A serial plagiarist has no business serving on the faculty of any self-respecting college or university. Enter Claudine Gay, a child of privilege, educated at Philips Exeter Academy, Princeton, Stanford, and Harvard Universities. Each is a world class institution by reputation. In October 2023, Ms. Gay became Harvard University’s first ever Black president. Her tenure was short-lived after a series of unforeseen circumstances culminated in her January 2, 2024, resignation from the presidency. She remains on the faculty as the Wilbur A. Cowett Professor of Government and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University where she retains her $900,000 annual salary.
Her downfall began months before a dismal performance before Congress on December 5, 2023, where she was unable or unwilling to give moral clarity to issues related to rising antisemitism on the Harvard campus where Jewish students were being harassed and assaulted by pro-Palestinian activists.
Ms. Gay never took responsibility for more than forty-seven documented instances of plagiarism. In fact, her corrections only included seven instances in three of her publications. Rather than holding Ms. Gay accountable for her lack of academic integrity, the men and women who serve on the Harvard Board of Overseers and Corporation chose to redefine plagiarism and to give Ms. Gay an opportunity to make corrections in her 1997 dissertation and other published works.
It is infantilizing that the leaders of Harvard reinterpreted their fiduciary duties in a manner that caused them to “reimagine” the moral and ethical standards that would have been applied to a white man or woman caught up in such a damaging scandal involving multiple instances of pilfered work from a number of different scholars.
Rather than holding Ms. Gay accountable for her lack of academic integrity, the men and women who serve on the Harvard Board of Overseers and Corporation chose to redefine plagiarism and to give Ms. Gay an opportunity to make corrections.
I am one of the several academics whose work was stolen by Gay. Gay plagiarized sections from my 1993 prize-winning book, Black Faces, Black Interests: The Representation of African Americans in Congress and an article I published in 1997. The damage to me extends beyond the two instances of plagiarism identified by researchers Christopher Rufo and Christopher Brunet. Black Faces, Black Interests received numerous accolades and recognitions. In 1994, it was selected one of Library Choice Journal’s seven outstanding academic books and won both the Woodrow Wilson prize and the V.O. Key Award for its political coverage. In 1995, my book won the D.B. Hardeman Prize for its scholarship on Congress. My book was cited three times by the U. S. Supreme Court in the cases Johnson v. Degrandy (1994) and Georgia v. Ashcroft (2003), and in lower court decisions.
Claudine Gay’s damage to me includes the fact that her early work was in the area where my work is considered seminal. Her scholarship on Black congressional representation, electoral districting, and descriptive representation builds on an area where I plowed the ground. Her dissertation and early publications were clearly an effort to refute the conclusions of Black Faces, Black Interests. I argued that substantive representation was more important than the race of the representative. Whites can represent Black people and Black people can represent Whites; in fact, your best representative might be someone outside your group.
Gay failed the basic research standards. When one follows in the footsteps of a more senior scholar, it is expected that they will acknowledge that scholar’s contribution to the field and how their own research ideas refute, affirm, or expand our knowledge in the area. Gay ignored the substantive importance of my research. My work on representation should have been acknowledged and engaged. A single citation or two located far from the stolen idea is not intellectually honest. When scholars are not cited adequately or their work is ignored, it harms them because academic stature is determined by how often people cite their work. Gay had no problem riding on the coattails of other people. Only two of the people she pilfered from have condemned her action. One remains anonymous. Many of the elites have excused her actions. These are individuals who have benefited from a system that protects its own.
Harvard University cannot condemn Claudine Gay because she is the product of an elite system that holds minorities of high pedigree to a lower standard.
Setting aside the documented instances of plagiarism, the work that Gay produced would not normally have earned a person tenure in the Ivy League. Tenure at a Tier One institution demands groundbreaking originality; Gay’s work displays none. In a world where the privilege of diversity is king, Gay was able to parlay mediocre research into tenure and administrative advancement at what was once considered a world-class institution. We have also discovered that she was appointed president of Harvard in the shortest search ever and no one bothered to examine her scholarship because the position was redefined as administrative.
Harvard University cannot condemn Claudine Gay because she is the product of an elite system that holds minorities of high pedigree to a lower standard. This harms academia as a whole and it distracts from and demeans Americans of all races who have had to fight tooth and nail for everything they have earned. Gay is the perfect poster child for my book, The Adversity of Diversity. Her elevation and harm are some of the casualties of a system we must put to rest.
**The Wall Street Journal published an older version of this article, “Claudine Gay and my Scholarship,” on December 17, 2023. https://www.wsj.com/articles/claudine-gay-and-my-scholarship-plagiarism-elite-system-unearned-position-24e4a1b1
