is hardly to be expected. She doesn’t mention the double-standard with regard to anti-Semitism vs. other discrimination. While we might say that racism was a part of it, although I have seen no evidence of that, by ignoring the actual controversies, she does, in effect, attributed her departure to racism.
My interpretation of Gay’s resignation letter is that it is self-serving nonsense.
“We respect each other’s dignity and treat one another with compassion.”
Except if you’re Ronald Sullivan, a black Harvard Law School professor, who agreed to serve on Harvey Weinstein’s defense team and provide the legal counsel to which criminal defendants are entitled.
“[A]nd…affirm our enduring commitment to open inquiry and free expression in the pursuit of truth.”
Except if you’re Roland Fryer, a black Harvard professor of economics, whose research contradicted the woke narrative on bias and racism in police interactions with black citizens.
Ad infinitum…
“it is frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus”
She is saying she is a victim of personal attacks and threats. She is saying that those personal attacks and threats come from “racial animus”..which is the word that ChatGPT gave her when she asked it for a more subtle synonym for “racism.”
As others mention she makes no mention of the legitimate criticism of her based on her plagiarism and equivocation on antisemitism. She is just filing all of that under “racism!”
A pure product of DEI culture.
So yes I agree with Rufo on this one.
Well, I don’t think she’s accusing all her critics of being racists. On the other hand, did she admit to doing anything WRONG? Like plagiarizing?
I pasted the resignation letter and the Board’s letter on Ceiling Cat’s Hili dialogue for the day in case people want to read them. (I’d have planted them here, but it all happened so fast.)
This is good.
Good for Harvard. Good for the students and (ironically) good for POC.
A good day for America.
DEI needs to die.
And yes, it wasn’t her congressional testimony that forced her resignation. It was “copy and paste” that did it.
The resignation letter says she’ll stay on faculty. If she plagiarized, shouldn’t she have to face the consequences of her actions?
Seriously. I agree. I find her letter to be a further embarrassment. More woke BS. I don’t understand how Congress can involve itself in the matter of double standards regarding plagiarism, but if they are legally permitted to do so, I think I support it.
I’m OK with her staying as faculty, but not without some public statement acknowledging the plagiarism, which she appears incapable of doing. At this point, I’ve lost all sympathy for her. What a failure as a leader.
I think she should be asked to be on leave without pay for a year, as students who plagiarize can be asked to stay off campus for a year after they are caught for 10x less than what she did!
Dr Gay must now be Haiti’s most famous politician since Papa Doc Duvalier.
But she is a brave, fierce, amazing, and brave and fierce person of color! How can you criticize her braveness and fierceness in the wake of this unfair criticism…proper citation of sources is such a white oppressive patriarchal cis-gender…uh and other bad things!
By the way, she apparently plagiarized her resignation letter as well…
Yes, she should be out.
Yes her resignation is good but she should not remain on the faculty and I’m not sure she won’t still sue Harvard. Further, this story and Gay’s terrible apology letter that doesn’t even name why she was pressured out, strikes me as bad for the advancement of black people in the US. Even Steven Pinker noted the bad optics of firing the first black female president of Harvard in less than a year. She was a black, female affirmative action hire who catastrophically failed the competency test as president and as an academic scholar due to plagiarism, thereby discrediting one of the leading universities in the world. Surely this outcome and her non-apology letter hurt the cause of black representation in the topmost eschelons of academia and companies, no?
I agree, but the fault isn’t really hers, or at least not only hers. I think the lion’s share of the fault is the Harvard Corp. that selected her for the position. They have only themselves to blame for any discrediting and embarrassment Harvard may experience over this debacle.
It was “copy and paste” with the judicious change of one word here or there, which may or may not qualify as plagiarism in the strict sense. But it would be regarded as dubious work in an undergraduate term paper—and is normal in the mock scholarship that characterizes grievance studies and other branches of Theology.
Finally. Now they can get the hijab wearing muslima they’ve wanted.
Inevitable. It’s sad that Harvard’s first black female president was such an ill-suited appointee – I hope that the college learns from the experience, but I doubt it. This would also be a good opportunity for US academia to rein in the overblown influence of DEI. I’m similarly pessimistic about it seizing the chance to do so.
Probability that her replacement will be a white male?
I think it must be close to zero. Mind you, I don’t give a rat’s ass who they pick. But I’m just thinking that the kind of people who would have selected Claudine Gay over many far more qualified people would never be able to handle the acrimony that replacing her with a white male would generate–so they won’t do it.
Maybe Roland Fryer could take her place. I think he wouldn’t want to. He is too honest. And not afraid to show it.
My votes for Harvard President are:
-Jeffrey Flier
-Steve Pinker
-Amy Wax. While I know how absurd that is, can you imagine the uproar! Maybe the wokiest of wokelet faculty would resign. That would be fantastic. And it would draw faculty with diverse thinking back to Harvard, where they are currently not welcome. This isn’t something that either Flier or Pinker have the dispositions for.
Steve Pinker for President of the U. S. A.
Right. Although I shouldn’t take partisan sides in the national politics of a country that isn’t mine 🙂 , it would free up the Harvard presidency for Prof. Wax. She is a force of Nature.
Impossible since he is not a native-born U.S. citizen (whatever that exactly means, Pinker does not qualify).
Lucky for him.
Pinker +1.
Living outside of the US, Harvard’s brand still conjures up Pavlovian responses of academic merit, not industrial-strength tokenism and proud last place holder in the free speech index of US Universities. [ NZ’s most well-known educational consultancy is called ‘Crimson Consulting’ !]
I about choked on my coffee thinking about the likes of Amy Wax as Harvard president; I would reserve her for the Penn position.
What’s next? Camille Paglia as provost?
Delightful!
Ibram X. Kendi (born Ibram Kendi Rogers), replying to The Harvard Crimson news feed of Gay’s resignation :
“Racist mobs won’t stop until they topple all Black people from positions of power and influence who are not reinforcing the structure of racism. What these racist mobs are doing should be obvious to any reporter who cares about truth or justice as opposed to conflicts and clicks.”
https://x.com/ibramxk/status/1742261273520198080?s=46
… he’s still got it!
Typo : born Ibram Henry Rogers
When did he care about “truth or justice?”
Marc Lamont Hill has demanded, on Twitter, that the next president of Harvard be a black woman.
Colin Wright claims the resignation letter matches his prediction :
https://x.com/swipewright/status/1742259326733988093?s=46
Apparently she is blaming racism for her situation: “Amidst all of this, it has been distressing to have doubt cast on my commitments to confronting hate and to upholding scholarly rigor—two bedrock values that are fundamental to who I am—and frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus,” she wrote.
The race card put me in and the race card put me out!
In the cold light of day it makes no difference, that is how fuck ups play out.
You put the right race in,
You pull the wrong race out,
You put the right race in,
And you shake them all about.
You do the Wokey jokey,
And you turn yourself around,
That’s what it’s all about!
Apologies to those elsewhere in the Anglosphere who have their own renditions!
Even the resignation letter looks plagiarised/copied from a template:
“It is with a heavy heart…”
“This is not a decision I came to easily…” (I’m surprised she didn’t use “lightly”!)
She neither mentions the blatant and repeated plagiarism, nor takes any personal responsibility for anything at all anywhere in it. Instead she bloviates about the importance of the DEI mission and obliquely suggests she was the victim of racism (no doubt a cadre of Awful People on the Internet took this opportunity to be awful, but the Harvard Corp was 100% behind her). Indeed, she says that aspersions against her were unfair and hurtful, and that academic rigour is her middle name.
This just looks terrible: the first black woman president of Harvard, it turns out, was a lightweight and a fraud, and will go down as serving the shortest tenure in its history.
Surely there were other candidates who both ticked the required demographic boxes, but also had solid, impressive and unimpeachable academic records?!
“This is not a decision I came to easily…” (I’m surprised she didn’t use “lightly”!)
Perhaps that was the one word she changed in the sentence in a futile attempt to escape detection?
This remains to be seen.
This is my kind of optimism!
Our host will recognize the joke that would write itself if it hadn’t been written many years ago. “Things can’t get any worse,” moans the pessimist. “Oh sure they can!” replies the optimist.
How ’bout
“[…] through a glass, darkly”
– Corinthians 13:12
It just occurred to me – couldn’t help it, it’s “BIBLICAL”!
>Surely there are . . .
Surely you jest.
This is a positive development, as obviously Gay needed to be gone. Or gone from the Presidency anyway, since apparently she will not be gone from the university. There is at least some level of sanity left.
But it is a bit exasperating to see all right wingers, journalists and politicians alike, who seem to be rushing to take credit for striking some sort of devastating blow against wokedom. Um, not quite. If it weren’t for the plagiarism, Gay would still be there and free to continue entrenching DEI and spouting all the wokiest of drivel. Unfortunately her resignation is no way a repudiation of that crap.
With luck Harvard will appoint a more qualified and sensible person to fill that role, but I hold out little hope of that actually happening. The woke hordes will be howling in fury, so expect institutional appeasement to ensue.
If she is resigning mainly because of the plagiarism then the individuals on the committee that appointed her should face consequences as well, for an extreme lack of due diligence. It took the internet all of 5 minutes to clearly identify the instances of plagiarism.
These individuals should be named and shamed as well.
What makes you think that “It took the internet all of 5 minutes to clearly identify the instances of plagiarism”?
I think that to find the problematic passages in her writings required substantive subject-matter expertise which a random internet user does not have.
Because she has such a wafer thin publication record it does not take long for an even semi sophisticated checker to detect her plagiarism.
So either the hiring committee was incompetent or knew about the cheating but chose to ignore it.
Well, I don’t think she’s accusing all her critics of being racists. On the other hand, did she admit to doing anything WRONG? Like plagiarizing?
Agreed; it took some doing. But the NY Post says that the Overseers defended her against plagiarism before they’d even heard from a committee they appointed to investigate the charges of plagiarism.
I have two comments:
1. The Harvard Board is composed largely of businesspeople and financiers, not unusual given that Board members, as in most other places, are expected to give generous donations to the University. But these people don’t know much about what it takes to run an academically sound university. There’s only one scientist on the whole board. There should be more academics and fewer capitalists.
2. This shows that the right-wing media should not be dismissed simply because they’re conservative, as many here have done. Some dismissed the allegations of plagiarism because some came from the right-wing Christopoher Rufo. Never dismiss an allegation simply becauses it comes from a part of the political spectrum you don’t like.
To your point 2, Ceiling Cat, I agree with you. And, for the sake of steelmanning the case against Rufo, see this by Chait:
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2024/01/claudine-gay-had-to-go-she-was-right-about-the-big-things.html
Chait claims Gay awkwardly but nobly stood for institutional values. True enough. She does stand for DEI! But she also undermined Harvard’s very mission and in ways the Corporation hasn’t yet grokked.
Rufo is out to “scalp” DEI leaders, going so far as to berate Pinker for being ineffectually anti-woke. Also, I’ve had engagements with Rufo on X. He’s responded to me 2x, presumably because of my bio, which mentions Harvard, even though my account looks like a bot. He’s arrogant. Not that the left doesn’t need cultural correcting. But I’m concerned about the authoritarian, strongman streak in him.
And I don’t think the Board went far enough. If Harvard doesn’t take up Pinker’s 5-point plan or something similar, we’ll have DEI Groundhog Day.
I found her speech very moving, from the very fist line-
“Four score and seven years ago our fathers…”
But really, that someone as little qualified as she could be given such a position is just depressing. It is as if they are trying to sweep away any vestiges of competence left in our society.
Spot on Max. There is no doubt a significant number of women who are highly qualified academically and administratively, some of whom are minorities, who could serve as President. However, many are quite content with their professorships and have little desire to become administrators. I have long contended that the best university presidents are often top academics.
Maybe Dr. Gay could move to the presidency of Oglethorpe U., where Meredith Raimondo (formerly Dean of something at Oberlin) is now vice-pres of something. In turn, Dr. Raimondo might qualify for the Harvard presidency, were it not for her pallor.
The resignation letter was an intolerable soup of feelgood verbiage spiced up with a little accusation of racism. No accountability, no integrity.
Now, the interesting part: a couple of weeks ago, Stephen Pinkers 5-point plan read like “I wish someone did something”. In retrospect, it reads like an application for the Harvard presidency. What are his odds? Has Harvard learned the lesson, or are they going to drown in woke mediocrity?
https://avi-loeb.medium.com/a-new-vision-for-harvard-c7d01a08cb9a
Perhaps they should pick the next President from a cohort with an impeccable (and substantial) academic record and proven administrative abilities. I can think of quite a few people who would qualify – a surprising number of them Jewish!
More from Mr. Kendi :
“Pay attention: The racist mob routinely calls peoples of color “woke” and their presence “DEI” and then says it is striving to eliminate “DEI” and “wokeism.” It couldn’t be clearer who the racist mob is striving to eliminate, particularly from positions of power and influence. 1/
(Exceptions: invitations are always out for individuals of color willing to be servants of the racist mob. Ironically, these servants call themselves “free thinkers” on this platform.) 2/2”
https://x.com/ibramxk/status/1742598637803184473?s=46