Why Is Integrity So Important in Our Universities?

It finally happened! Claudine Gay resigned as president of Harvard University on Tuesday and ended her tenure as the shortest in the history of Harvard University – September 2023 until January 2024. In her resignation, Gay did not include any scandals that caused the resignation. 

As noted by Tyler O’Neil, “The incident arguably illustrates the effectiveness of conservative critics in drawing attention to Gay’s many scandals, and the fecklessness of a university so rooted in diversity, equity, and inclusion that it refuses to acknowledge the ideological roots of the scandal.” 

So, what was so controversial that Gay was forced to resign? According to O’Neil, Gay testified about antisemitism on campus at a hearing in the U.S. House of Representatives and gave the wrong answer.

Toward the end of the hearing, Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., asked Gay and two other university presidents whether “calling for the genocide of Jews” violates the “code of conduct or rules regarding bullying and harassment” at their universities. All three of the women hedged, saying the answer depends on context.

Three days later, Gay told The Crimson, Harvard’s student newspaper, that she was “sorry” and noted that her “words amplify distress and pain.” She said she had “got caught up in what had become at that point, an extended, combative exchange about policies and procedures,” adding that she “failed to convey what is my truth.”

Stefanik, a Harvard graduate, condemned Gay’s apology.

“No, Dr. Gay. You were given an opportunity to speak your truth,” Stefanik responded to Gay on X, formerly Twitter. “And you did. Not once. Not twice. Not 5 [times]. Not 10 [times]. I asked you 17 [times] (!!!) in the hearing about whether calling for the genocide of Jews violates [Harvard’s] code of conduct. You spoke your truth under oath 17 [times]. And the world heard it.”

Liz Magill, President of the University of Pennsylvania gave the same answer as Gay in the antisemitism hearing on December 5, and she resigned four days later due to pressure from donors. Also resigning was the chairman of Penn’s board of trustees. O’Neil noted:

On Dec. 10, Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Chris Rufo published the first in a series of plagiarism accusations against Gay, comparing sections from the Harvard president’s 1997 dissertation to works published by others.

On Dec. 12, Harvard announced that it had reviewed Gay’s published work after receiving accusations in October about three of her articles. The university cleared Gay of accusations that she had violated its standards for “research misconduct,” but said the review discovered “a few instances of inadequate citation.” Harvard announced that Gay would request “four corrections in two articles.”

On Dec. 22, the New York Post revealed that Harvard had sent the newspaper a letter in late October warning of a defamation lawsuit if it were to publish accusations of plagiarism. The letter claimed that the passages in question “are both cited and properly credited.”

Also in December, Jay Greene, a senior research fellow in the Center for Education Policy at The Heritage Foundation, and Max Eden, a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, drew attention to the paucity of Gay’s academic record. (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s news outlet.)

“Over about two decades, Gay has written 10 journal articles and no books,” Greene and Eden wrote. “This is about half the average rate for a political science professor, even at a middling university. By comparison, Amy Gutmann—who, like Gay, is a political scientist and until early last year served as president of the University of Pennsylvania—has published more than a dozen books and well over 100 articles.”

Furthermore, Greene and Eden noted that “Gay’s institutional rise was marked by a pattern of destroying the careers of genuinely brilliant black scholars who had the stature to point out her mediocrity.” They wrote that Gay led the charge to undermine black Harvard economist Roland Fryer and black Harvard Law professor Ronald Sullivan, who had agreed to serve as an attorney to help defend Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein from sexual assault charges.

Reporters and analysts went through works Gay’s published work, finding example after example of text blocks apparently lifted from other writers without attribution. The steady drip-drip-drip of information, coupled with conservative outlets such as The Daily Signal demanding answers and repeatedly raising the issue of DEI in education, appears to have led Harvard to reconsider.

These examples led Greene and Eden, among many others, to conclude that Gay had been an “affirmative action pick,” an example of the university’s prioritizing goals for "diversity, equity, and inclusion" over scholarly merit.

Gay resigned due to too much evidence of her lack of merits for the position, but she was quick to blame racism and other causes rather than acknowledging her own problems. O’Neil wrote that the “public campaign to reveal DEI corruption zeroed in on Gay because she arguably represented the worst of ‘woke’ ideology – a woman elevated more for her skin color than for her merit, promoting ethe cause of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and overlooking the rising threat of antisemitism from the Left.” …

“There were so many reasons that justified Gay’s removal as president that it is hard to say which one ultimately tipped the scale,” Greene, the Heritage education scholar, told The Daily Signal in a statement Tuesday. “She was a plagiarist who destroyed the careers of rival black scholars on her way to the top, idly stood by while Jew-hatred ran rampant on campus alleging a newly discovered commitment to free speech, fostered a dangerous expansion of DEI, and was fundamentally unqualified for the position in the first place. Any one of these should have disqualified her from leading Harvard.”

Greene called Gay’s removal an “essential step forward” but “clearly insufficient” because “almost all of the issues that justified her removal remain serious problems at Harvard.”

“The university is clearly unwilling to uphold scholarly standards against plagiarism,” Greene said. “The DEI cudgel she used to destroy rival black scholars can be used to accuse others of fostering hostile environments. Harvard continues to selectively enforce its code of conduct to permit anti-Jewish activity but not activity affecting other, protected groups. The DEI bureaucracy and the discriminatory oppressor/oppressed dichotomy it promotes remains undiminished. The board that selected her despite her manifest lack of qualification for the position remains in charge.”