The Claudine Gay Problem

If Gay is just a sign that modern scholarship is an intellectual sham... why should the sign be taken down?

It is late into the Claudine Gay “plagiarism” saga, but I use her full name here and in the title so that the subject of this post will remain legible once the headlines have been forgotten.

Note that twitter now requires a login to see all relevant material attached to linked tweets.

The essentials will already be familiar to most readers in the present. Just over¹ six months ago, Harvard appointed its first Black president, Claudine Gay, whose field of research and instruction is “African-American studies.” This appointment was unremarkable in light of internal operations, as Gay had served for five years prior as dean of Harvard’s largest faculty (Arts and Sciences (FAS), which encompasses most of Harvard College and much of the University). In this prior post she openly prioritized “diversity,” “culture,” “being able to be the place we aspire to be,” and other frivolous aims², and oversaw the punitive, me-too-adjacent deposition of the College’s first two Black deans to the obvious approval of the institution at large.

However, the scandal concerns not her teaching or leadership, but her scholarship.

Last month, Christopher Rufo and Chris Brunet produced a viral exposé of substantial instances of “plagiarism” in Gay’s academic oeuvre, seductively highlighting multiple examples of lifted material in her PhD thesis. At present, examples of borrowed phrasing without citation (or similar gaffs) have been found (it is claimed) in some 8 of her 17 publications.³ The narrative timeline is provided on Rufo’s substack:

“The Conservative Mastermind Behind Claudine Gay’s Ouster”

Harvard University is an emblem of American intellectual and economic prestige both at home and on the world stage; as such it reflects modern revolutions in the cultural and demographic basis of that same prestige, from the WASP stock of the early 20th Century, to post-War (proto-diversity and) meritocracy, to modern liberal-ideological party-rule by elites sorted by diversity credentials — for better or worse. Harvard is American intellect and American power.

It is more than this — many mundane things. But it is accurate for the university’s first Black president to comment that the campaign to expose the lackluster standard and poor integrity of her scholarship represents “[a] skirmish in a broader war to unravel public faith in pillars of American society.”⁴

Harvard is a symbol; Gay was a symbol.

So what was Gay a symbol of?

The disconnect between internal and external

From an internal standpoint, as best as I can glean, Gay’s scholarly merits, her integrity and adherence to Harvard’s plagiarism policy, were never relevant to begin with.

This is not to say that all that mattered was her sex and race.

Rather that she was apparently an effective administrative reformer; she advanced an administrative “high-low” alliance with the student body, which reduced the ability of faculty to uphold and impose previously long-standing boundaries on either. This is what she boasted of achieving as dean of FAS, proving in that commission (it would seem) that she understood how to invade unfamiliar nodes in the hard sciences to further the administrative agenda of prioritizing “student needs” even in insular branches.

“We struggle sometimes to find the right balance between being super-responsive to faculty needs,” she said, “and also elevating and articulating the responsibility faculty carry to students, to the institution, and to one another.”

In faculty recruitment and retention, she amplified, Harvard did not stress those reciprocal obligations enough. She sought to “chip away at the excessive deference [to faculty priorities like, who knows, teaching students things] and pair it with a greater sense of collective ownership and responsibility for making this place work for everyone.” […]

She immersed herself in the sciences and engineering (“I always go to them,” she emphasized, to see how the work proceeds in situ, and, she laughed, was welcomed to tour labs “as long as I didn’t touch anything”), athletics, and such diverse realms as the events staff.⁵

From the external standpoint, then, any notion that Gay’s appointment and swift resignation reflect a story of a “diversity hire” proving to be a fraud would seem completely off the mark with the reality (unless of course the above quotations are totally at odds with that same reality; how would I know). Even if Gay’s sex and race were assets in her administrative reform — who would want to tell a Black, female Dean that she can’t tour their lab? — this still means she was the best person for the job in the modern, “intersectionalist” American elite.

Gay the administrator

Thus, an actual look at Gay’s administrative record reveals that Gay’s appointment was fitting.

Harvard represents the American elite; the American elite is a de facto communist one-party ruling class of educated administrators. Advancing an agenda of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion — which is to say, of replacing competent white people, or men of any race, wherever they are to be found in American business and media — is merely how the Party effectively pursues the same “grow or die” imperative that faces any human organization. “Elevating and articulating the responsibility faculty carry to students, to the institution, and to each other” is exactly what we should expect to be going on at America’s premier universities in the present conditions.

In this sense, Gay should not have been made to resign based on her published work; it is a bit nonsensical — like making her resign for not knowing how to drive a truck — and cannot in-of-itself change anything that Gay’s appointment truly reflected about the University’s present function in society and culture.⁶ (The more substantial opposition to this “present function,” among disaffected alumni who were unaware of what the DEI agenda really is, was already underway in response to Gay’s tacit approval of student antisemitism in October. See Bill Ackman’s recent remarks about touring the campus.)

Gay the academic

And so the whole affair is, again as Gay wrote in the New York Times, merely a “skirmish” against what America’s “pillars” are today.

If it means anything, it is only because of how from the outside Gay is a symbol of something different than what she really is: The authority on which the Party — the media-state, our educated elite ruling class — bases its day-to-day rule over the lay public at large.

This authority is obviously a fraud. Everyone already knows it — the news lies, the “scientists” often do not have a clue what they are talking about, the Anti-Racist Social Priests are more and more difficult to distinguish from the Bad Evil White Racists who they were elevated to find and destroy:⁷

You mean… Blacks do want to destroy America?

You’re saying… we should assume this?

So Black women have to work harder even with plagiarizing?

The central conceit of American society is that institutions have authority because “the experts” understand better what is true; this conceit is obviously null and void if the experts now wantonly contradict themselves from one day to the next.

And so now that everyone knows this authority is a fraud, the cultural and political power of the institutions-contradicting-themselves-from-day-to-day rests entirely on maintaining a fiction that those institutions don’t know this. America is trapped at the ending moment of “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, wherein (it may surprise the reader) nothing actually changes once the people realize the emperor is naked, for he and his retinue simply pretend to still believe differently.

And so in this sense, Gay does matter. She has exposed and eroded the fiction of the Party’s authority, and it is this fiction which is literally the “pillar of American society.”

Campaigns of this kind often start with attacks on education and expertise, because these are the tools that best equip communities to see through propaganda [citation?]. But such campaigns don’t end there [citation?]. Trusted institutions of all types — from public health agencies to news organizations — will continue to fall victim to coordinated attempts to undermine their legitimacy and ruin their leaders’ credibility [citation?].⁸

Gay matters - but not because she “plagiarized”

But a bit of accuracy is important here. Gay’s trail of lifted passages, or at least the lowest-common-denominator which has been set in gathering the complaints against her, hardly counts as plagiarizing — but it is a symptom of modern academic rot.

In this post I find myself disagreeing and agreeing with Igor Chudov at the same time. Gay’s transgressions are rather anodyne and commonplace by modern standards. But that is the problem. It is put well in this tweet by “QuasLacrimas”:

QuasLacrimas (twitter.com)

“Western academics have been losing touch between citing a claim, and that claim being true in fact.”

This is precisely what Gay’s “crime” is. Often, indeed, citing lifted passages would have made no difference to the substance of the work in question. To take one example with sourcing, context, and highlights provided by The Free Beacon’s Aaron Sibarium:

freebeacon.com

It is simply doubtful that the reader of this essay would have imagined that Gay didn’t depend on some other source for this claim. In fact, the reader would have to be crazy to imagine that any of the factual claims in the essay (pdf) are not sourced from someone else’s research, given the essay’s didactic and glossy presentation of Facts-as-such rather than as claims.

In Brazil, the ideas of “whitening” (branqueamento) and “racial democracy” are the ideologies which [paradoxically] perpetuate discrimination. These beliefs have maintained a system of individual [as opposed to group] opportunity and individual responsibility which has hampered the development of racial identity and of political organization based on race.

This is all merely border-line dogma; even if the claims are true, the purpose of describing them is merely to inform the reader “what they should think.” And unless these claims were for instance part of the introduction to a book of original research on the topic, again, the reader couldn’t really imagine that the thesis here or scant historical examples included are the product of original research on Gay’s part.

And yet not a single claim is cited.

The modern pointlessness of citation

This is not to defend Gay’s work — this would be ironic of me, since it is precisely opposition to this treatment of “facts” that inspires the title and approach of this blog (and since I have taken more care to cite others’ work in this post than she has in her academic work).

It is merely to point out that, for the kind of writing Gay was doing, and the kind of reading Gay’s readers were doing, citation was pointless.

And indeed, citation today is (like peer review) pointless. At least in practice when it comes to accuracy and originality (obviously it still helps a reader find other relevant publications). This is true even in “harder” sciences like biology. It does nothing, absolutely zilch, to make it more likely that false or misinterpreted claims borrowed from others will be identified and challenged before or after publication.

Consider (severe) Covid-19 and “cytokine storm.” The original paper describing the “clinical features” of Covid-19, Huang, et al., has now been cited 58,012 times, and usually (in my encounters) is the root “source” for most claims made afterward that “cytokine storm” is a feature of Covid-19.

This was a global phenomenon; but the globalization of biology is part-and-parcel with the degradation of American research and the replication crisis. At all events, Bhaskar, et al.’s 2020 paper, featuring authors from multiple countries including the US, is representative:

Cytokine Storm in Covid-19

Observations from the first cohort of 41 COVID-19 patients in Wuhan, which led to the discovery of the novel SARS-CoV-2 virus, revealed a cytokine profile similar to that of secondary hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis (sHLH), a hyperinflammatory condition triggered by viral infection [citation here to Huang, et al.]

But cytokine storm was never a feature of Covid-19. The supplemental appendix of Huang, et al. (Fig 1) itself shows unremarkable elevations of cytokines (you would expect some elevation during an infection) and unremarkable differences in non- and ICU cohorts (you would expect some increase in the more severe infections). (See more here; when compared to influenza, cytokines are lower or similar in Covid-19.)

Most critically, none of the hundreds or thousands of papers mentioning cytokine storm in Covid-19 bothered to discuss the findings of Huang, et al. or other papers in a way that substantiated the claim that cytokine storms were actually happening. Substantiation is irrelevant; the claim itself is the fact. So what actually is even the point of citing claims?

This laziness in global and American biology research feeds off of, and may one day metastasize into, an even more fundamental deficiency in Chinese research; and again cytokine storm is a prime example. A common feature of Huang, et al. and other papers out of China is that in the term “cytokine storm,” “storm” need not bear any relevance to reality.

And so for example, a fresh-off-the-presses paper by Kang, et al. reports on findings from Chinese cases after the end of the zero-Covid policy. In the very first sentence the claim is made,

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is associated with immune dysregulation and cytokine storm.

They conclude by claiming,

Our data shows that the magnitude of cytokine storm is associated with the disease severity and mortality.

But most cytokine levels are (of course) within or only mildly above the normal range:

This reflects a clear, outright indifference to the meaning of the English term “storm” (why not, it isn’t their word anyway). It further represents indifference to the distinction between correlation and causation — akin to blaming the amount of blood-loss for how many times people are shot. And I did not produce this example by cherry-picking; it was the most recent paper with Chinese surnames in Huang, et al.’s “cited by” roll in pubmed.

(This is all of course a tangent, but it is an important one — after all, it only concerns the most intensely researched disease of the last 4 years, across the entire world.)

But if such a treatment of facts is par for the course with Chinese biology research, why aren’t American researchers able to critically interpret claims in papers like Huang, et al.? The answer has already been given:

Modern academia is no longer able to make a distinction between a claim of a fact and an (actual) fact.

In such a condition, when no one is any longer reading anyone else’s work skeptically or critically, what good is a citation? In fact, the reader interested in what is actually true might be better off heeding the opposite advice: Beware the openly borrowed claim.

And so, is it better for Gay to have resigned?

This is the question, but I do not purport to have an answer.

As long as American academia is no longer capable of understanding the distinction between claims and facts, isn’t it — it would seem — better that Harvard have a president who everyone knows doesn’t even try?

Indeed, why let her resign? It only restores the tawdry fiction, however temporarily, that Gay was an anomaly.

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1. Originally published as “not even.” January, however is month “one” and not “zero” of the calendar year.

2. John S. Rosenberg. “The Art of the Dean.” September-October 2021. Harvard Magazine.

3. Aaron Sibarium. “Harvard President Claudine Gay Hit With Six New Charges Of Plagiarism.” (January 1, 2024.) The Washington Free Beacon.

I don’t vouch for any of these numbers; I have only glanced at a sample of the identified problematic passages.

4. Claudine Gay. “What Just Happened at Harvard Is Bigger Than Me.” (Jan 3, 2024.) The New York Times.

5. (Rosenberg.)

6. Of course, her “internal” effectiveness as an administrator, or reformer, whatever, would have been harmed by this scandal, and in this sense the resignation is logical, and probably the shortest path to recovery of her career.

7. All three of these are examples of what the Online Right, after twitter user CovfefeAnon, would term “woke more correct.” Those harboring mainstream American conservative and centrist sentiments typically find it puzzling, however, that in the era of “woke” the left should have found its way to the same racial essentialism which the right was forced to abandon (in order to maintain political legitimacy in the decades after the Civil Rights era).

8. (Gay.)