The resignation of Claudine Gay as Harvard’s president provides an opportunity for the university to correct its faults. It should not squander that opportunity.
The resignation of Claudine Gay as Harvard’s president provides an opportunity for the university to correct its faults. It should not squander that opportunity.
A t least one lesson has been learned at Harvard this semester: It turns out there is such a thing as bad publicity. After months of controversy over the university’s treatment of anti-Israel protesters and the revelation that much of her academic work included plagiarized material, President Claudine Gay has resigned.
It should be unsurprising, given the allegations against her, that Gay is stepping down. After all, had I, as a Harvard junior, written a paper for class in a similar fashion, I would have been suspended. Had I done it multiple times, I might have been expelled. Eliot A. Cohen, a former member of the administrative board that handled student plagiarism, suggested as much. So, too, did a current undergraduate member of the Harvard College Honor Council (which adjudicates plagiarism cases), speaking anonymously to avoid retribution.
The fact that many of my friends and I were shocked to hear the news, then, is cause for concern. Just as Harvard has quickly lost the trust of the American public — early-action applications declined 17 percent this year — its administration was also quickly losing the confidence of the student body. Many of my classmates didn’t see how the college could hold its members to its honor code while Gay remained in office. Nor did they understand why the Harvard Corporation (the body formally in charge of the school) was willing to publicly defend her.
Restoring this trust will require clear and decisive action to recommit the university to exacting standards in the pursuit of truth. Harvard’s leadership must make clear that the flaws of the Gay administration were only a temporary aberration in the university’s history. Otherwise, the university will continue losing the ability to produce the “citizen-leaders” demanded by its mission.
Claudine Gay’s resignation is a step in the right direction. But as Gay acknowledged in the aftermath of her disastrous congressional testimony, “words matter.” And her resignation statement had a rather glaring omission: She did not accept responsibility for her plagiarism. Her only acknowledgement of the allegations of academic misconduct against her was a complaint about the “doubt cast on [her] commitments to confronting hate and upholding scholarly rigor.” In a New York Times op-ed, Gay unconvincingly referred to her instances of plagiarism as “errors” and said she “requested corrections from the journals in which the flagged articles were published, consistent with how [she had] seen similar faculty cases handled at Harvard.” And she added unrepentantly, “I proudly stand by my work and its impact on the field.”
The statement of the Harvard Corporation was not much better. While it claimed that “President Gay has acknowledged missteps,” it also thanked her for “her deep and unwavering commitment to Harvard and to the pursuit of academic excellence.” It is frustrating though unsurprising that even in letting Gay go, university leadership is unwilling to acknowledge that her behavior both before assuming the presidency and in exercising it was unbecoming of her office. She had to know that someone might eventually discover her plagiarism. Her willingness to expose Harvard to this embarrassment shows her commitment to her own self-advancement, not to the university.
Unfortunately, it is unlikely that either Interim President Alan Garber or Gay’s eventual permanent replacement will be any more forthcoming in this regard. But they must in practice repudiate Gay’s legacy.
That starts by proving that Harvard is still deserving of the prominent place it occupies within American academia. The presidential search committee may feel tempted to select a candidate whose primary experience is administrative, not academic. That would be a mistake. Harvard’s next president should be a truly first-rate scholar so that he can credibly set the standard for academic quality and productivity.
In this regard, his résumé should look a lot more like that of former president Lawrence Summers, whose academic work was prolific even without considering his time in government, than Gay’s comparatively meager CV did. It goes without saying, I hope, that the next president’s work should also be reviewed with a fine-tooth comb before the person is appointed.
The university should also leave behind the use of DEI in its hiring practices. Gay was selected after Harvard’s shortest presidential search in decades. It is clear that this was because the search committee prioritized selecting a member of a minority for the role. As the Harvard Salient, for which I am an editor, reported in October after Gay’s inauguration:
A member of the Student Advisory Committee to the presidential search told the audience that their selection efforts were set against ‘recent reports of [Harvard’s] entanglement with slavery as well as current battles over affirmative action.’ The committee found in Gay someone who ‘by background . . . carries a different perspective from her predecessors.’
We can now clearly see that the committee erred in its ideologically motivated haste. But while the Supreme Court has prohibited the university from using affirmative action in its admissions processes, racial and gender preferences in hiring remain, for now, untouched. The university should admit that finding suitably qualified candidates for professorial roles, much less its presidency, is hard enough without imposing identitarian requirements as well.
Harvard’s next president might also signal commitment to Veritas by taking a strong stance against grade inflation. It is becoming an open secret that the hardest part of graduating from an Ivy League institution is getting in. The average GPA at Harvard has continuously risen in recent decades, reaching 3.8 in 2022; some peer institutions are experiencing a similar phenomenon.
In my experience, this race to the 4.0 encourages students to take classes they are not really interested in or challenged by in order to keep up with their classmates. It also incentivizes professors either to make the content of their classes easier or their grading less harsh. This trend serves no one — not students, not professors, and certainly not employers — and it decreases the value of the Harvard degree.
Naturally, the new president must also affirm a strong commitment to academic freedom. In light of the past semester, however, it is necessary to go further in offering a substantive explanation of what academic freedom requires and permits at Harvard. Academic freedom must be appropriately bounded by the university’s academic purpose. The university need not tolerate, as it did last semester, protests that disrupt classes and make study spaces and libraries inaccessible.
But the gates should be open rather wide, particularly with respect to the faculty. When I was a freshman, one of my professors was forced to apologize to the class after reading aloud a passage of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man that contained the n-word after a student asked about the passage in question. In the past few years, more substantive punishments have been applied to several other scholars for ideological reasons, leading to our “abysmal” free-speech ranking from FIRE. Our next president ought to promise to protect scholars who are doing their jobs well from the consequences of offending a particularly whiny student or administrator. Fear does not beget truth.
University leadership should also consider very carefully whether its dearth of right-leaning academics is really the result of fairly applied standards. While the university’s pursuit of diversity as currently conceived has proven disastrous, maintaining an ideologically monolithic faculty does a disservice to the student body.
Harvard must not miss the opportunity offered by Claudine Gay’s resignation: namely, to refocus on the production of high-quality scholarship and the training of young men and women for leadership in their communities. The university has been too distracted for too long.