Current:Home > Contact-usHarvard president’s resignation highlights new conservative weapon against colleges: plagiarism-LoTradeCoin
Harvard president’s resignation highlights new conservative weapon against colleges: plagiarism
View Date:2024-12-23 19:38:05
WASHINGTON (AP) — The downfall of Harvard’s president has elevated the threat of unearthing plagiarism, a cardinal sin in academia, as a possible new weapon in conservative attacks on higher education.
Claudine Gay’s resignation Tuesday followed weeks of mounting accusations that she lifted language from other scholars in her doctoral dissertation and journal articles. The allegations surfaced amid backlash over her congressional testimony about antisemitism on campus.
The plagiarism allegations came not from her academic peers but her political foes, led by conservatives who sought to oust Gay and put her career under intense scrutiny in hopes of finding a fatal flaw. Her detractors charged that Gay — who has a Ph.D. in government, was a professor at Harvard and Stanford and headed Harvard’s largest division before being promoted — got the top job in large part because she is a Black woman.
Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist who helped orchestrate the effort, celebrated her departure as a win in his campaign against elite institutions of higher education. On X, formerly Twitter, he wrote “SCALPED,” as if Gay was a trophy of violence, invoking a gruesome practice taken up by white colonists who sought to eradicate Native Americans.
“Tomorrow, we get back to the fight,” he said on X, describing a “playbook” against institutions deemed too liberal by conservatives. His latest target: efforts to promote diversity, equity and inclusion in education and business.
“We must not stop until we have abolished DEI ideology from every institution in America,” he said. In another post, he announced a new “plagiarism hunting fund,” vowing to “expose the rot in the Ivy League and restore truth, rather than racialist ideology, as the highest principle in academic life.”
Gay didn’t directly address the plagiarism accusations in a campus letter announcing her resignation, but she noted she was troubled to see doubt cast on her commitment “to upholding scholarly rigor.” She also indirectly nodded to the December congressional hearing that started the onslaught of criticism, where she did not say unequivocally that calls for the genocide of Jews would violate Harvard policy.
Her departure comes just six months after becoming Harvard’s first Black president.
As the figureheads of their universities, presidents often face heightened scrutiny, and numerous leaders have been felled by plagiarism scandals. Stanford University’s president resigned last year amid findings that he manipulated scientific data in his research. A president of the University of South Carolina resigned in 2021 after he lifted parts of his speech at a graduation ceremony.
In Gay’s case, many academics were troubled with how the plagiarism came to light: as part of a coordinated campaign to discredit Gay and force her from office, in part because of her involvement in efforts for racial justice on campus. Her resignation came after calls for her ouster from prominent conservatives including Rep. Elise Stefanik, a Harvard alumna, and Bill Ackman, a billionaire hedge fund manager who has donated millions to Harvard.
The campaign against Gay and other Ivy League presidents has become part of a broader right-wing effort to remake higher education, which has often been seen as a bastion of liberalism. Republican detractors have sought to gut funding for public universities, roll back tenure and banish initiatives that make colleges more welcoming to students of color, disabled students and the LGBTQ+ community. They also have aimed to limit how race and gender are discussed in classrooms.
Walter M. Kimbrough, the former president of the historically Black Dillard University, said what unfolded at Harvard reminded him of an adage from his mother, a Black graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, in the 1950s.
As a Black person in academia, “you always have to be twice, three times as good,” he said.
“There are going to be people, particularly if they have any inkling that the person of color is not the most qualified, who will label them a ‘DEI hire,’ like they tried to label her,” Kimbrough said. “If you want to lead an institution like (Harvard) … there are going to be people who are looking to disqualify you.”
Reviews by conservative activists and then by a Harvard committee did find multiple shortcomings in Gay’s academic citations. In dozens of instances first published by The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative website, Gay’s work includes long stretches of prose that mirror language from other published works. A review ordered by Harvard acknowledged “duplicative language” and missing quotation marks, but it concluded the errors “were not considered intentional or reckless” and didn’t rise to misconduct.
Harvard previously said Gay updated her dissertation and requested corrections from journals.
Among her critics in conservative circles and academia, the findings are clear evidence that Gay, as the top academic at the pinnacle of U.S. higher education, is unfit to serve. Her defenders say it isn’t so clear-cut.
In highly specialized fields, scholars often use similar language to describe the same concepts, said Davarian Baldwin, a historian at Trinity College who writes about race and higher education. Gay clearly made mistakes, he said, but with the spread of software designed to detect plagiarism, it wouldn’t be hard to find similar overlap in works by other presidents and professors.
The tool becomes dangerous, he added, when it “falls into the hands of those who argue that academia in general is a cesspool of incompetence and bad actors.”
John Pelissero, a former interim college president who now works for the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, said instances of plagiarism deserve to be evaluated individually and that it’s not always so cut and dried.
“You’re looking for whether there was intentionality to mislead or inappropriately borrow other people’s ideas in your work,” Pelissero said. “Or was there an honest mistake?”
Without commenting on the merits of the allegations against Gay, President Irene Mulvey of the American Association of University Professors said she fears plagiarism investigations could be “weaponized” to pursue a political agenda.
“There is a right-wing political attack on higher education right now, which feels like an existential threat to the academic freedom that has made American higher education the envy of the world,” Mulvey said.
She worries Gay’s departure will put a new strain on college presidents. In addition to their work courting donors, policymakers and alumni, presidents are supposed to protect faculty from interference so they can research unimpeded.
“For presidents to be taken down like this, it does not bode well for academic freedom,” she said. “I think it’ll chill the climate for academic freedom. And it may make university presidents less likely to speak out against this inappropriate interference for fear of losing their jobs or being targeted.”
____
Balingit reported from Sacramento.
____
The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.
veryGood! (91)
Related
- Trump on Day 1: Begin deportation push, pardon Jan. 6 rioters and make his criminal cases vanish
- Britney Spears Recalls Going Through A Lot of Therapy to Share Her Story in New Memoir
- Young men making quartz countertops are facing lung damage. One state is taking action
- Why Emily Blunt Is Taking a Year Off From Acting
- New Yorkers vent their feelings over the election and the Knicks via subway tunnel sticky notes
- A Hospital Ward for Starving Children in Kenya Has Seen a Surge in Cases This Year
- After a Decade, Federal Officials Tighten Guidelines on Air Pollution
- Trucks, transfers and trolls
- Jordan Chiles Reveals She Still Has Bronze Medal in Emotional Update After 2024 Olympics Controversy
- A mom owed nearly $102,000 for her son's stay in a state mental health hospital
Ranking
- Kyle Richards Swears This Holiday Candle Is the Best Scent Ever and She Uses It All Year
- Zayn Malik Makes Rare Comment About His and Gigi Hadid's Daughter Khai in First Interview in 6 Years
- In the End, Solar Power Opponents Prevail in Williamsport, Ohio
- Citing Health and Climate Concerns, Activists Urge HUD To Remove Gas Stoves From Federally Assisted Housing
- Eva Longoria calls US 'dystopian' under Trump, has moved with husband and son
- Jimmy Carter Signed 14 Major Environmental Bills and Foresaw the Threat of Climate Change
- Trucks, transfers and trolls
- Uprooted: How climate change is reshaping migration from Honduras
Recommendation
-
Colts' Kenny Moore II ridicules team's effort in loss to Bills
-
'Hi, Doc!' DM'ing the doctor could cost you (or your insurance plan)
-
20 Lazy Cleaning Products on Sale During Amazon Prime Day for People Who Want a Neat Home With No Effort
-
'Hi, Doc!' DM'ing the doctor could cost you (or your insurance plan)
-
What’s the secret to growing strong, healthy nails?
-
EPA Paused Waste Shipments From Ohio Train Derailment After Texas Uproar
-
Natural gas can rival coal's climate-warming potential when leaks are counted
-
Blockbuster drug Humira finally faces lower-cost rivals