Plagiarism charges sunk Harvard’s president. Intense conservative scrutiny paved the way
WASHINGTON — American higher education has long viewed plagiarism as a cardinal sin. Accusations of academic dishonesty have ruined the careers of faculty and undergraduates alike.
The latest target is Harvard President Claudine Gay, who resigned Tuesday. In her case, the outrage came not from her academic peers but her political foes, led by conservatives who put her career under intense scrutiny.
Reviews by Harvard found multiple shortcomings in Ms. Gay’s academic citations, including several instances of “duplicative language.” The university concluded the errors “were not considered intentional or reckless” and didn’t rise to misconduct. But the allegations continued, with new ones as recently as Monday.
Conservatives zeroed in on Ms. Gay amid backlash over her congressional testimony about antisemitism on campus. Her detractors charged that Ms. 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 against Ms. Gay, celebrated her departure as a win in his campaign against elite institutions of higher education. On X, he wrote “SCALPED,” as if Ms. Gay was a trophy of violence, invoking a gruesome practice taken up by white colonists who sought to eradicate Native Americans and also used by some tribes against their enemies.
“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.”
Ms. 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 Ms. 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 Ms. 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.