Higher education

Any political observer who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that the resignation of Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard University who was driven from her job this week, had nothing to do with plagiarism.There are all sorts of factors that make this obvious: there is the reality that Gay’s field, political science, is a data-driven discipline in which abstracts from one paper are not-infrequently copied as parts of a literature review in another, and that the borrowed phrases and summaries that account for Gay’s “plagiarism” are not crimes of theft but of sloppiness, with little bearing on the originality of her work.There is the fact that Gay’s “plagiarism” scandal arose belatedly, brought up in tenuous relation to a similarly fatuous and opportunistic false claim by the Republican congresswoman Elise Stefanik that Gay had abetted antisemitism at Harvard. (The same accusation also led to the ouster, last month, of the University of Pennsylvania president, M Elizabeth Magill).There is the fact that rightwing propagandists, prominently the anti-education crusader Christopher Rufo, openly admitted the pretextual nature of their plagiarism smear against Gay, and frankly spoke of their intention to manipulate the national media into creating a baseless controversy that would drive Gay, Harvard’s first Black president and only the second woman to lead the university, out of her job.But recounting all of this is tedious, and cedes the terms of the debate to the authors of this false controversy–fighting on their territory, arguing the questions they pose, giving good-faith rebuttals to allegations they do not pretend to believe even as they make them. As the sociologist Victor Ray put it, “Accepting the bad-faith framing is a choice to ally oneself with the bad-faith actors.”But this is what much of the mainstream media, over the past weeks of the so-called “controversy” over Gay’s tenure at Harvard, has been doing with unnerving enthusiasm. Between her congressional testimony in December and her resignation on Tuesday, the New York Times alone published more than 60 items about Gay, breathlessly covering alleged plagiarism in her 25-year-old dissertation; CNN joined in, granting credulous coverage to claims that Gay had plagiarized in graduate school and granting airtime to claims made by the likes of Bill Ackman, a billionaire hedge fund manager and Harvard donor who openly stated that he hoped to dislodge Gay because of his disdain for “DEI”, – the corporate euphemism for racial integration efforts.The flurry of coverage resulted in not so much a clear articulation of alleged misconduct by Gay as a vague fog of ill will that carried stench of scandal. The media seemed assured that Gay had done something wrong: maybe it was about academic integrity, or maybe it was about the supposed antisemitism on campus; maybe it was the racist subtext, all but declared by Gay’s rightwing critics, that a Black woman who attained a position of superlative prestige and authority could necessarily not have done so by merit. The media followed all this as if any of it was real, as if any of it mattered, proving themselves willing to serve as outlets for a rightwing propaganda effort that is wildly cynical, demonstrably sadistic, and avowedly indifferent to the truth.In reality, it is not just that Gay’s ouster has nothing to do with plagiarism: it is that it has nothing to do with Claudine Gay. Her resignation is merely the latest episode in the rightwing’s assault on education – a project that has increased in its virulence and success in recent years, but which has been decades in the making. Republicans hate education, and they have demonstrated this hate in both their policymaking and in the public theater of their cultural grievance.They defund and privatize public schools, and they attempt to make public enemies of teachers; they ban books, and force educators into the closet, and impose abstinence-only sex education. They manipulate Title IX to make universities hostile to women and deferential to rapists; they impose bizarre, invasive and lascivious rules that would compel period tracking and genital inspections for student athletes. They take over colleges and gut departments that might lead students to think critically about social hierarchies; through their partisans on the supreme court, they have now banned affirmative action in admissions. They dox student activists, harass and intimidate professors, and, now, purge administrators. This is the story that the media has been studiously ignoring, preferring to miss the forest of a coordinated anti-education effort for the trees of a flimsy, pretextual citation scandal. One has to ask: what are they so afraid of?It may be that Republicans are hostile to education because they believe that the world they want to usher in – one in which hierarchies of race and gender are entrenched, naturalized and given the force of law – is not possible to impose except on a population that has been kept ignorant. But the fact is that if the university system were as strong an incubator of pro-equality, pro-democracy social forces as the Republican machine seems to think it is, then it would not be so vulnerable to such transparently bad-faith attacks.In reality, the American university is weakened – low on public funding, reliant on underpaid, contingent and dissatisfied academic labor, and subject to the whims of very wealthy donors. In such conditions of precarity and scarcity, true freedom of thought has long been something of an fiction for academics and students alike, who know well, for instance, that they cannot report sexual harassment or openly support Palestinian freedom without inviting harassment or risking their careers.Universities, at their best, remain sites of robust debate and challenging inquiry. But at their worst, they are sites of vampiric labor exploitation, of malign incentives for scholars, and, increasingly, of meddling by ambitious Republican operatives or politically appointed trustees. Gay can be forced to resign for transparently dishonest reasons because universities like Harvard are dependent on bad-faith actors who wanted her gone to pursue their own agendas – and because they lack the will to break this dependence.Something similar might be said of the mainstream media. Many news outlets – much like universities – have been weakened by declines in revenue, and have largely failed to adapt to the rise of an anti-intellectual and anti-democratic right wing that is indifferent to the truth. Instead of covering the malfeasance of these actors, they have anxiously tried to maintain the appearance of neutrality – sometimes at the expense of frankly telling the truth. They, too, are dependent on the good will of the right – in the form of subscribers and sources alike. And they, too, have been manipulated in this dependence, becoming willing to use their platforms and prestige to lend legitimacy to faux controversies that otherwise would have not have any.None of this is to say that Claudine Gay is an especially innocent or admirable figure. It is to say that her character does not much matter: no institution, no social movement, and no profession can survive if its survival depends on the moral perfection of all its main actors. Both the media and the American university system had an opportunity to see the attacks on her in the context of Republicans’ broader anti-education crusade – to treat the right wing’s bad faith for what it really was, and to treat Gay’s missteps for what they really were. They failed.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

On Tuesday afternoon, Claudine Gay resigned from her post as president of Harvard University, making her six-month tenure the shortest in university history. In the aftermath of her departure from the position, many argued that the aggressive nature of the campaign against her was motivated not by questions about her academic integrity or about her response to campus controversy, but by her race.Pressure on Gay to resign grew following her 5 December congressional testimony, where she, along with the presidents of MIT and the University of Pennsylvania, answered questions regarding allegations of on-campus antisemitism related to the Israel-Gaza war. Shortly thereafter, plagiarism allegations published on conservative website the Washington Free Beacon mounted against Gay, ultimately leading to her resignation.Janai Nelson, the president and direct-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, wrote on X (formerly Twitter): “Attacks against Claudine Gay have been unrelenting & the biases unmasked. Her resignation on the heels of [UPenn president] Liz Magill’s set dangerous precedent in the academy for political witch hunts. The project isn’t to thwart hate but to foment it thru vicious takedowns. This protects no one.”Ibram X Kendi, the founder of the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research, wrote: “Racist mobs won’t stop until they topple all Black people from positions of power and influence who are not reinforcing the structure of racism. What these racist mobs are doing should be obvious to any reporter who cares about truth or justice as opposed to conflicts and clicks.”In her resignation letter, Gay acknowledged the racism she experienced following her congressional testimony. And though she issued additional citations to her doctoral dissertation and other papers following the backlash, she also used the letter to defend the integrity of her work. “It has been distressing to have doubt cast on my commitments to confronting hate and to upholding scholarly rigor – two bedrock values that are fundamental to who I am – and frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus,” she wrote.The Harvard Corporation, the university’s governing body, issued a statement in support of Gay, condemning the racist vitriol she experienced.“While President Gay has acknowledged missteps and has taken responsibility for them, it is also true that she has shown remarkable resilience in the face of deeply personal and sustained attacks,” the statement reads. “While some of this has played out in the public domain, much of it has taken the form of repugnant and in some cases racist vitriol directed at her through disgraceful emails and phone calls. We condemn such attacks in the strongest possible terms.”The attacks against Gay and the open admission by some rightwing pundits and activists to execute similar plans across higher education could have larger implications. Roopika Risam, an associate professor at Dartmouth, wrote: “While no one owes Harvard pity, we’d be remiss to not see this as an attack on higher ed, like ones in states like Florida and South Dakota (and and and…), laying the groundwork for ongoing dismantling higher ed – especially public higher ed, where states hold the purse strings.”Risam may have been referencing the efforts of people like Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist who led the campaign against Gay. Last month, Rufo posted on X: “We launched the Claudine Gay plagiarism story from the Right. The next step is to smuggle it into the media apparatus of the Left, legitimizing the narrative to center-left actors who have the power to topple her. Then squeeze.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionFollowing Gay’s resignation, Rufo posted: “Today, we celebrate victory. Tomorrow, we get back to the fight. We must not stop until we have abolished DEI ideology from every institution in America.”Elise M Stefanik, a representative from New York and Harvard alum, led one of the most aggressive lines of questioning during the congressional hearing. On 2 January, Stefanik posted on X: “TWO DOWN,” a reference to the resignations of both Gay and the University of Pennsylvania president, Elizabeth Magill.Gay will remain on the Harvard faculty following her resignation. But conservative lawmakers and pundits have indicated that the academic purge that began with efforts to overturn diversity, equity and inclusion efforts and swept up both Gay and Magill, will continue. More