Integrity First. Tribe Second.
Claudine Gay had terrible enemies, but that doesn't mean she didn't do anything wrong.
I’m Michael A. Cohen, and this is Truth and Consequences: A no-holds-barred look at the absurdities, hypocrisies, and surreality. If you were sent this email or are a free subscriber and would like to become a paid subscriber, you can sign up here.
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I’ll be honest: I have very little interest in the resignation of Harvard President Claudine Gay. I wrote last month about how her congressional testimony showed a troubling disregard for anti-Semitism and the feelings of Jewish students on her campus. But I didn’t think it was a firable offense.
When allegations of plagiarism emerged, I didn’t pay it much mind — because, well, there were other more important stories. But with the continuing drip-drip of plagiarism allegations, her resignation Tuesday seemed inevitable. But, as is so often the case with these types of scandals, it is the reaction to that is far more interesting.
Since Gay was forced out, many progressive allies are portraying the scandal as a racial attack on diversity in higher education by conservatives like conservative activist Christoper Rufo and Rep. Elise Stefanik, who set a trap for Gay in her congressional testimony that she walked straight into.
For example, according to Ibram X. Kendi, Gay was attacked by a “racist mob” who used the fig leaf of plagiarism accusations to deny that “they are attacking the person in this way because the person is Black.” The real “question” he says is “whether all these people would have investigated, surveilled, harassed, written about, and attacked her in the same way if the Harvard president in this case would have been White.”
Others argue that this was a bad-faith attack by bad faith actors and “center-left pundits” had a responsibility not to fall for it. They should instead have supported a fellow member of their tribe and refused even to discuss the issue.
There is one major problem with these arguments. Claudine Gay committed plagiarism — repeatedly and flagrantly. Indeed, Gay was accused of lifting material or failing to provide proper attribution in not only her Ph.D. dissertation but more than half of the 11 journal articles listed on her resume. That’s a lot of plagiarism.
And what makes it even worse is that if Gay were an undergrad at Harvard she would not be getting off so easy.
In the statement accepting her resigniation Harvard’s governing body the plagiarism scandal went unmentioned. And in a self-pitying oped in the New York Times, Gay said this about the allegations.
Most recently, the attacks have focused on my scholarship. My critics found instances in my academic writings where some material duplicated other scholars’ language, without proper attribution. I believe all scholars deserve full and appropriate credit for their work. When I learned of these errors, I promptly requested corrections from the journals in which the flagged articles were published, consistent with how I have seen similar faculty cases handled at Harvard.
I have never misrepresented my research findings, nor have I ever claimed credit for the research of others. Moreover, the citation errors should not obscure a fundamental truth: I proudly stand by my work and its impact on the field.
“My critics found instances …” is some top-notch avoidance of responsibility. Instead, Gay presents herself as the victim, which in a way she is — but in a larger way is not.
Over at the Atlantic, Tyler Austin Harper, a professor at Bates College, captures my view.
The conservative activist Christopher Rufo, who helped kick off this controversy when he and fellow conservative Christopher Brunet leveled a round of accusations against Gay last month, has spent the past 24 hours doing a victory lap. It is this unseemly context that many academics are hung up on: In their minds, a college president succumbed to conservative pressure. And this fact is melting their brains and obliterating their standards for professional conduct. As Harvard Law’s own Charles Fried told The New York Times, “It’s part of this extreme right-wing attack on elite institutions.” And: “If it came from some other quarter, I might be granting it some credence … But not from these people.
The true scandal of the Claudine Gay affair is not a Harvard president and her plagiarism. The true scandal is that so many journalists and academics were willing, are still willing, to redefine plagiarism to suit their politics. Gay’s boosters have consistently resorted to Orwellian doublespeak—“duplicative language” and academic “sloppiness” and “technical attribution issues”—in a desperate effort to insist that lifting entire paragraphs of another scholar’s work, nearly word for word, without quotation or citation, isn’t plagiarism. Or that if it is plagiarism, it’s merely a technicality. Or that we all do it.
…. Rufo won this round of the academic culture war because he exposed so many progressive scholars and journalists to be hypocrites and political actors who were willing to throw their ideals overboard. I suspect that, not the tenure of a Harvard president, was the prize he sought all along. The tragedy is that we didn’t have to give it to him.
I’m sympathetic to the anti-Rufo and Stefanik arguments. And I acknowledge that race and gender played a role in the pile-on … but Gay is guilty of plagiarism. That terrible people exposed it doesn’t wipe away her offense. The fact that Gay might have been attacked because of her race, gender and the prominence of her position as an Ivy League University president is important context, but it’s not a get-out-of-jail free card. And, frankly, progressives do themselves no favors when they gloss over ethical failures because of tribal solidarity.
For years, liberals have rightly bemoaned the unwillingness and cowardice of conservatives to speak out against Donald Trump. They have placed party and ideological allegiance over basic integrity and morality. While Gay’s crimes are obviously nowhere near as bad as Trump’s they can’t be ignored either. To do that would mean progressives adopting the worst aspects of modern conservatism. What happened to Claudine Gay is a sad story, but as much as she and others want to point the finger at her enemies, she brought this on herself.
It’s also worthy of note that in virtually all the defenses of Gay, the charge of insensitivity to anti-Semitism have been largely waved away or excused — as is the outrage that many American Jews felt about her congressional testimony. But this should come as no surprise: on the progressive left anti-Semitism doesn’t count.
What’s Going On
Your semi-regular reminder that Republicans politicians are gutless cowards — and progressives should not imitate them.
Mr. Trump works his endorsements through both fear and favor, happily cajoling fellow politicians by phone while firing off ominous social media posts about those who don’t fall in line quickly enough. In October, he felled a top candidate for House speaker, Representative Tom Emmer, by posting that voting for him “would be a tragic mistake!” On Wednesday, Mr. Emmer capitulated and endorsed him.
“They always bend the knee,” Mr. Trump said privately of Mr. Emmer’s endorsement, according to a person who spoke to him
And Mr. Trump is privately ranting about and workshopping nicknames for other holdouts, like Senator Ted Cruz of Texas. “Ted — he shouldn’t even exist,” Mr. Trump said recently of Mr. Cruz, a 2016 rival, according to a person who heard the remarks and recounted them soon after. “I could’ve destroyed him. I kind of did destroy him in 2016, if you think about it. But then I let him live.”
According to Axios, President Biden “aims to put the deadly assault on the Capitol at the center of his reelection campaign.” Color me skeptical. Don’t get me wrong, Biden will talk about January 6 a lot. But abortion will likely be at the center of his reelection campaign.
Fascinating article on how all passengers aboard a burning Japan Airlines flight survived.
Further evidence that Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers is the absolute worst.
Musical Interlude
Michael - You nailed it on the Claudine Gay story. Perhaps most troubling to me is Ibram Kendi's assertion that she was attacked because she was black and presumably would not have been if she had been white. This is a typical response by Kendi and his followers, but there is absolutely no basis for it. The fact that she is black does not support an assertion that she was attacked for her blackness. As a strong liberal committed to racial justice, I believe these claims do tremendous harm to the struggle for racial justice. No, Mr. Kendi, it is not always about race. Making baseless claims of this sort undermines your cause.