The Claudine Gay affair, in which the President of Harvard was basically fired after only a few months on the job, with her cardinal sin being plagiarism, has got to be the most dramatic and portentous academic event of 2023/2024. I say “portentous” because although Gay was fired for stealing other people’s prose, her exit also has led many to see this as the beginning of the decline of DEI in universities. After all, Gay had made her name, in both her academic work and as an administrator, largely by pushing DEI, and her hiring was, without a doubt, a nod to the philosophy of DEI. In his op-ed in the Boston Globe about what Harvard needs to do to repair itself, Steve Pinker proposed five propositions (his “Fivefold Way”) that included this as one suggestion:
Disempowering DEI. Many of the assaults on academic freedom (not to mention common sense) come from a burgeoning bureaucracy that calls itself diversity, equity, and inclusion while enforcing a uniformity of opinion, a hierarchy of victim groups, and the exclusion of freethinkers. Often hastily appointed by deans as expiation for some gaffe or outrage, these officers stealthily implement policies that were never approved in faculty deliberations or by university leaders willing to take responsibility for them.
I’m keeping my fingers crossed that Harvard will do this, but I don’t think there’s a snowball’s chance in hell that it will. DEI is too entrenched at Harvard, and where will they put all the bureaucrats who buttress it?
At any rate, John McWhorter and Glenn Loury, whose biweekly discussion on the Glenn Show I follow regularly (despite my disdain for podcasts), have a 25-minute discussion of Gay’s departure, and I’ve put it below. As you can see from the title and the picture, they’re not going easy on her. Here’s the intro, and I’ve put my own comments and summary (flush left) below it. I suspect that on Loury’s Substack site, where the video also resides, there’s a written transcript.
For the sake of argument, let’s assume all of that is correct, and Gay was ousted over matters of identity rather than academic integrity. That still does not explain why she plagiarized in the first place, nor does it excuse the offense. Whether or not one agrees with the motivations of Gay’s opponents, there is no excuse for a professional scholar to do what she did. None of the possible explanations—underhandedness, sloppiness, a belief that small acts of plagiarism don’t matter—could exonerate Gay, because they all betray a similarly cavalier attitude toward the integrity of the scholarly endeavor. Safeguarding that endeavor and ensuring Harvard’s continuing preeminence was a major part of Gay’s job, and she was not up to the task. Anyone who looked at her paper-thin CV could have guessed as much, and now the evidence is in.
It’s no small irony that a DEI ideologue who likely views “merit” as a suspect concept was brought down by her own demonstrable lack of same. Claudine Gay is the victim of her own debased principles. Harvard’s faculty and students deserve a leader who reflects the ideals of the institution, not a functionary with people skills. I don’t know who will be next in line for the job, but if they’re more of the same—another mediocre scholar with the “correct” politics—I’d advise them to rent a place in Cambridge rather than buying.
Brief summary: Both guys largely blame DEI for getting Gay into office in the first place, and both, like Pinker, see DEI as a villain that can destroy academia.
John McWhorter says he doesn’t think that one needs a good academic record to be a good college President, but his beef about Gay is that she lack both that and the business and fundraising skills necessary to run Harvard. As he says about DEI, McWhorter says that Gay “was raised in that culture” and “was never asked to be excellent”, so she had no motivation to be that way.
He also makes no bones about why he thinks Gay was hired: “The reason they chose her was because of the color of her skin” As he notes, what she brought to the office of President was simply her “blackness . . . and her commitment to DEI.” Both McWhorter and Loury emphasize that affirmative action was instrumental in her choice; as McWhorter says, “Her blackness was not just one factor, it was not just a thumb on the scale—it was decisive. She’s a token. . . ”
He adds “Affirmative action in universities is about lowering standards.” not just a thumb on the scale. I presume that what he means by a “thumb on the scale” is that when people are roughly equally qualified, it’s okay to choose a minority person, but the problem is that people are not equally qualified: the standards must be substantially lowered for black people like Gay. This is a debatable issue, for if you don’t lower standards somewhat, you have no chance of getting anywhere near equity, for there’s a huge gap in academic qualifications between minorities, with Asians and top, followed by whites and then by Hispanics and African-Americans.
Glenn Loury is more exercised, and see’s the choisc of Gay as a “corruption of the meritocratic order underlying our most precious institutions of human achievement”. He also feels–and I agree with him–that yes, business executives can run a university, but they but can’t lead one. I prefer to have an academic who has had some administrative experience become president of a university. To appreciate and promote a good university’s mission, you have to be more than just a businessman or fundraiser.
Loury is really exercised about the corruption he sees in the choice of Gay. As he says, “What we’re seeing with Gay is the culmination of a process that is corrupt to its core”. His assessment of her academic qualifications, which he sees as important, is that they are very thin; he’s read her papers and finds “no really original ideas.” Like McWhorter, he blames DEI: “DEI people put a mediocre person into the position of intellectual–of presiding over the precious jewel in the crown of American academia” By “corruption,” Loury apparently means that because of DEI, unqualified people get jobs and prevent qualified people from getting them, that politicians encourage identity politics and victimology, and that universities aren’t “developing black talent.”
Although a friend of mine judged the discussion as “a bit too harsh,” I think the guy are just being honest and speaking their minds. Claudine Gay wouldn’t like hearing it, but it’s not aimed at her. It’s aimed at us and at “progressive” Democrats.
I have always been impressed by how fluent John McWhorter’s extempore speech is, but in that discussion I actually heard him say “um”. What a disappointment!
Perhaps we can be thankful that he doesn’t say “kind of,” or “sort of,” or “like,” or some combination thereof, every second or third sentence, as not a few academic and media types anymore do.
A necessary take, for sure.
“DEI is too entrenched at Harvard, and where will they put all the bureaucrats who buttress it?”
The dialectical synthesis of it to something even worse, to infect and reproduce everywhere — under everyone’s noses (nod to Orwell) — is what I dread.
“And so the dialectic progresses.”
-Delgado and Stefancic
Critical Race Theory – An Introduction
2017
I link below to a clip from the Cris Wallace show that has become notorious and gone viral. The panel discusses the Gay affair.
Not sure if Dr. Coyne has linked to it, but I thought I would share. Parts of it are unintentionally funny.
https://twitter.com/JonahDispatch/status/1743654553680011332
Navarro, formerly of NPR and now of the NYT if memory serves me, stole Swisher’s “interruptional” thunder in this instance, and Swisher is a champion interrupter. I could stomach only a couple of minutes of her podcast a year or so ago when Sam Harris was a guest. He rarely was able to complete a sentence, but he kept a reasonably cheerful tone of voice.
One has to admire the oblivious way in which she interrupts and then says “let me finish!’
One of the best comments on this affair: https://www.wsj.com/articles/claudine-gays-my-truth-and-the-truth-academia-real-diversity-55d077bd . Key insights: elevation of “Diversity” to an end-in-itself reveals a philosophy (postmodernism), and leads to consequences like the presidency of the former Harvard official in question.
I just watched the conversation while pounding away on the cardio machine at the gym. The two claimed to disagree, but they weren’t all that far apart. I’m essence, while Gay’s tenure and her departure as Harvard president was the starting point, their discussion was more around DEI, Affirmative Action, and the degradation of standards. It was a good discussion of a problem that goes way beyond the academy and permeates all of American society. In this complex world of ours, we need excellence across government, our businesses and industries, our military, and our colleges and universities. Mediocrity is not enough. When the next existential crisis comes, I hope that there is enough excellence still out there to meet the challenge.
This whole saga has made me think again about how unjust it is that the burden of correcting society’s failure to produce “equity” outcomes should fall so heavily on universities. Since the changes required to make “equity” a *natural*, rather than artificially imposed, outcome of the education system clearly need to be made as early as possible in a person’s life, to give them the most time, and therefore the best chance, to fulfil their potential, then it would make more sense to focus most attention on kindergarten and the earliest years of school. Universities, by contrast, are the last in line, chronologically speaking, and therefore the least able to do anything about it — yet those pushing DEI talk as if universities are single-handedly capable of righting everything that might have gone wrong in a person’s education and life beforehand.
You are right on target Jonathan. In all of these discussions, K-12 skates, that is, is never indicted. But especially as a class/socio-economic issue, these are the years that schools must have impact. These are the years that poor children spend many hours at home, often without basic comforts and without an educated adult to help them learn to read or do research. It can be done. Our school district piloted a program called Reading Recovery for grades k-2 in one of our more than twenty title 1 elementary schools with incredible success…brought second graders reading at grade level from 2% to 80% over the two years. Several board members pushed to expand it…yes it was a bit expensive in dollars, skilled effort, and school space. But with election of a new board and their hiring of a new superintendent, interest and support disappeared. The initiative came from teachers and a principal. They demonstrated a huge success. But the policy-making board lacked the political will to expand it. But you are right on target…focus must be K-12 and more than that, the early prep of k-2 and K-5.
Jonathan, I’m replying partly to agree with you and partly to pose a question. What would we do if we found (as many IQ researchers have found) that the differences in mean educational outcomes among equity-seeking minority groups (e.g., high mean test scores among east Asians and low mean test scores among African Americans) were largely heritable genetic differences? As we reduce the environmental differences (e.g., investment in all K-12 education) that contribute to differences in mean group outcomes, one hopes we would reduce the size of the differences between group means (e.g., raise test scores for black kids). But other things being equal that heritability would be expected to increase so that a larger proportion of the remaining (but smaller) differences would be heritable genetic differences in ability. As those differences become smaller but more heritable, would we still expect or want equity (e.g., group outcomes proportional to group membership in the total population)? Maybe not.
Mike, your hypothethetical scenario depends on quite a big “If”. The changes that would be needed to really create broadly equitable childhood environments regardless of race really extend not just through the education system but well beyond: access to housing, to healthcare free at the point of delivery, to meaningful work, all imply a degree of sustained political will, across the country and at all levels of government, that is hard to envisage in the United States. But assuming for the sake of argument that it were possible, and happened in a sustained way, then after twenty or thirty years I think what you’d find is that people would stop obsessively checking quotas and percentages: a greater equity of outcomes would naturally develop, but even if it never approached parity, it would matter less, because the underlying sense of grievance that fuels it would have been dissipated.
Yes that’s a fair expectation: less grievance would make any remaining differences in outcomes unimportant. I hope it’s not unachievable!
Ah, but would the necessary upstream proposition be true? That reducing economic, educational, and health disparities through redistribution in the welfare state would reduce either dependency or grievance? It certainly hasn’t done that in our underclass in 157 years of trying. If anything it fuels both.
Mind you, we aren’t any better at making fathers stick around to help raise their children than the Americans are.
“would we still expect or want equity (e.g., group outcomes proportional to group membership in the total population)?”
I would not expect it under any circumstances except DEI dictatorship. It is really rare for any activity, hobby or endeavour to be equally popular between sexes and ethnicities, even if you really can’t come up with a mechanism of oppression to explain it.
For that reason, I would not want it either, because I don’t want to live in a DEI dictatorship.
Also, I don’t think the problem is much different from heritable differences between different members of one group. Let’s say we have a town with people of one ethnic group. A very few are brilliant, some are smart, most are average, some are a bit slow, and a few are dumb as a rock, just due to heritability.
Should we make sure that the dumb ones have as good a chance of becoming the town’s mayor, doctor, lawyer, school teacher as the brilliant ones? No, we should make sure that everyone gets an education that allows them to live up to their potential and that everyone gets a chance to find a place where they can apply whatever talents they have.
Nothing about that changes in principle if we pin another label (let’s call it “race”) on everyone, where smart people have a higher likelyhood of getting one of the labels, whereas dumb people are more likely to end up with a different one.
Why would we want to help dumb people with one label, but not with another? How is that fair?
Why would we want to give advantages to smart people with one label just because there are more-than-average dumb people with the same label? How is that fair?
It’s not meant to be fair or even beneficial, Ricahard, and there is no point appealing to those values. It’s about power, its companion spoils and its reciprocal fear. Even though the pie is made smaller as a result of DEI, and even if my slice in absolute terms is smaller than before, the important thing is that your slice is much much smaller than it was, both relatively and absolutely. And for that you now fear me, because I have now the power to take even that little slice from you and leave you with nothing.
I blame neither Dr. Gay, nor her upbringing for this disaster. She was just filling a role that the Harvard Corp picked her for. The blame lies squarely just north of President Gay on the org chart. Until the misguided good intentions of the Fellows undergoes a sea-change, I am afraid l’affaire Gay could be an infinite loop of repetition. I expect that there are numerous highly qualified minority candidates who would be happy with this demanding but plum job. NASA has demonstrated diversity with incredibly qualified and meritocratic individuals in its astronaut corps for years. It can be done. The onus is entirely on the Corporation.
There is a way of say what is meant here without seeming to invoke group attributes.
> This [the thumb on the scale] is a debatable issue, for if you don’t lower standards somewhat, you have no chance of getting anywhere near equity, for there’s a huge gap in academic qualifications between minorities, with Asians and top, followed by whites and then by Hispanics and African-Americans.
Why is this debatable, (other than that everything is debatable)? If getting anywhere near equity requires lowering standards “somewhat” to compensate for the “huge gap”, what is it, exactly, that makes racial equity a good worth having…or even a good at all? After all, a thumb on the scale is a metaphor implying frank dishonesty that cheats a customer to the unjust profit of the merchant.
I thought the argument for reverse racism (since as you say a mere thumb isn’t enough) was, à la Martin Luther King*, to compensate bluntly for the racism that prevented equally qualified and prepared black applicants from getting admitted….or, failing that, that admittedly poorly qualified black applicants would by some transubstantiation come out of their shells and thrive when given that thumb — a elephant’s foot really — on the scale. But if neither of those arguments is true, why are we chasing equity at all? Just because we afraid of a race war? Or do we not care what happens to the customers of the humanities and social sciences departments and medical schools at our universities? Or are we actively trying to undermine them?
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* King advocated for preferential hiring of blacks for construction and factory work, even displacing whites where necessary to achieve what would later be called equity, without regard to relative qualifications, experience, union seniority, or work ethic. I am extrapolating his views to knowledge work.
I also don’t understand why present-day Western societies are so hell bent to promote mediocre people at all costs, based on their skin pigmentation, at the expense of excellent people and of the entire community.
I believe the explanation is fear, Maya. We are trying to ingratiate ourselves with an underclass who has shown through its criminality that it is quite comfortable with violence and we are not. Affirmative action and DEI are a form of Dane-geld. We all know it is harmful and weakens us but we are simply unable or unwilling to consider more muscular alternative responses.
While the main beneficiaries of Dane-geld were the fearsome Danes, there were careers to be made in the King’s service, extracting the money from the English populace at spear-point and conveying it to the recipients.
We can dress it up in social-Justice talk to make ourselves feel better about it, — and of course the spear-carriers do — but it is really raw, naked, sphincter-relaxing fear.
A very interesting conversation about these matters is at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVYA_sjHztQ . Peter Boghossian, despite his verbal tic of fumbling for words, often asks good questions; he speaks with Bruce Gilley, a very smart and well-informed contrarian at Portland State. Professor Gilley, it will be recalled, wrote the article “The Case for Colonialism”, which generated hysteria in the groves of academe almost equal to that after the less scholarly exploits of Minneapolis policeman Derek Chauvin. Professor Gilley is also guardedly optimistic about the future of academia in the US, which I thought unexpectedly encouraging. His outlook may reflect: (a) his experience as a journalist in the formerly British colony of Hong Kong; and (b) his experience of surviving the outbreak of hysteria mentioned above, remaining after all at Portland State.
Claudine Gay and chat both.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/01/chatgpt-plagiarism-copyright-harvard-claudine-gay/677086/
My take. The plagiarism wasn’t the huge issue. Catching it put guy’s past output under scrutiny; and focused the light on “what wasn’t there.”
There is another aspect of Claudine Gay’s selection I find noteworthy. She is reportedly the child of wealthy Haitian parents and the graduate of prestigious schools. So presumably of the same class as the governing board members who selected her. Her economic class added to her ethnicity and DEI credentials may have been a heady cocktail for the folks outside the ancademy involved in her selection.
I used to interview students for Harvard admissions. This year they are desperately short of interviewers. I felt I had to decline as I was not sure I could honestly recommend Harvard any more. Harvard has a code word for conservative applicants. They are labeled “immature”. This guarantees they won’t get in.