No sooner had Claudine Gay’s resignation hit the airwaves, then the media started their apology tour for plagiarism. You see, it’s ok to plagiarize if you are one of the chosen ones.

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 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.

Oh, I see. If only we conservatives hadn’t gotten mad at Claudine Gay for her refusals to denounce the anti-semitism on campus and went digging into her scholarship, she’d still be President.

Harvard themselves had investigated Gay’s scholarship and found that her “duplicative work” as the New York Times described it, was just a minor mistake. 

The issues were found in Dr. Gay’s 1997 doctoral dissertation, in which Harvard said it had found two examples of “duplicative language without appropriate attribution.”

Last week, Harvard said that an earlier review had found two published articles that needed additional citations, and that Dr. Gay would request corrections.

Harvard really wanted this to go away. Except, by the mere fact of allowing Gay to correct her mistakes, they sent a signal to Harvard students and the public. Plagiarism is fine when WE do it. 

Plagiarism is passing off someone else’s work as your own. It is cheating. It is lying. It does and should call into question the credibility of that person and their work. 

As we are now finding out, a significant amount of Gay’s work was plagiarized. In The Crimson just three days ago, a Harvard student points out that low-level instances such as leaving out quotation marks and citations can lead to a student’s probation. 

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.

In my experience, when a student is found responsible for multiple separate Honor Code violations, they are generally required to withdraw — i.e., suspended — from the College for two semesters. Since the Council was established in 2015, roughly 16 percent of students who have appeared before us have been required to withdraw.

But again, it’s totally fine when the favored ones do it. 

Claudine Gay’s resignation as Harvard’s president for having repeatedly engaged in low-level plagiarism is a strange and sad ending to her brief tenure as a symbol in the culture wars. The tragicomedy of it lies in the disjuncture between the picayune scale of her sloppiness and the broader ideological stakes she came to symbolize. On those stakes, Gay was right. But on the morally insignificant matter that doomed her — the discovery that she had violated rules of attribution in her academic work — she was frustratingly defenseless.

According to Chait, because she was clumsy in handling her answers to Congresswoman Elise Stefanik’s questions about campus anti-semitism, that emboldened right-wing activists to attack Gay’s scholarship. 

Gay’s offenses were more minor. She sloppily failed to employ correct citations and quotes for her citations. Those errors were not necessary for her advancement. She could have fixed them easily.

For better or worse, though, Harvard maintains strict, unforgiving standards on plagiarism. Gay’s offenses, while immaterial to the main thrust of her work, would have invited stern punishment if committed by an undergraduate. So Harvard faced a terrible choice. Firing her would hand a victory to the braying mob. It would be seen as a repudiation of her careful attempts to defend free speech while denouncing antisemitism.

Will Harvard learn from this as Glenn Reynolds discusses here? I don’t think so. 

Chait misses an important point. Gay could not commit that Harvard anpplies its own policies esp on bullying uniformly. Sowell said when you get used to preferential treatment equal treatment is discrimination. She is the poster child of preferential treatment

— Patricia Richards (@par4160) January 3, 2024

Especially when the media is crafting this as ‘Republicans pounce’ and getting Community Noted for it. 

Harvard president's resignation highlights new conservative weapon against colleges: plagiarism https://t.co/GiVkT3LgUo

— The Associated Press (@AP) January 3, 2024

While the media works overtime to tell us that plagiarizing is ok if certain people do it, Harvard sends a signal of their own regarding Gay’s intellectual dishonesty and plagiarism. Instead of being fired entirely, she will keep her $1 million a year job as a political science professor. So much for accountability.

Feature Photo Credit: Stamp via iStock, cropped and modified