What I Defend When I Defend Claudine Gay
Don't be fooled: Republicans don't care about plagiarism or antisemitism. They only care about taking over American education at every level, and in every state
I see that New York Times columnist John McWhorter decided to use his platform this morning to join the dogpile that continues, despite the resignation of Harvard’s first African American president. “Claudine Gay Was Not Driven Out Because She Is Black,” is the headline, and the story affirms that plagiarism, not racism, was Gay’s ultimate undoing.
“I don’t think the notion that racism was substantially to blame for Claudine Gay’s trouble holds up,” McWhorter writes:
Nor does it seem that Gay was ousted on the basis of her race in the aftermath of her Dec. 5 testimony before Congress on the topic of antisemitism on campus. Of three university presidents who attended, only one resigned under duress shortly after the hearing, and she — Liz Magill of Penn — was white.
No, the charge that ultimately led to Gay’s resignation was plagiarism, of which more than 40 alleged examples were ultimately unearthed. And plagiarism and related academic charges have of course also brought down white people at universities many times.
Really! Relax, white people. No racism there; one of you was treated equally horribly! And—look! Plagiarism!
This is sloppy, wishful, arrogant—and utterly incorrect—thinking. It is also vintage McWhorter. An academic and a linguist at Columbia University, McWhorter can frequently be found deploying his authority as a Black scholar to reassure white New York Times readers that Americans live in a society where only virtue, not race, matters.
As importantly, McWhorter’s rhetorical style is not to start conversations, which is the job of an opinion writer, but to end them, usually in service of a small “c” conservative agenda. Not unlike many pundits, McWhorter usually writes as if he is a universal insider, and today’s column is a particularly glaring example of the flaws in this intellectual style. He is, in fact, an outsider; a professor at Columbia who literally has no idea what conversations Gay’s detractors at Harvard had about her. None. He doesn’t know what the racial context of Harvard’s decision-making was. He doesn’t know what was said as Republicans and their political consultants strategized the hearings and deployed a public relations strategy designed to remove her. He doesn’t know any more about what really happened at Harvard, or who Claudine Gay is, than you or I do.
Worse, McWhorter decides to know less. He walls off the obvious: that white supremacy is a feature, not a bug, of the Republican party. He ignores the evidence of the racism that contextualizes the relentless assault on Gay: repeated attacks the Republican party has waged on African American students and faculty, not just in the year since it assumed the House majority, but for the several decades it has taken to dismantle affirmative action. Nor is McWhorter willing to hold “racism” and “plagiarism” in his head as intersecting categories that could be at work simultaneously.
McWhorter seems not to know that, in the Republican party, to be a Black intellectual and not be conservative, is to be inherently unworthy of the most trivial achievements, much less grand ones.
But McWhorter also ignores an obvious fact. The Congressional hearings held in December were not designed to fight antisemitism. This is perfectly obvious, because since 2016, the GOP has made a point of coddling, recruiting, and promoting antisemites.
The hearings were designed to decapitate three of the finest universities in the United States and intimidate the rest of them into adopting revanchist policies that stifle speech and inquiry about race and gender. They were designed to bully three presidents at three wealthy, prestigious, universities into submission. They were designed to empower reactionary Board members and donors who were unable to accomplish this on their own (minority rule, anyone?)
What the December 5 hearings were not about was education, scholarly integrity, or academic standards.
Instead, they were political theater, and when you put on a play you choose characters, you don’t just let them walk on stage randomly. You choose them for a reason. Each one has a part to play. Magill’s was to be the embattled university president who just needed a little push to get her offstage. Kornbluth’s was to be a woman in a scientific world where women are second class citizens.
Gay’s designated role, from the beginning, was to be Undeserving and Black. Anyone who does not recognize that is a fool.
And yet, the world is full of fools, sometimes very well educated ones. Both Penn and Harvard capitulated to bullying by donors, Board members, and illiberal politicians. Magill, already in a weakened position on her campus because of donor rage at her administration’s inability, or unwillingness, to contain pro-Palestinian protests on campus, resigned on December 9, 2023, along with Board chair Scott Bok. Gay, similarly under attack for protests that critics characterize as antisemitic, seemed to have mustered sufficient support from her community and board. That was when they pulled out the plagiarism accusations. When the first round failed to dislodge Gay, there was a second round, which caused the Harvard Corporation to offer her the opportunity to resign last week. Now, some are calling for Board chair Penny Pritzker’s head too, for the imagined sin of having chosen Gay in the first place.
MIT’s Sally Kornbluth, the president of MIT, survives. For now.
“TWO DOWN,” two members of the GOP caucus have tweeted, indicating that they are intensifying efforts to push out Kornbluth too. Despite the fact that the MIT community continues to stand behind her, billionaire Harvard alum William Ackman, who helped Republicans by leading a media campaign against Gay, claims he won’t stop until Kornbluth is gone too. The revelation that his wife, Neri Oxman Ackerman’s plagiarized numerous passages of her dissertation from Wikipedia (Dear God in heaven!) has only caused Ackman to double down on this threat, and extend it to the entire MIT faculty.
I will be criticized for saying this, but the plagiarism accusations against Claudine Gay are a distraction on the scale of “but her emails.” You remember that, right? After a three-year investigation, we learned in 2019 that Hilary Clinton had mishandled classified materials, but not broken any laws or compromised national security. Similarly, no one has proven to me that Claudine Gay stole other people’s ideas, or that by breaking protocols of quotation in works she cited fundamentally compromised arguments in her published work. I would like due process, please.
Let me be clear: it’s McWhorter’s business whether he chooses to be in denial about American racism, or that white supremacy is a feature of the Republican party, not a bug. In my world, this is what we call “academic freedom”and “reasoned debate”—he makes an argument, I’ll make an another. May the best argument prevail.
But no academic should support political interference with the structures and procedures of university self-governance, and that includes plagiarism accusations and the right to appoint their own faculty and officers. To do so is to support the Republican Party’s primary agenda: political control of education, and replacing factual knowledge with partisan pablum. When a university-based intellectual supports any piece of this agenda, particularly by spreading misinformation to audiences who do not understand how universities work, that person helps to move this country further towards ignorance and illiberalism.
So, here’s the news, John McWhorter. The barbarians have already breached the gates, and you just offered them a sandwiches and bottles of water. Furthermore, if you are focused on plagiarism as the reason why outside forces pushed Magill and Gay out of Harvard, you are not only wrong, but you have fallen for the oldest Trumpian trick in the book. That trick is: “Oh, look over there—a squirrel!” Or more familiarly, “But her emails!” In other words, there is something really important happening in front of you—maybe it’s a political party preparing to nominate a candidate facing close to 100 felony counts and civil litigation that has cost him over $400 million in damages and lawyer’s fees so far—and instead, you elevate GOP operatives hyping a minor sin into an unforgivable scandal.
I want to stipulate that I don’t think academics, or any writer, should lift someone else’s work, deliberately or by mistake. At best, it is careless and at worst, it is lazy, but in the age of searchable text, what we are learning is that lots of smart, accomplished people do it by accident. I don’t know why these cited but duplicative passages appeared in Claudine Gay’s scholarship, or what it means in relation to her body of work—but, I might add, neither does anyone else, since there has as yet been no comprehensive due process at Harvard to give us an answer to this question.
And by the way? The GOP seems perfectly comfortable allowing profiteering tech companies to put AI’s out there that are not only for-profit plagiarism machines but also could not do what they do without stealing the intellectual property of people like me.
The Republican party doesn’t give a rat’s ass about academic integrity or, for that matter, the safety of Jewish students. What they do care about is remaking the American education system as we know it, and by any means necessary. This has been true since Ronald Reagan became Governor of California in 1967 and began the process of defunding the finest educational system in the nation. What we are seeing now is a multi-pronged operation to see what can give conservatives political control over this nation’s most precious resource even in places where they do not have executive or legislative power: Massachusetts and Pennsylvania.
We know what they want, because where Republicans do have majority power, they have systematically conducted a war on knowledge. In a matter of weeks Florida In the name of intellectual diversity, governor and presidential primary candidate Ron DeSantis tore progressive New College of Florida down to its studs, scattered its faculty, and salted its intellectual fields. Nothing but baseball and conservative thought will ever grow there again. Florida faculty are retiring and heading to other states in unprecedented numbers, and I suspect this is an outcome DeSantis and his cronies desired. We have seen political attacks dismantle a national African American Studies curriculum devised by experts, with the cooperation of the craven, New Jersey-based, College Board. We have seen state laws strip thousands of books from libraries and schools, and eliminate courses from curricula, creating barriers of ignorance between students and decades of knowledge in art, theater, literature, history, social science—and even science.
The assault on Claudine Gay, and her fellow presidents, are of a piece with these attacks. Racism, and the myth that liberals and progressives hate white people, is the fuel that drives them.
Don’t be fooled.
And whatever you do, don’t look at that squirrel over there. You’ll miss the main event.
Updates on past stories:
Keeping up with the Zieglers. We don’t know whether Florida GOP chair and Ron DeSantis ally Christian Ziegler will be convicted of raping the woman with whom he and wife Bridget (a cofounder of Moms for Liberty) were collectively having an affair. If he is, it will because he recorded it on his phone. “In a police interview on Nov. 2, Ziegler claimed the encounter was consensual and showed detectives a two-and-a-half minute video of the sex act he’d taken on his iPhone, according to the new affidavit,” Michael Barfield writes at The Florida Trident. Ziegler’s lawyer, perhaps trying to bolster the assertion that the encounter was all good clean fun, claimed that Christian sent it to both the alleged victim and to Bridget. But here’s the thing: “The woman…told police she never sent such an Instagram message and had no knowledge Ziegler had recorded the encounter. Bridget Ziegler also said she knew nothing about the video, Sarasota police Det. Megan Buck wrote in the affidavit.” Best news? Even if the prosecutors believe they don’t have the evidence for a sexual assault charge, in Florida it’s against the law, and punishable for up to five years, to record someone having sex without their permission. (January 2, 2024)
Write In Biden could really be a thing. New Hampshire Democrats’ campaign to get voters to write in Joe Biden, who is not on the presidential primary ballot because the party made South Carolina the first primary state, is putt-putting along on a $70,000 budget. In mid-December, I speculated that “a weird kind of revenge campaign waged by the Democratic party of one of the smallest, most politically insignificant states in the nation.” Am I wrong? Maybe. A couple of weeks ago, I talked to one of the Granite State Write In folks on background, who said that distress about being bumped was tempered by a strong belief that it is a mistake not to begin supporting Biden now, since the stakes of the 2024 campaign are historically high. There are only 60,000 registered Democratic voters (as opposed to 250,000 registered Republicans)—not enough to send them all over to the Republican primary to vote for Nikki Haley and make a difference, but enough, bolstered by Christie and Haley voters, to potentially pull out the state for Biden in the general.
Short takes:
Here’s a way to get rid of transgender people: eliminate gender! “In one of the most sweeping anti-trans bills filed in the country, Florida state Representative Dean Black’s `What Is A Woman?’ Act would eliminate the term gender from government documents, including driver's licenses, and require instead for the sex assigned at birth to be listed under sex,” writes Jacob Ogles at The Advocate. “As originally drafted, the bill takes some specific aim at political parties that allow transgender people to serve as committeemen or committeewomen based on their gender identity.” But it would also require anyone applying for a government ID to sign a legal affidavit that the box they checked was the same as the sex on their original birth certificate, thus effectively preventing trans people from moving to, or living in, Florida. (January 6, 2024)
What wins elections? Reproductive freedom wins elections—which is why Florida’s Republican Governor, Ron DeSantis, doesn’t want a referendum that would legalize access to viability, about 24 weeks, on the ballot in 2024. Activists now have the signatures to reverse state laws that currently ban the procedure at 15 weeks, a time frame Republicans are trying to reduce to six. State Attorney General Ashley Moody has petitioned the Florida Supreme Court “to disqualify the amendment,” writes Tori Otten at The New Republic. “She argues the language is misleading, claiming that the use of the word `viability’ could have multiple meanings.” Really? Not medical ones. Meanwhile, “In November, state Republican Representative Rick Roth quietly introduced a measure to raise the threshold for ballot initiatives to 66.7 percent of votes—just above the definite level of support for abortion access in Florida.” (January 5, 2024)
Readers will be shocked to learn that, according to a study done by JAMA Internal Medicine, American women are stockpiling abortion pills, and that the practice spikes every time a new limitation is on the horizon. “Studying data from the nonprofit organization Aid Access, whose doctors prescribe and mail abortion pills to people in all 50 states,” Julianne McShane reports at Mother Jones, “researchers found that the average number of daily requests for advance provision increased nearly tenfold—to about 247 a day—in the seven weeks between the leak of the Dobbsdraft and when the Supreme Court issued its final decision.” (January 3, 2024)
I think Claire, that this is one of your best columns that I’ve read, and it’s helpful to have lucid, righteous rage expressed.
Brilliant on multiple registers … thank you Claire.