Embattled Harvard President Claudine Gay might have had a more stressful holiday season, as her remarks on Capitol Hill concerning antisemitism earlier this month sparked an intense backlash. Neither Gay nor Sally Kornbluth of MIT or Liz Magill of the University of Pennsylvania could outright condemn calls for Jewish genocide on their respective campuses. They couldn’t even say it violated their school’s code of conduct.
We now know that calling for the genocide against Jews isn’t necessarily against the code against bullying and harassment at @Harvard and @Penn
— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) December 6, 2023
Let’s see how things are at MIT…
Turns lot that calling for genocide of Jews is OK as long as it’s only “public statements” pic.twitter.com/SY2cdEuhmC
Yes, there’s nuance regarding free speech, and there would have been a way to thread that needle, as FIRE president Greg Lukianoff noted with Bill Maher, but the three women came off as exceedingly apathetic to the growing calls from the far left to kill all Jews. Murder isn’t an academic exercise, ladies, and neither are these situations. There was a heinous terrorist attack against Israel on October 7; people have acted on these chants. Magill lost her president’s office at UPenn over this public relations fiasco. Gay remains safely sheltered under an umbrella of Harvard’s pro-terrorist and antisemitic faculty. Yet, the plagiarism scandal that’s bubbled up from this is more damning than the antisemitism-enabling episode before lawmakers.
Gay has hinged her career and reputation on these words, some of which are copied word-for-word with no attribution. This unrelated incident has snowballed to the point where a new review should be initiated, not just the one previously conducted by Harvard, who admitted they found “duplicative language” in Gay’s work. Even CNN has even pointed out instances of plagiarism in her career. Now, we learn that she was cagey about sharing the data from her 2001 paper, which got her tenure tracked at Stanford (via NY Post):
Harvard University president Claudine Gay, who has come under fire over accusations of plagiarism and antisemitism, is now seeing her work further scrutinized after it was revealed two professors questioned a data method she used in a 2001 Stanford paper that often resulted in “logical inconsistencies” — and she refused to share her research with them.
The 2001 study, titled “The Effect of Black Congressional Representation on Political Participation,” was one of four peer-reviewed articles that helped land Gay tenure at Stanford University, but its merit could not be properly reviewed by everyone, according to a post on the Dossier by Christopher Brunet.
In 2002, Michael C. Herron, the Remsen 1943 professor of quantitative social science at Dartmouth, and Kenneth W. Shotts, the David S. and Ann M. Barlow professor of political economy at Stanford Graduate School of Business, claimed to debunk the very foundation of Gay’s research.
At a conference of the Society for Political Methodology (PolMeth) that year, Herron and Shotts presented their research, finding inconsistencies in Gay’s paper where she concluded that the election of black Americans to Congress negatively affects white political involvement and rarely increases political engagement among black people.
While Herron and Shotts highlighted errors by other researchers using El-R, they noted that their probe into how Gay reached her conclusion and the stats she listed were limited because she refused to share her research with them.
“We were, however, unable to scrutinize Gay’s results because she would not release her dataset to us,” the researchers noted in their 2002 paper.
Let's just say it: this woman is a fraud. And Harvard should have done the right thing and dismissed her when UPenn’s Magill was shown the exit. It’s bad enough that the head of one of a prestigious higher education institution can’t deliver the simplest of responses regarding antisemitism and calls for Jewish genocide. There is no coming back from plagiarism and shoddy research in the world of academia, and Ms. Gay appears to have dabbled in both extensively.