How Not to Defend Claudine Gay

The resignation of Claudine Gay as president of Harvard University in the midst of a growing plagiarism scandal has invited predictably partisan reactions. On the right, figures like Christopher Rufo and Elise Stefanik have been taking a victory lap, claiming credit for Gay’s departure. On the left and in academic circles, others have — almost as a reflex — bemoaned Gay’s withdrawal as an act of capitulation to a right-wing mob and power-hungry donors. In a country in which everything is a matter of partisan polarization, a knee-jerk defense of Gay is perhaps understandable, but it is nonetheless misguided. First, the arguments mounted in her defense are demonstrably weak. And second, those arguments will do nothing to restore the American public’s confidence in academe, and will do even less to avert political interference in higher education.

To be clear, there is no doubt that the right has staged a coordinated campaign against Gay. The engineers of that campaign have said as much. It seems that the entire conservative-media ecosystem has been working overtime to keep Gay in the news, by making piecemeal revelations about her plagiarism every week or two in recent months. It would also be difficult to deny that the right’s motives have little to do with either antisemitism or academic honesty. For someone like Stefanik, both are merely convenient weapons in the culture-war battles against academic liberalism. But none of that matters one bit in adjudicating the allegations against Gay, which ultimately cost her the office.

Because allegations of academic plagiarism are a relatively clear-cut matter — one either did or did not inappropriately lift sentences and paragraphs from other people’s texts — the only way to refute such accusations is through textual analysis, i.e. by demonstrating, on a textual level, that no impropriety has taken place. Of course, that line of defense is available only to those who are not guilty of plagiarism. Those who are guilty usually resort to other strategies: They will question their accusers’ motives, they will try to silence them, they will minimize the allegations, and they will argue that everyone does it anyway. Gay’s defenders have used all of those approaches. They have pointed to the political provenance of the allegations against her; they have euphemistically described clear cases of plagiarism as “duplicative language”; they have suggested that these are things that happen routinely in academic writing; and they have publicly wondered why she is being singled out for such scrutiny.

As others have observed, Harvard’s reaction to the plagiarism allegations was both heavy-handed (with its legal threats against the New York Post) and not transparent (with the public’s being informed about the university’s investigation only after it was already complete). The unsatisfactory arguments in defense of Gay are more consistent with a desire to cover up the allegations than with an attempt to honestly address them.

The cui bono argument is problematic on at least two grounds. The first is that this is a two-way street. While it is certainly true that allegations against Gay have originated with right-wing activists who have an ax to grind with elite higher-education institutions, it is also true that Gay’s defenders are hardly disinterested third parties: The Harvard Corporation as well as Gay’s collaborators and former advisers would all end up looking much better if the allegations against her turned out to be much ado about nothing than if they turned out to be true. More significant, the provenance of the allegations is immaterial because allegations against public figures almost always come from hostile actors and because this is not a he said/she said situation. The veracity of the plagiarism charge is easy to determine, regardless of the reliability of the accusers.

As always with accusations of plagiarism, the answer lies in the text itself. In this case, the answer is that something was obviously wrong with Gay’s writing, given that she has requested corrections of a number of her publications, including her doctoral thesis. The question then becomes not whether something is wrong but how wrong it is. Again, Gay’s defenders insist that it is not particularly bad. In a certain sense they are right: Gay is not accused of stealing her central scholarly insights but of improperly citing (or not citing at all) the works of other authors when describing established methodological procedures. Most of her transgressions do not seem to entail a deliberate attempt to pass off others’ work as her own.

I am not unsympathetic to that defense. The distinction does matter. Expounding the arguments of other scholars without replicating their language is indeed a pain, especially in fields in which literature reviews are required in most forms of academic writing. But such a defense goes only so far. We teach our undergraduates not to replicate the language of other scholars when explaining their arguments, and we fully expect our graduate students not to make such mistakes. If what was found in Gay’s writing is not all that bad, then why the corrections, and why do Harvard’s own regulations require undergraduates who commit similar mistakes to undergo a disciplinary hearing that can result in serious consequences?

Then there is the question of scale: Even if one accepts that Gay’s transgressions are relatively trivial in themselves, the sheer number of citation errors is deeply troubling. As of this writing, dozens upon dozens of instances of “improper citation” across her published work indicate a systematic problem with the basics of academic writing. Perhaps this really does not rise to the level of research misconduct, but it constitutes strong evidence that the former president of Harvard struggles to cite properly. I fail to see how this makes things better for Gay.

Finally, there is the “everybody does it” argument. After all, that argument goes, there are only so many ways to describe a particular methodological technique or the specifics of a law. As with the previous argument, however, the question rises once again as to why we have regulations that prohibit plagiarism and why we penalize our students when they use other people’s words without proper attribution. If those who believe that Gay should not be held responsible are serious, they should also lobby for a wholesale change in our understanding of plagiarism and for the abandonment of the punitive approach that is now the norm. In any case, the burden of proof here is on those who are making the “everybody does it” argument. If they can prove — and they should be able to do so with a few days of work and the right software — that the kinds of offenses that Gay committed appear with similar frequency in the work of other scholars, then perhaps we really should rethink our approach to plagiarism.

Academics, of all people, should be able to hold two thoughts in their heads at the same time. It is entirely possible for Professor Gay to be a target of a right-wing smear campaign and to be guilty of plagiarism. By choosing to ignore the latter because of the former, we are succumbing to a kind of us-vs.-them mentality, and, worse, we risk being accused of a willingness to cover up and minimize the mistakes of our peers when it suits us. I can understand concerns about political interference in higher education, but we cannot possibly defend against such interference by calling plagiarism “duplicative language.” When one is faced with politically motivated allegations of plagiarism, the best one can do is to not be guilty of plagiarism. And when allegations turn out to be true, the best that academic institutions can do is to admit it and move on. It seems as if Harvard has yet to learn that lesson.