We can disagree on the significance of the plagiarism allegations, but the reason I have defended her is because IMO the “facts” that brought her down don’t really concern plagiarism. This was all pretext to get rid of her. That it was successful doesn’t really change that.
In the long run, my hope is that Harvard won. Hopefully, they can right their academic ship and regain their reputation.
I’ve gone back and read the statements from UPenn and Harvard about their respective resignations as well as the statements (letters of resignation) from Liz Magill and Claudine Gay. They are both so different in tone and content - both from the universities and the presidents involved. Seems like UPenn and Magill are handling this much better. I wonder why.
Gay comes out of Exeter Academy, Princeton, Stanford, and Harvard. How someone with that background would plagiarize material is beyond me. Academics alone dont build character.
I wonder how far back this would go, if her papers from earlier on were examined. Could it be that she simply had a long history of cut and paste of others’ writings, in assembling her own, and that it was allowed to just slide by?
The real problem is with the Harvard board that hired her without any apparent vetting. Scott Bok, the chair of the Penn board put the interests of Penn first when he resigned along with Liz Magill. Contrast that with Penny Pritzker, champion of Gay’s selection, who did not resign.
Now it’s possible that the Harvard board is so chastened by Gay’s failure that they will properly vet candidates based upon the merits. But I will believe it when I see it.
Also worth noting is that Alan Garber, the interim president, was a previous candidate for president. He should certainly be thoroughly vetted of course, but he could be in the running.
So, a recently appointed President [insert name] of a respected academic institution, who was caught with plagiarism in half of their publications but had no other missteps, would not have been asked to resign? They can just go about their daily business working with faculty, students and donors, as if nothing happened? I doubt it.
I agree with you. Her plagiarism, while a very valid reason to remove her, was not the motivation here. I never heard of anyone speaking against her until her totally inadequate and delayed response to the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee’s statement, co-signed by 33 other student groups, released on Saturday Oct 7th, the day of the massacre, well before any Israeli military response (other than attempts to collect the dead and track down the terrorists still hiding within Israel) which “held the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence”. THAT was when the outcry against her began, after her utter failure to immediately and wholeheartedly condemn that statement. It increased as she failed to do anything to stop the frequent and aggressive demonstrations on campus, with chants implying encouragement of attacks on Jews worldwide (“Globalize the Intifada”) and the destruction of the State of Israel with all of her Jews suffering the same fate as the victims of the Oct 7th massacre (“From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free”) and implied calls for violence (“By Any Means Necessary”). This resulted in the congressional hearing on anti-semitism on campuses, at which she declined to outright condemn antisemitic calls for genocide against Jews.
She was not removed for her failure to handle the student group’s outrageous statement blaming the victims of the Oct 7th massacre, nor for her failure to stop the increasingly disruptive demonstrations on campus against Israel and all who support Israel, including “dogwhistle” chants calling for the murder of Jews worldwide - after all, the intifada consisted of numerous repeated explosions of buses, synagogues, Jewish schools, restaurants, party-halls, all occupied by Jews, so what else does globalize the intifada mean? And From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free means that the entirety of the the Land of Israel will be “judenrein” (Jew-free). And yet, Harvard would not remove her for the miserable way in which she failed to handle this.
Instead, she finally was removed for the multiple areas of plagiarism in her PhD thesis and other writings, only brought to light a month ago, after her writings were closely examined. That close examination has to be assumed to have been provoked by her abysmal failure to handle the student-led uproar on campus. I don’t believe that it had anything to do with racism.
I think another real threat to them long-term is who they deem their primary constituency to be. I hate to use such a hackneyed phrase (these days), but “follow the money”.
The point may now be moot, but the important question for Harvard was never whether Gay should step down. It was why she was brought on in the first place, after one of the shortest presidential searches in Harvard’s recent history. How did someone with a scholarly record as thin as hers — she has not written a single book, has published only 11 journal articles in the past 26 years and made no seminal contributions to her field — reach the pinnacle of American academia?
But is being the president of Harvard the pinnacle of “academia”? Personally, I’d consider winning a Nobel prize more academically noteworthy than being the president of Harvard. Is the Harvard presidency even an academic/scholarly role? From an outsider’s perspective it seems more of an administrative/fundraising job than an academic one. Do you really need to have published extensively to do that job well?
It’s obvious that there are different points of view as to whether Claudine Gay plagiarized or whether she should have resigned or if she should have even been hired. But really, if you’ve said the same thing numerous times, it’s time to find a new drum to bang.
Similarly, please refrain from asking a user to defend their position for the 25th time; nobody’s opinion will change as the result of this thread.
As always, posts not in compliance are subject to deletion without comment.
President Backow wrote 4 books in addition to his articles, was a very successful president of Tufts, appointed to 5 different academic departments there, and a fellow of the Academy of Arts&Sciences, before his selection as Harvard President.
There is truly no comparison in stature with Pres. Gay. I don’t think any modern elite university President has the thin qualifications she has.
No doubt historically many universities filled a different role, often clergy preparation, and had suitable leaders for that. Not in this century, though.
From Table 1 of the linked article, 19 of the top 100 most-cited scholars in political science either taught at or received their Ph.D. from Harvard. This includes Gay’s advisor, Gary King, who comes in at number 5. The scholar ranked number 100 has 14,890 citations. In comparison, Gay has roughly 2,600 according to Google Scholar.
On one hand, this comparison is unfair to Gay as a scholar because some on the list are near the end of their career. On the other, citation counts typically follow a power law distribution so there is a huge number of scholars with citation counts between 2,600 and 14,890, much larger than there is between 14,890 and 27,180 (i.e., same width).
Table 4 lists the 40 most-cited women scholars, where the one ranked number 40 has 6,899 citations, again far exceeding Gay.
To be fair to Gay, Lawrence Bacow is nowhere to be found in the tables as well. But from an ‘absolute’ standpoint, there are almost certainly hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of political scientists whose publications have been cited more times than those of Gay.