The American Historical Association may be dedicated to studying the past, but its annual meeting last week exhibited a deep anxiety over the present. Lectures on the Cold War and the Holocaust were sandwiched between sessions lamenting political attacks on the profession, such as state-legislative efforts to scrap tenure and restrict teaching about race and gender.
The cherry on top: Claudine Gay had just stepped down as president of Harvard University after a month of intense scrutiny over accusations of plagiarism in her research as a political scientist. In interviews at the San Francisco conference, historians were less than thrilled that citations, footnotes, and quotation marks were becoming the new fronts in the culture wars.
“Well, I wish people would comb through my work,” said Robert W. Cherny, an emeritus professor of history at San Francisco State University and one of 3,000 meeting attendees. “But not with that in mind.”
The plagiarism accusations were first reported by conservative media outlets in December after Gay was widely criticized for her lawyerly answers in a congressional hearing about antisemitism. Asked if calling for the genocide of Jews violated Harvard’s rules of bullying and harassment, she responded, “It can be, depending on the context.” She later apologized.
In at least eight publications to date, including her dissertation, Gay allegedly lifted text from other works without adding quotations or properly citing the original authors, according to The Washington Free Beacon. Prior to her resignation, Harvard said that an investigation — one it undertook after it threatened the New York Post with legal action for asking about plagiarism claims — had concluded she did not violate its research-misconduct policy, though some aspects of her work had “failed to adhere” to the institution’s guide to using sources. Harvard has also said that Gay issued corrections to her dissertation and two articles.
Gay, a professor of government and of African and African American studies, has defended herself. “I have never misrepresented my research findings, nor have I ever claimed credit for the research of others,” she wrote in an opinion essay the day after she resigned and six months after taking the job, capping the shortest presidential tenure in Harvard’s history. “Moreover, the citation errors should not obscure a fundamental truth: I proudly stand by my work and its impact on the field.”
But firebrands on the right, like the activist Christopher Rufo, Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, and the billionaire financier and prominent Harvard donor Bill Ackman, see Gay’s ouster as just the beginning of a campaign to — as Rufo has put it — “eliminate the DEI bureaucracy in every institution in America and to restore truth rather than racialist ideology as the guiding principle of America.” Rufo has also pledged $10,000 to a “plagiarism hunting fund” meant to “expose the rot in the Ivy League.”
“This is all 100 percent politically motivated,” said A.K. Sandoval-Strausz, a history professor and director of Latino and Latina studies at Pennsylvania State University. “But when you plagiarize, you hand them a knife to stab you with.”
Several scholars interviewed by The Chronicle declined to comment on the perceived severity of Gay’s alleged plagiarism, or said that it was more important to focus on the context in which it surfaced: one in which higher education, especially history and the rest of the humanities, is under attack.
“I think her decision to resign is not a bad decision,” said Amna Khalid, an associate professor of history at Carleton College. She said that in some instances — not necessarily the plagiarism case — conservatives like Rufo correctly identify that “there are problems in higher education, and they need to be addressed.”
But “it’s a weaponization of evidence to a certain end, which is very much about dismantling public education,” she said, adding that she’s disappointed that more faculty members are not speaking up about threats to academic freedom. “My lament is that I think they’re waking up a tad too late,” she said.
“No one’s looking for her footnotes or thumbing through her citations if she doesn’t take a position that’s considered to be off-color relative to Hamas and the situation in Gaza and Israel,” said N.D.B. Connolly, an associate professor of history at the Johns Hopkins University. “So it’s clearly a bad-faith effort to weaponize an academic standard.” He also noted that Gay “was already being stained as an unqualified diversity hire” by the likes of Rufo and Ackman, the “classic kinds of arguments that are leveled at people who are talented and of color in a high position.”
As Harvard’s first Black president, Gay said she believed that she was targeted because of her race, citing in part being “called the N-word more times than I care to count.” “Those who had relentlessly campaigned to oust me,” she wrote in The New York Times, “recycled tired racial stereotypes about Black talent and temperament.”
When the plagiarism accusations hit the news in December, it incited a little panic in more than one academic. “Oh my God, do I need to kind of go back now to everything that I wrote?” Einav Rabinovitch-Fox, a lecturer at Case Western Reserve University, remembered thinking. But she was confident that she cited every source possible in her dissertation. “I really hope it’s not going to bring a new wave that now, like, every dissertation is going to be scrutinized,” she added.
At the very least, historians conceded, recent events reinforce the need for diligent citation and quoting practices. “I think that plagiarism should be called out, because I think we need to be reminded that we have to work hard not to do it,” said Samuel Truett, a historian at the University of New Mexico. “I also freak out all the time that I might be plagiarizing something that I’d forgotten to cite, so it’s stressful. But I think it’s important for us to be always carefully watching.”
As heated as the current moment feels, several historians noted that plagiarism and other research-misconduct accusations periodically flare up in their discipline. Two years ago, Kevin Kruse, a Princeton University history professor known for taking jabs at Republican politicians, was accused by another scholar of plagiarism, claims that were cleared by Princeton and Cornell University, where he received his doctoral degree. In 2002, Michael A. Bellesiles resigned from Emory University and relinquished the Bancroft Prize after his book Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture was found to contain errors and at times “move into the realm of falsification.” Bellesiles denied fabricating evidence while acknowledging and apologizing for errors.
So will the Gay episode catalyze a sea change in how social-science scholarship is produced — or will it fade into the past, like so many cases before it? Robert Cassanello, a University of Central Florida historian who is suing Gov. Ron DeSantis over a law that restricts the teaching of race in Florida, thinks that this time might be different. “I’ve seen stuff like this, but it’s never politicized,” he said.
On the other hand, Earl Lewis, a professor of history at the University of Michigan, said he believes most historians operate with integrity. Besides, he added, subjecting every person to the degree of fact-checking Gay has received would be hugely time-consuming, even with the use of artificial intelligence. “I’ve had probably 30, 40 doctoral students over a 40-year career,” he said. “Have I gone back and read every footnote that each one of them have written and gone back and looked at each citation? No, it’s just not humanly possible.”
He added, “God knows, I think if we submitted every scholar in the United States to that kind of scrutiny, what would happen?”
But if one billionaire has his way, that scenario wouldn’t be so far-fetched after all. Last week Business Insider reported that Neri Oxman, the wife of Ackman, had plagiarized parts of her dissertation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as well as other papers. She acknowledged and apologized for some of those instances. By the end of the weekend, her husband was calling for a plagiarism audit of the work of every faculty member at MIT, plus, for good measure, every journalist at Business Insider, plus, for even better measure, every scholar in all of academe.
“Every college and university in the world is going to have to do the same for themselves,” Ackman wrote to his one million followers on X. “They will do so because they will need to validate all plagiarism accusations, or someone else will do it for them.”
