The downfall of Harvard's president has elevated the threat of unearthing plagiarism, a cardinal sin in academia, as a possible new weapon in oversight of bias, division, exclusion, and indoctrination in higher education.
Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) has been denounced on Newsmax by conservatives like Gov. Ron DeSantis and Harvard legal expert Alan Dershowitz as divisive, exclusionary, and indoctrination.
Claudine Gay's resignation Tuesday followed weeks of mounting accusations 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 those who sought to oust Gay and put her career under intense scrutiny for failure to condemn antisemitism or calls for Jewish genocide. 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, critics note.
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."
"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 DEI 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 did not 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 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, her defenders claim plagiarism only came more clear after past exposes 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, R-N.Y., 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 effort to remake higher education, which has been bastion of liberalism. Republican detractors have sought to gut funding for public universities, roll back tenure and banish initiatives that make colleges more politically biased. They also have aimed to limit how race and gender are indoctrinating classrooms.
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 Gay, as the top academic at the pinnacle of U.S. higher education, is unfit to serve. Her defenders say it is not 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 is 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" against the leftist leaders in college.
"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."
Information throughout this report came from The Associated Press.