Know When to Fold ‘Em

Defenses of Claudine Gay are just more proof that sometimes you should let the ‘other side’ have the win.

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448
Claudine Gay speaks after being named Harvard University president on December 15, 2022. (Photo by Erin Clark/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

Hey,

Don’t worry, this “news”letter isn’t about Jeffrey Epstein. But given recent developments, I think the Epstein story could be useful for an uncomfortably plausible thought experiment. Consider the following hypothetical (and it’s just a hypothetical—plucked from the headlines, as they used to say about Law & Order).

Imagine Jeffrey Epstein invited lots of important people to his house, on his plane, and—almost—to his creepy Sex Dungeon Island. (I was going to make a Scooby Doo joke about how he would have gotten away with it, too, if not for those meddling kids. But, ick.) Anyway, let’s assume Epstein hadn’t been thwarted and he and his darkest-timeline version of Fantasy Island were still up and running. More important people came to the island. More gross, illegal, and evil stuff ensued. Oh, and let’s assume that all of the guests were Democrats or famous liberals. 

Let’s say this goes on for a good while until, finally, one of the following scenarios unfolds:

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  1. Betsybowditch

    Over 30 years ago, Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, whose race offset his thin judicial record, declared he was the victim of a “high-tech lynching.”

    Claudine Gay has a better claim to that. After she resigned from the presidency of Harvard, conservative talk show host Josh Hammer wrote on X that taking her down was a “a huge scalp” in the “fight for civilizational sanity.”

    It was a lot of fun for some here to mock Harvard’s dismissal of “duplicative language” to make plagiarism sound better.

    Bill Ackman was seen as fighting the good fight through his Twitter account where he referenced unknown sources who had told him this or that. Very Trumpian.

    Now his wife’s dissertation has been revealed to contain the same sort of duplicative wording he is accusing the publisher of Business Insider, which picked up the story, of being anti-Zionist.

    How is that different from Al Sharpton claiming Claudine Gay was the victim of a racist assault? Sharpton is actually on stronger ground. Dr. Gay was targeted because she is black and therefore a beneficiary of D.E.I.

    Ackman’s wife’s work was out under the microscope because of his pronouncements about Gay not because she is from Israel.

    He appeared to be setting himself up as a self-appointed Education Czar. The future president of Harvard will have to decide how much influence big donors should have.

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    1. Avatar photo
      BrandonAlleman

      The pattern of attack the messenger and not the message is the same. I imagine with AI we may have a wave of these accusations. I'm a fan of Neri Oxman's work but I guess we'll see eventually what the 'unconfessed single standard' is here.

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      1. Betsybowditch

        I was looking at the Neil Gorsuch controversy. He copied from an Indiana journal article published over two decades before his book on euthanasia, which is based on his dissertation. Here is an example:

        For example, the journal author writes:

        “Esophageal atresia with tracheoesophageal fistula indicates that the esophageal passage from the mouth to the stomach ends in a pouch, with an abnormal connection between the trachea and the esophagus.”

        He regurgitates this passage in identical wording except “indicates” becomes “means." (This is but one example.)

        He doesn't cite the author but instead cites her sources. This is secondary source plagiarism and suggests duplicity though he is entitled to due process.

        He is also guilty of inadequate paraphrasing. Granted, the vocabulary is highly specialized. It would have been better for him to put it in quotations and cite the author of the journal article.

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      2. Betsybowditch

        Ackman has insinuated that he has “good reason to believe,” presumably supplied by unnamed sources in the know, that the plagiarism allegations against his wife, an erstwhile (good substitution word for former) tenured MIT prof, came from a party inside the school. This sort of implies she was outed by someone with an axe to grind.

        It doesn't really matter who spilled the beans but whether or not the allegations hold water. Neither he nor Oxman have denied Business Insider's allegations.

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  2. Safety Cone

    https://www.researchgate.net/scientific-contributions/Claudine-Gay-2031603735

    The Rorschach of abstracts:

    A body of academic rigor and excellence? Or a clever paddler shooting a particular section of rapid water?

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  3. Deleted Comment

    This comment has been deleted

  4. New reader

    Another thought: Who's racist now? Kendi and Sharpton's assertion that a woman with (only) 11 peer-reviewed publications to her credit shouldn't be removed from the Presidency of Harvard after her revelatory congressional testimony and after the discovery of repeated plagiarism in her work is founded on one premise only: it's OK because she's Black, and any effort to depose her must be racially motivated. Really? Harvard's even greater disgrace is that she retains her position as tenured Full Professor (any PhD or post-doc would have been kicked out of the University altogether for what she did). And she gets to keep her eye-popping salary of $800K / yr (any professors out there care to comment on whether this salary is typical for their work?) Shame! Shame! and Shame!

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    1. Betsybowditch

      "any PhD or post-doc would have been kicked out of the University altogether for what she did"

      But Neil Gorsuch did it in a book, where he borrowed text from an article written two decades earlier without citing it, and was confirmed as a Supreme Court Justice.

      Claudine Gay used verbatim text from other sources, though in most cases she cited the source, but didn't indicate it was quoted text. (You can only quote so much text and generally it is to take issue with another scholar not to use their words to advance your own argument.) So did Bill Ackman's wife Neri Osman, in her PhD dissertation, though he is claiming family is off limits. So is it the offense or the person who commits it?

      I don't agree Claudine Gay is a top scholar and I earned a PhD in Political Science. But the way to handle this is not to try her in the social media but to consult scholars in her field who could assess the originality and value of her research along with those who could assess the severity of her plagiarism. Did she appropriate anybody else's ideas and pass them off as her own?

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  5. Bob Rittner

    Although I need to keep a dictionary and thesaurus at hand, I find your musings most informative and thought-provoking.

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  6. Bskrantz

    "Now, I am the first to concede sex trafficking and rape are way, way, way, way, worse than plagiarism or even mealy-mouthed legalistic equivocations about calls for genocide."

    Yes, but in the etherial world of hyper-elite academia, intellectual fraud is a capital crime, and justification for expulsion from the institute and banishment from the realm. Thus race-baiting charlatans like Kendi should be next.

    A bit more seriously, the real crime of people like Gay and others, allowed by civilization to rise to the highest of ivory towers, is that they subvert the values we expect them to promote (and teach), especially academic rigor.

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  7. Betsybowditch

    Now that Claudine Gay has reisgned some at Harvard are pointing out that allowing the mob to exert pressure on the board denied her due process. Elise Stefanik crowed, “Two down one to go” with respect to the college president resignstions. But she voted against expelling her colleague George Santos on the grounds he was entitled to due process despite an incredibly damning report.

    There is a process to ascertain the severity of plagiarism offenses. Did it involve appropriate of ideas or simply regurgitating boiler plate language? In the case of Neil Gorsuch, who wrote a book that included passages taken verbatim from a journal article without attribution, his defenders chalked it up to sloppiness. There was no “medacious intent” they insisted and anyone who suggested otherwise was on a partisan witchunt.

    Christopher Rufo, who claimed to have an MA from Harvard when in fact it was from the Harvard Extension School that has very different admission standards, has openly claimed that Gay was the first “scalp” in a war against DEI. Bill Acxkman has linked Gay’s plagiarism to being a DEI appt. Guess he’s going to have to rethink that now his wife’s dissertation has been revealed to contain copied content, from Wikipedia no less.

    He now wants all MIT faculty research to be checked as he sets his sights on MIT President Sally Kornbluh. Ironically, the president of Columbia was initially slated to appear before the House committee. But she had a prior engagement in Europe so she is off the hook.

    There are certaibly problems in academia but going at it this way is not going to solve them. Yale, Penn Harvard and Stanford are all currently looking for new presidents. Who of the appropriate caliber would take the job?

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  8. Ken Motamed

    "[T]he standards of excellence are racist only when black people fall short of them." Brilliant. Great piece Jonah.

    But you keep getting "whack job" wrong. It's wack job, just like wackadoodle.

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  9. Betsybowditch

    Theres’ an interesting article in the NYT’s about how Claudine Gay lost the support of the Harvard Board, which is comprised of very successful and wealthy people. Some are self made while others, including Dr. Gay, come from families that were synonymous with fortunes.

    Many people assumed because she was a Haitian immigrant she came from a poor family. This is not the case and one problem with DEI is the beneficiaries are often those who have had great advantages in life. I could even see people wondering, "If her family was wealthy, were they part of the exploitative class in one of the poorest countries in the world?"

    The Board thought its December 12 statement would extinguish the fires. These are people who are accustomed to success. But so is Bill Ackman and Christopher Rufo was determined to make this Exhibit A in the culture wars. Drip, drip drip over plagiarism heightened concerns about board members' personal safety given doxing. Several have children at Harvard and they feared harassment. Dr. Gay received police protection due to threats on her life.

    She resigned but it was not the end of story. Gay’s backers decided to fight fire with fire. They had a target: Ackman's wife who received her doctorate from MIT where she was tenured. And they drew blood quickly. Her dissertation contains passages lifted from Wikipedia, a source that is not accepted from undergraduates. As I have told students, all sources must be authored in order to vet the quality of the information. After first claiming a personal vendetta, Ackman now wants to put everyone’s research under the plagiarism microscope.

    This is not really the problem though it does raise questions over how an MIT grad, who later joined the faculty, used Wikipedia sourced content for a dissertation on Computational Design. What does that say about what constitutes research in the hallowed halls of a premier research institution?

    While it received scant attention in comparison to Gay, the president of Stanford was forced to resign earlier this year after data falsification had been uncovered in his lab, though he was not personally implicated. Scientiific research runs on money and nothing brings it in like results.

    Academia has to change to make vetting a more important part of the process. Reviewers need to be paid for their efforts and receive professional credit for it. As Ronald Reagan said, “Trust but verify.”

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  10. Avatar photo
    John Schoch

    Another thorough and well thought out piece from Mr. Goldberg. I always believed Ms. Gay should be removed from her position but doubted it would happen. I am mildly encouraged that the forces of good, especially the work at The Free Beacon, were able to force her resignation. It may take a long time but the foundations of the DEI movement are starting to crumble.

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    1. Joelchrisporch

      The forces of good? I think you mean the forces of partisanship. Which have an upside of adversarial accountability. But calling them forces of good? My dude, that’s what Jonah literally warned you about in this exact article!

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        John Schoch

        I re-read the piece and still didn’t understand your comment. You seem to be conflating “forces of good” with “forces of partisanship” which are two distinctly different things. One of them doesn’t preclude the other. Even though the WFB and SCLC are partisan entities, that doesn’t necessarily keep them from doing “good”. Per Jonah himself, partisanship is a good thing in the right doses.

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        1. Joelchrisporch

          Yeah. I guess we agree. I can appreciate the good done by partisanship, while not thinking partisanship at large is a force for good.

          As for Gay’s removal, I don’t know if it was good per se, other than in the sense that double standards are bad. Bad was stopped. I guess I’m wary of anything being actually a positive good these days. Perhaps I’m overly cynical about the world.

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            John Schoch

            We do agree and I appreciate your thoughts especially on cynicism. I was never a cynic but in the last few years I have definitely become one which is disconcerting in some ways but slightly welcome in others. Thanks for the dialog.

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