The saga of Claudine Gay and her rise and fall as Harvard’s president will be ruminated over for a very long time.

What is becoming clearer, though, is just how much Harvard had invested in Claudine Gay, to the point that they were willing to look the other way when it came to the charges of plagiarism. (Hilariously, her resignation letter was shared so much online that the program to detect plagiarism, Grammarly, thought it was plagiarized as well.) Think about the chain of events that led to this moment, and how we all started to pay attention after the rise in blatant anti-Semitism on college and university campuses, which led to a Title VI investigation being opened into Harvard over its treatment of Jewish students, eventually culminating in President Claudine Gay sitting in front of Congress and embarrassing herself.

Harvard, as a corporation, chose at that time to stand by Gay, even as donors began to withdraw money and make a lot of noise. What we didn’t know when Gay was testifying, is that the plagiarism investigation had already begun, and Harvard had already threatened legal action against the New York Post if they published anything about it. So once the plagiarism charges broke on Twitter/X, led by Christopher Rufo and Christopher Brunet, and then backed up by Aaron Sibarium of the Washington Free Beacon, Harvard initially tried to hold up their previous “investigation” into the plagiarism allegations as a shield – something that proved totally ineffective in the long term, and they have never revealed who actually did their investigation, either. But in the end, the thorough examination and scrutiny of Claudine Gay’s very limited scholarship and published works were weighed and found wanting – and when the hits kept coming, Harvard apparently realized they couldn’t take it any more.

SCOOP: Harvard president Claudine Gay was hit with six additional allegations of plagiarism tonight in a complaint filed with the university, pushing the total number of allegations near 50. 

These are some of the most extreme and clear-cut examples yet.🧵https://t.co/Bg69AeZcMU

— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) January 2, 2024

The constant drip of information is really what did Claudine Gay in. Somewhere, Andrew Breitbart is smiling approvingly.

What obviously sealed the deal was the fact that Harvard undergrads were being held to a stricter academic standard than the president of the university – and everyone knew it. An anonymous letter by a former member of the Honor Council to the Harvard Crimson, published just this last Sunday, highlighted the double standard that was benefiting Claudine Gay.

I have served as a voting member of the Harvard College Honor Council, the body tasked with upholding the College’s community standards of academic integrity.

In my time on the Council, I heard dozens of cases. When students — my classmates, peers, and friends — appear before the council, they are distraught. For most, it is the worst day of their college careers. For some, it is the worst day of their lives. They often cry.

It is because I have seen first-hand how heart-wrenching these decisions can be, and still think them necessary, that I call on University President Claudine Gay to resign for her numerous and serious violations of academic ethics.

In my experience, when students omit quotation marks and citations, as President Gay did, the sanction is usually one term of probation — a permanent mark on a student’s record. A student on probation is no longer considered in good standing, disqualifying them from opportunities like fellowships and study-abroad programs. Good standing is also required to receive a degree.

What is striking about the allegations of plagiarism against President Gay is that the improprieties are routine and pervasive.

She is accused of plagiarism in her dissertation and at least two of her 11 journal articles. Two sentences from the acknowledgement section of her dissertation even seem to have been copied from another work.

According to the Honor Council’s procedures, the response to a violation depends on the “seriousness of the infraction” and “extenuating circumstances, including the extent to which a student has had similar trouble before.” In other words, while a single lifted paragraph could be blamed on a lapse in judgment, a pattern is more concerning.

It is a serious thing for the Council to render this judgment, and I have never taken any such vote lightly. Voting to suspend a peer with whom I might share a dorm, club, or class is not easy. We have even voted to suspend seniors just about to graduate.

But strict sanctions are necessary to demonstrate that our community values academic integrity. Cheating on exams is not okay. Plagiarism is not okay.

It may be true that the plagiarism allegations against President Gay fall short of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ interim policy on research misconduct. She may not have “intentionally, knowingly, and recklessly” tried to represent the work of her doctoral advisor and others as her own. And there is no evidence that any of her arguments posited as original contributions were plagiarized.

But President Gay’s pattern of mistakes is serious, and the Harvard Corporation should not minimize these allegations of plagiarism, as it has readily done.

In a Dec. 12 University-wide letter, the Corporation described the alleged plagiarism as “a few instances of inadequate citation.” The letter lauded President Gay for “proactively” correcting her articles by inserting citations and quotation marks.

By definition, Gay’s corrections were not proactive but reactive — she only made them after she was caught. And that the Corporation considers her corrections an adequate response is not fair to undergraduates, who cannot simply submit corrections to avoid penalties.

That, everyone, is what we call a knockout punch. The “Corporation” (can you think of a more fitting term for the machine that apparently is the Harvard of today, a place that is noted to be the first college in America, founded in 1636, with a reverend as its first president?) had to have known that the double standard that they created would inevitably lead to lawsuits, and possibly a class-action one, as former students who had Honor Code violations for plagiarism would now have legal proof that Harvard was willing to let academic scholarship be fixed retroactively, but only for the president of the university? There are lawyers out there who were salivating for the chance to put that case to a jury. How did the big brains of Harvard not realize that?

But the real question is, why did Harvard as a “corporation” go to bat for Claudine Gay, to the point of embarrassing themselves over her? We all know that Gay was the poster child for DEI, and like Kamala Harris, her qualifications for her job did not reflect her intellectual strength, but her gender and the color of her skin. We know this because both Gay’s defenders (Mara Gay, Marc Lamont Hill, and Nikole Hannah-Jones, for example) and detractors are pointing out that her qualifications for president of Harvard are completely tied up in her intersectional identity.

Claudine Gay was named president of Harvard on December 15, 2022. She assumed the office on July 1, 2023, and was formally inaugurated on September 29, 2023. However, the red flags were out well before Gay was named, as the date on Christopher Brunet’s initial Substack post of October 21, 2022, indicates. We are also hearing that Harvard considered Danielle Allen, another Harvard professor (and a black woman), as a candidate for president of the university at this time, and her publication list and scholarship far outstrips Claudine Gay’s. So, why choose Gay, when there looks to have been a much academically stronger intersectional candidate?

I think the answer lies in the Supreme Court. The case Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College was decided this last summer, but acceptance of the case by the Supreme Court happened in January of 2022. Harvard had managed to get its affirmative action admission criteria all the way through the Court of Appeals, but once the SCOTUS chose to hear the appeal, they had to have known that this would be a BIG problem for them. It is my contention that choosing Claudine Gay, a DEI devotee above all other things, especially academic scholarship, was Harvard’s way of preemptively flipping a middle finger to the Supreme Court. Gay was named president in December 2022, but that was AFTER the court heard arguments on October 31, 2022 – arguments they knew went badly for Harvard’s affirmative action program. The writing was on the wall for Harvard, and I think choosing Claudine Gay as president after those arguments, and seeing which way SCOTUS was blowing, was both a “f**k you” to the court, and a firewall against giving up on affirmative action. After all, Claudine Gay was a living representation of affirmative action/DEI policy, and if Harvard had her in place, then the “Corporation” could work around that pesky SCOTUS ruling by simply having Gay push DEI as the highest ideal held by Harvard. Just look at Harvard’s statement after the SCOTUS decision – which Gay co-signed as both dean and as president-elect:

We write today to reaffirm the fundamental principle that deep and transformative teaching, learning, and research depend upon a community comprising people of many backgrounds, perspectives, and lived experiences. That principle is as true and important today as it was yesterday. So too are the abiding values that have enabled us—and every great educational institution—to pursue the high calling of educating creative thinkers and bold leaders, of deepening human knowledge, and of promoting progress, justice, and human flourishing.

For almost a decade, Harvard has vigorously defended an admissions system that, as two federal courts ruled, fully complied with longstanding precedent. In the weeks and months ahead, drawing on the talent and expertise of our Harvard community, we will determine how to preserve, consistent with the Court’s new precedent, our essential values.

Gay is a true believer in DEI, and that’s what the “Corporation” was counting on. This was their attempt to preserve what they could of their precious little leftist bubble, without putting anything about an actual admissions policy in writing. Too bad for them that Gay didn’t believe in putting anything in writing, either, and used other people’s writing to get by.

Also too bad for the “Corporation” that the anti-Semitism of Harvard post-October 7th drew too many eyes, and that Claudine Gay was exposed as a coward when it came to defending Jewish students against threats of violence – all because she is a true believer in DEI. Harvard got exactly what they wanted, but when a moment of actual crisis came, Gay failed quite publicly and spectactularly. Harvard the Corporation thought they could just wait the moment out. And that’s when Rufo, Brunet, and Sibarium started bringing the receipts – right when Claudine Gay stood prominently in the public eye.

Will Harvard be chastened by its failure to flip off the Supreme Court’s ruling, or reconsider their positions on DEI, with the resignation of Claudine Gay? No. The rot goes much deeper than one university president. Academia as a whole needs a full and complete reckoning and reformation, in that order. There are many Claudine Gays out there on college campuses – and Claudine Gay is going nowhere, she’s just moving back into her old office at Harvard – just waiting for their turn at power. Academia needs to be stripped of its exalted perch as conferrers of status and credentialing, and return to actual education and critical thinking. But since the current leadership of the “Poison Ivies” shows no inclination to self-correct, the public will have to do the correcting for them. And if that means the complete collapse of the financial structure of higher education, then so be it.

Featured image: Claudine Gay at her inauguration as president of Harvard on September 29, 2023, cropped, from the Flickr account of Governor Maura Healey of Massachussetts, photo by Charlotte Hysen/Governor’s Press Office, Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 DEED)