Jonathan Tobin
National Post, Jan. 3, 2023
“The reason why Gay was so vulnerable to criticism wasn’t just the testimony but the fact that her career embodied everything that is wrong about an ideology helping to fuel the surge in antisemitism in the United States.”
In the end, not even the support of former U.S. president Barack Obama and one of his former cabinet members was enough to save Claudine Gay from being forced out as president of Harvard University. Nor did the initial support of the Harvard Corporation itself, the endorsement of much of the Harvard faculty or the student newspaper allow Gay to remain in office at one of America’s most prestigious academic institutions. After a month of controversy that began with her appalling testimony in front of Congress on Dec. 5, along with the presidents of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania, and was prolonged by a series of revelations about her history of plagiarism, the drama concluded on Jan. 2 when she issued a statement declaring her intention to resign.
The coup de grace was administered the day before when the Washington Free Beacon published a story alleging more instances of plagiarism in her scholarly work. By that point, eight of her 17 published works were under scrutiny for stealing the work of others. This latest charge didn’t merely involve a failure to make proper attribution when making points in a paper but a matter of lifting half a page of material verbatim from the writing of another scholar. Such misdeeds usually involve the most severe consequences for students accused of this.
The idea that the president of Harvard should be given a pass for doing what would get someone barely out of high school expelled became less and less viable, even though that was exactly what her defenders thought was appropriate, largely because of her status as the first Black president of Harvard. But as the evidence showing that she was an academic fraud began to pile up, the university’s board realized that their reputation was being tarnished along with hers. … [To read the full article, click here]
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