I missed this when it was published Thursday but it’s still very relevant. John McWhorter makes the argument that Claudine Gay already appeared to be sort of a borderline figure academically and now many of the few articles she has managed to publish have been revealed to contain plagiarism.

It has always been inconvenient that Harvard’s first Black president has only published 11 academic articles in her career and not one book (other than one with three co-editors). Some of her predecessors, like Lawrence Bacow, Drew Gilpin Faust and Lawrence Summers, have had vastly more voluminous academic records. The discrepancy gives the appearance that Dr. Gay was not chosen because of her academic or scholarly qualifications, which Harvard is thought to prize, but rather because of her race.

McWhorter acknowledges that there are degrees of plagiarism and what Gay is accused of is certainly not the worst. She doesn’t appear to have stolen any valuable ideas without credit. Mostly she just borrowed lines and paragraphs from other authors without citing them. But even so the evidence suggests this was a pervasive problem through most of her academic career.

If the issue were a couple of hastily quoted phrases in one article, it would be one thing. But investigations have shown that this problem runs through about half of Dr. Gay’s articles, as well as her dissertation. We must ask how a university president can expect to hold her head high, carry authority and inspire respect as a leader on a campus where students suffer grave consequences for doing even a fraction of what Dr. Gay has done.

The counterpoint to this argument appeared in an X thread posted yesterday by someone who had an idea stolen by a professor.

…and he read a conference paper he was going to deliver at the Shakespeare Association that month, re-articulating exactly what I had said about the same material the week before. The 15 or so grad students around the seminar table were dumbfounded. Jaws on the floor.

2/n

— Dr. Genevieve Guenther (@DoctorVive) December 22, 2023

He proceeded to wrap me into his arms and give me a full-body, pelvis-to-pelvis hug, which of course made me freeze, Jean E Carroll style, and then just smile weakly at him when he let me go, patted me on the shoulder, and breezed off down the hallway.

5/n

— Dr. Genevieve Guenther (@DoctorVive) December 22, 2023

And that was it. She just gave up, deciding that gifting an idea to this powerful professor would probably help her somewhere down the line. Only it didn’t. She just got ripped off. But the ending of this thread is interesting because it reveals there’s another motive at play in this argument.

And, yes, US right-wing politics are so dangerous right now that I feel like I have to defend the president of fucking *Harvard*, which is absurd, but that's the power of today's white supremacists, to make *Harvard* a bastion of racial sanity. What a time to be alive.

fin/

— Dr. Genevieve Guenther (@DoctorVive) December 22, 2023

Anyone who criticizes the plagiarism of Claudine Gay is a white supremacist and an opponent of DEI and anti-racism. So if you’re not a white supremacist and you support anti-racism you must support Claudine Gay to keep Harvard from falling into the hands of the enemy or something like that. That’s really what this is all about for most of Gay’s defenders. Harvard won’t uphold its own standards if the people demanding they do so are on the right.

The NY Post had a follow-up story yesterday explaining that Harvard had hired a top law firm to threaten the paper and flatly deny she had plagiarized anyone even before it investigated the allegations.

Harvard’s smokescreen to save Gay began on October 24, when The Post asked for comment on a dossier of allegations sent to us anonymously that alleged she had plagiarized parts of three published works.

After a lengthy investigation of the dossier, we presented 27 possible examples of plagiarism in two peer-reviewed journals and an academic magazine, published between 1993, when Gay was a graduate student, and 2017, when she was dean of the faculty of social sciences…

But three days later Harvard responded with a blistering letter from Clare Locke, a law firm which previously represented the Sackler family, Matt Lauer, and Russian oligarchs after the invasion of Ukraine…

“These allegations of plagiarism are demonstrably false,” the law firm wrote — suggesting that Harvard had cleared Gay already.

“Harvard and President Gay stand together in their determination that the proposed article must not be published…

The letter rounded up statements from academics using college letterheads — whose work The Post had found bore striking resemblance to Gay’s — to say that they did not believe they had been plagiarized.

In other words, the circled the wagons and went into full crisis PR mode to protect Gay. But it wasn’t until two days after sending the letter threatening the NY Post that Gay allegedly asked Harvard to actually investigate the claims. The story is that Gay herself asked for this investigation but given that there was already a legal team defending her it’s very possible any actions were dictated by them.

But the main point is that Harvard hadn’t really investigated the allegations before making threats against a news organization. And of course since that investigation Gay has decided to make corrections to multiple papers which seems like proof there was a problem. But as you probably know, Harvard has now cleared Gay twice and is denying that she committed plagiarism even though any student would have been expelled with her record of copying entire paragraphs without attribution.

Here’s McWhorter’s conclusion:

…if Harvard declines to dismiss her out of fear of being accused of racism — a reasonable although hardly watertight surmise — Dr. Gay should do the right thing on her own. For Harvard, her own dignity and our national commitment to assessing Black people (and all people) according to the content of their character, she should step down.

That’s what should happen but it won’t. Dignity doesn’t come into it. This is about having the power to tell the right-wing critics to get stuffed even if, or maybe especially if, they are right.