The Review: The REAL real Harvard scandal

Attempts to intimidate the press are incompatible with "veritas." ADVERTISEMENT [The Review Logo]( You can also [read this newsletter on the web](. Or, if you no longer want to receive this newsletter, [unsubscribe](. When the news broke that the political scientist Claudine Gay, accused of plagiarism, had resigned as president of Harvard University, I happened to be reading the first volume of the Spanish writer Javier Marías’s novel Your Face Tomorrow, which, like much of that author’s work, concerns the circulation of language. “Most people forget,” the narrator says, in Margaret Jull Costa’s translation, “how or from whom they learned what they know, and there are even people who believe that they were the first to discover whatever it might be, a story, an idea, an opinion, a piece of gossip, an anecdote, a lie, a joke, a pun, a maxim, a title, a story, an aphorism, a slogan, a speech, a quotation or an entire text, which they proudly appropriate, convinced that they are its progenitors, or perhaps they do, in fact, know they are stealing, but push the idea far from their thoughts and thus manage to conceal it.” What about a line or two in the acknowledgments section of a dissertation? In the most trivial but also the weirdest of Gay’s apparent misdeeds, her 1997 dissertation [lifts]( language thanking her adviser and her family directly from a 1996 book by Jennifer Hochschild. For instance, whereas Hochschild writes that “Sandy Jencks showed me the importance of getting the data right and of following where they lead without fear or favor,” Gay thanks her adviser, Gary King, who “reminded me of the importance of getting the data right and following where they lead without fear or favor.” Whereas Hochschild said that Jencks “drove me much harder than I sometimes wanted to be driven,” Gay said the same of her family — they, too, “drove me harder than I sometimes wanted to be driven” (not, however, “much” harder). I adapted the foregoing sentences from Anemona Hartocollis and Sheelagh McNeill’s New York Times reporting, although I believe I have remained on the right side of the law. Like Marías’s narrator, I “always do my best to remember my sources” — and to name them, as I am sure you do too. But one starts to feel squeamish, writing about stolen writing. As Ian Bogost put it in an Atlantic [essay]( occasioned by Gay’s resignation, he has never plagiarized — “at least as far as I know.” But he is certainly not able to subject his own old dissertation to the plagiarism-detection software iThenticate without feelings of trepidation. (I wrote that sentence all on my own, although a Google search shows that the phrase “without feelings of trepidation” returns 402 results, far fewer than “with feelings of trepidation,” which returns 5,910.) Waiting for the software to offer a verdict feels a bit like waiting to hear from the radiologist whether an odd growth is malignant or benign. (Bogost originated the medical analogy, although I have revised it in paraphrase. And I write “a bit” where he writes “a little.” Is this kosher?) (The phrase “Is this kosher?” returns 98,900 results on Google.) The fact is that many instances of Gay’s “duplicative language,” to use Harvard’s term for it, are more consequential than the borrowings from Hochschild, although none on its own looks all that serious. She seems to be, as Tyler Austin Harper [writes]( in The Atlantic, “guilty of serial, if low-stakes, plagiarism” — a fact which, given the conservative campaign against her, many of her defenders do not want to see. The “true scandal,” Harper says, “is that so many journalists and academics were willing, are still willing, to redefine plagiarism to suit their politics.” For Harper, Harvard Law’s Charles Fried exemplifies this unprincipled denialism. “If it came from some other quarter,” Fried told the Times, “I might be granting it some credence … But not from these people.” SPONSOR CONTENT | ACUE [Effective Teaching Proves to Drive More than Student Outcomes]( NEWSLETTER [Sign Up for the Teaching Newsletter]( Find insights to improve teaching and learning across your campus. Delivered on Thursdays. To read this newsletter as soon as it sends, [sign up]( to receive it in your email inbox. Fried’s comments might be wrongheaded, but to my mind, the true scandal lies elsewhere, and doesn’t have much to do with Gay or with plagiarism per se. The true scandal lies in Harvard’s response to the New York Post back in October, when reporters from the Post [asked]( about the allegations of plagiarism. Harvard had the legal firm [Clare Locke]( — “dedicated to litigating complex defamation matters and representing clients facing high-profile reputational attacks” — send the Post a letter denying all charges and plainly threatening litigation. “Let me be perfectly clear,” Tom Clare, a partner at Clare Lock and one of the letter’s signatories, wrote, “so there is no misunderstanding of my clients’ position in any future legal proceedings made necessary by the publication of these defamatory falsehoods.” If the Post goes ahead with its article, that “will subject the paper — and each of the individuals involved in the decision to publish — to legal liability for defamation. Harvard and President Gay stand together in their determination that the proposed article must not be published.” This cynical attempt at press intimidation is incompatible with the commitment to “veritas” Harvard boasts on its shield. And, because freedom of the press is a cognate of academic freedom, it suggests that the Harvard Corporation’s formal respect for the latter might not be very strong. How secure should internal critics of Harvard feel, knowing that the university is willing to unleash the big legal guns on the New York Post? This is the second time in recent memory that the leadership of a major private university exploited the threat of defamation law to quash an inquiry into potential research misconduct on the part of its president. In February of [last year]( Marc Tessier-Lavigne — former president of Stanford University, who resigned after extensive research misconduct in his lab was exposed — had the legal firm Cooley send Theo Baker, the Stanford undergraduate-student journalist who broke the story, a series of threatening letters. If universities want to arrest their decline in public trust, they might begin by refraining from threatening the media for reporting on them. ADVERTISEMENT SUBSCRIBE TO THE CHRONICLE Enjoying the newsletter? [Subscribe today]( for unlimited access to essential news, analysis, and advice. The Latest THE REVIEW | ESSAY [A Decade of Ideological Transformation Comes Undone]( By Len Gutkin [STORY IMAGE]( What just happened? ADVERTISEMENT THE REVIEW | OPINION [How Not to Defend Claudine Gay]( By Aleksandar Stević [STORY IMAGE]( She was the target of a political witch hunt. But the facts are the facts. THE REVIEW | OPINION [We Know Diversity Statements Are Political Litmus Tests]( By Komi Frey [STORY IMAGE]( It’s time to end this discriminatory practice. THE REVIEW | ESSAY [Why Americans Love to Hate Harvard]( By Derek Bok [STORY IMAGE]( A former president of the university explains how we got here. THE REVIEW | ESSAY [Everyone Talks About ‘Critical Theory.’ What Is It?]( By Peter E. Gordon [STORY IMAGE]( On the history of a contested concept. Recommended - “In Kluge’s efforts to curtail self-pity (his own or that of his initial 1970s West German readers), he can seem oddly hardened, even inhumane as a narrator.” In the New York Review of Books, Katie Trumpener [writes about]( Martin Chalmers’s new translation of Alexander Kluge’s 1977 collection Neue Geschichten. - “Exercising the decolonial option further activates an impressively obfuscatory array of official decolonial neologisms, too overlapping, idiosyncratic, and numbingly baroque to catalogue fully here.” In Jacobin, Neil Larsen on “[the reactionary jargon of decoloniality]( - “Moyn’s is a line of argument that also, in the end, fails to acknowledge just how difficult it is to improve the human condition in our fallen world, and how easily the path of perfection can turn astray, towards horror.” In Liberties, David A. Bell [critiques]( Samuel Moyn’s recent work on liberalism. For more on Moyn and liberalism, check out our [roundtable]( from late last year. Write to me at len.gutkin@chronicle.com. Yours, Len Gutkin FROM THE CHRONICLE STORE [Fostering Students' Free Expression - Buy Now]( [Fostering Students' Free Expression]( Many colleges are trying to expose students to views and ideas that challenge their own thinking. [Order your copy]( to explore how professors and administrators are cultivating environments that encourage discussion of difficult topics — in the classroom and beyond. NEWSLETTER FEEDBACK [Please let us know what you thought of today's newsletter in this three-question survey](. This newsletter was sent to {EMAIL}. [Read this newsletter on the web](. [Manage]( your newsletter preferences, [stop receiving]( this email, or [view]( our privacy policy. © 2024 [The Chronicle of Higher Education]( 1255 23rd Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20037