The Week: Harvard’s Humiliation

• At least Claudine Gay wasn’t caught plagiarizing someone embarrassing, such as Neil Kinnock.

• On January 2, after weeks of serious allegations of plagiarism, Claudine Gay resigned from her position as president of Harvard University. Her tenure was justifiably the shortest on record. Gay was transparently guilty of multiple instances of plagiarism—as part of its attempted damage control, Harvard permitted her to “amend” some of her earlier publications, a remedy it does not allow its errant undergraduates—and the light shone upon her academic misconduct also revealed the curious meagerness of her scholarship, a mere eleven publications over her career. But of course Gay’s academic record came under scrutiny in the first place owing to her repulsive testimony before Congress in early December. Addressing the issue of campus antisemitism, she said that calls to murder Jews and extinguish Israel were to be protected speech on campus, “depending on context”: a type of free-speech absolutism Harvard notoriously does not practice across the board. Her defenders cry foul, saying the outsider identity of her enemies and her own status as a black woman matter more than her misdeeds. Her detractors understand that defenses of this kind show the depth of the rot in academia.

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• At least Claudine Gay wasn’t caught plagiarizing someone embarrassing, such as Neil Kinnock.

• On January 2, after weeks of serious allegations of plagiarism, Claudine Gay resigned from her position as president of Harvard University. Her tenure was justifiably the shortest on record. Gay was transparently guilty of multiple instances of plagiarism—as part of its attempted damage control, Harvard permitted her to “amend” some of her earlier publications, a remedy it does not allow its errant undergraduates—and the light shone upon her academic misconduct also revealed the curious meagerness of her scholarship, a mere eleven publications over her career. But of course Gay’s academic record came under scrutiny in the first place owing to her repulsive testimony before Congress in early December. Addressing the issue of campus antisemitism, she said that calls to murder Jews and extinguish Israel were to be protected speech on campus, “depending on context”: a type of free-speech absolutism Harvard notoriously does not practice across the board. Her defenders cry foul, saying the outsider identity of her enemies and her own status as a black woman matter more than her misdeeds. Her detractors understand that defenses of this kind show the depth of the rot in academia.