Sympathy for Claudine Gay
Limited admittedly, but still present
As eny fule kno, well eny fule who pay attention to the news, fairly recently appointed Harvard President Claudine Gay had a pretty miserable December and an even worse New Year. Her participation in the multiple vehicle car-crash of a congressional hearing on campus antisemitism caused a lot of people to pay attention to her and look for issues. This is especially the case since the poor lady decided that she didn’t want to lose her $1M+/year job by resigning immediately afterwards unlike her fellow car-crash victim from Penn. Of course she has now been resigned and (see below) her resignation statement is a classic of its kind, but her insistence on staying has probably made things worse for her and for the DEI sorts of wokery she championed.
In fact I think it is an error similar in magnitude to that of Gen. John “They couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance” Sedgwick . I suspect that when future historians write about the wave of DEI etc. and when it turned back, Gay will have a star turn similar to that of the over-confident general. And this is where I have a smidgen of sympathy for the woman. You see, she’s been a diversity hire all her professional career and has never had to actually face any consequences for sloppy academic research that would hole below the waterline, and probably sink, the careers of white and/or male and/or non-immigrant academics even in her chosen area of grievance studies.
So rather like my sympathy for the unfortunate child who has never been taught not to stick the silverware in a power socket and then gets electrocuted when she does so, I sympathize for Gay because no one ever told her to shape up and made it stick and now, after she’s reached pretty much the pinnacle of her career all sorts of impertinent sorts are going over her sparse academic record and looking for faults. Indeed if one can stretch the metaphor a bit, it’s more like helicopter parents not just not telling her to stick the fork in the socket but making sure that no one else told her not to either and then the poor girl goes and jams a knife into the 220v washer/dryer circuit.
The Plagiarism
First there’s the plagiarism. Now many people in academia have pointed out that failure to cite and/or put in quotes every single time you lift someone else’s text is not exactly uncommon. But there are levels of offense and all the “whataboutism” and “everyonedoesitism” can’t divert from the fact that out of a measly dozen-ish publications (I’ve read some places saying 11 plus a dissertation, her 2022 Harvard CV seems to list 15) this kind of work has been identified in at least eight and one of those plagiarisms is in the dedication of her dissertation:
(See this PDF page 28)
This is beyond parody, I mean can you not even write a thank you without copypasta?
So while each individual example of “duplicative text” being improperly quoted/cited is fairly minor, the fact that there are almost 50 of them in publications ranging from an early graduate paper to a 2017 journal article is pretty serious. I will note that this is where an adult in 1998 or so would have done her a favor by spotting all the uncited unquoted cribs in her dissertation and telling her to fix it. For whatever reason no one did and so she continued because she didn’t face any consequences for so doing.
The No Data and Bad Statistics
In addition to the plagiarism it turns out that Gay can’t do sums. There are a few issues here.
Issue one is that her raw data for at least one questionable paper has not been published anywhere and she is on record as refusing to share it. Failure to make raw data available is a known tell of a researcher who has faked something because without it, it is very hard to replicate the findings. This was known back 20 years when the Gay paper was being picked on and, ironically, one of the strongest proponents in her field for releasing data and methods was the Gary King she gave a plagiarized dedication to in her dissertation and whose technique she screwed up in this paper (see below).
Issue two is that in that paper she appears to cock up a statistical technique developed by King and an initial draft of a conference paper discussing the technique uses her paper as an example of how to misuse it. Interestingly in the final version of the paper published in 2004 (as opposed to the one presented at the conference in 2002) Gay’s name and paper are (partially?) replaced by a hypothetical although its still one of the papers cited. The question here is not so much that the statistical analysis was screwed up (this sort of thing happens, repeatedly) but the reason why the criticism seems to have been muted and almost scrubbed from the internet. Although that might in part be due to her mentor Gary King, who also fails to impress.
This is relatively important because that paper is one of the few of hers that has had many others cite it (over 500 according to Google Scholar) and it is one of the ones where she plagiarized others.
Issue three harks back to issue one. It seems there are inconsistencies in the data presented and the results. Since the raw data and methods are not available it is impossible to tell whether the inconsistencies noted are due to fakery, error (e.g. the problem that is issue two) or some undocumented change of how some data were classified between one place and another. Though one of the issues is that the same data was apparently used in her dissertation but the data, as presented in the two places, differs so it probably isn’t the statistical issue.
It would be interesting to see how many other papers of hers lack raw data and/or have statistical errors/inconsistencies. I suspect that various academic replication experts are looking at her other papers as I write this so probably it won’t be long before we have answers.
The Anorexic CV
The reason why this paper with poor statistics is important is that it was one of the four (including her dissertation) that could be used by Stanford when they granted her tenure in 2005.
Another thing that would be interesting to know is how much research Stanford did before giving her tenure. The 2002 debunking of her statistics should have been known, because one of the debunkers was Kenneth W. Shotts, “the David S. and Ann M. Barlow Professor of Political Economy at Stanford Graduate School of Business”. At the time (2005) Shotts was also a Associate Professor seeking tenure (he achieved it in 2006) at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and also “the Robert Eckles Swain Campbell National Fellow, 2005-2006 at the Hoover Institution” (also at Stanford) so any competent literature search should have led the evaluators to him. This is particularly odd since even the finally published debunking paper cited her one and even back in the stone age of the mid 2000s google and other search engines could and did index citations and the like.
Indeed one wonders whether the reason why the critique of her paper was mostly scrubbed from the eventually published version of the Herron-Shotts paper is pressure from the Political Science department in Stanford on the GSB to not wash their dirty linen in public. Although the suggestion above that this was due to pressure from Gary King is also plausible.
[Aside: Shotts is more or less a contemporary of Gay - BA 1 year later, tenure 1 year later. His 2022 CV is 8 pages long as opposed to Gay’s 3 and has roughly double the number of published papers that hers has. In fact he’d published about the same amount as she has today by the time he achieved tenure in 2006. He also lists
Journals he’s (been) an editor of
Journals he’s (been) a referee for
PhD theses he’s been on the dissertation committee for
Gay lists none of those. One wonders whether this is because she’s never done any of that. Evidence supporting that hypothesis comes from taking a look at the CV of a female professor at Stanford in the Political Science department of about the same age and who may have overlapped with her for some of the time. This one is 9 pages long and also includes the journal and PhD bits]
The inconsistency between the 2001 paper and 1998 dissertation regarding some of the data should have been obvious if someone actually did any checking. And with just four items to look at, it’s not like this was easy to overlook in the crush.
The fact that they apparently ignored the statistical issue and didn’t notice the data error strongly suggests that Gay was a diversity appointment. I wonder what the make up of the Stanford Political Science department was in 2004/5 that meant that they felt they had to give tenure to such a marginally qualified assistant professor? Hopefully it wasn’t because they wanted to replace Condoleezza Rice who had been part of the Bush administration for the previous 4 years and had just been appointed secretary of state.
Condoleezza Rice, by the way, is another person that Gay fails to stack up well against in terms of academic matters and particularly academic administration. Rice was the first female and first African-American provost of Stanford and she was a great success at the job managing, amongst other things, to balance the budget for the first time in years. Plus of course Rice had (even at a similar age to Gay in the 2000s) many other accomplishments from foreign languages to concert pianist. It is hard to imagine that Rice would need to borrow other people’s phrases or that she would fail to be able to handle required statistical techniques.
Still, for some reason, despite having 25% of her published work being used as an object example in what not to do by a paper published by another Stanford non-tenured prof, Stanford decided to give her tenure in 2005.
Even more mysterious to an external observer is why Harvard decided they wanted to recruit her from Stanford a year or so later with a CV that had expanded to 6 papers (and a book review). That continues when less than a decade later she is picked to become Dean of Social Sciences at Harvard with no more than three more papers and a shared editorship of a book.
Now it is true that not all thin CVs are indicative of a limited intellect, there can be good reasons why it takes a while to properly describe/prove etc. the next big theorem in some academic discipline, but Claudine Gay’s scholarly oeuvre can be summarized more or less as:
When African Americans become elected politicians white voters don’t like it and don’t vote for them.
with the occasional diversion into related fields of grievance studies such as how tough it is to vote as a black woman or how latinos and blacks aren’t always in 100% agreement.
This is not exactly quantum chromodynamics or even a particular original sort of hypothesis in political science.
The Brown-nosing
Put it all together and you have a scholar who is
A plagiarist
A statistical incompetent who may have altered her data
Not at all productive
You would think that such a person would be destined to slave away in the bowels of a minor university’s grievance studies department. But oddly she soared to the heights of senior Harvard aministrative positions instead.
Another thing that is notable in all of this is how this not very distinguished scholar gets glowing press. This article from the “independent source for Harvard news since 1898” on the occasion, earlier this year, of her becoming Harvard president is illustrative. The author inserted his proboscis so far up that he could practically smell her tonsils as you can tell from the article title “A Scholar’s Scholar” which is apparently meant seriously rather than being sarcastic. There are many cringe-inducing sections in the article, this one (about how in demand she was after getting her PhD) is a good example:
As Gay set about entering that real world, she was in strong demand on the academic job market, garnering several invitations for interviews. During one, Gary King recalled, a department chair phoned to say, “The department has broken out in spontaneous unanimity” in favor of hiring the young scholar, even before formal deliberations. Given the caliber of her work, King wasn’t surprised—until Gay called a few hours after the interview to say she didn’t want to pursue the position, nor to go into teaching or academic research.
Assuming this is true then my assumptions are either that Gay had some hidden mojo that was not apparent in her scholarly record or that political science departments are remarkably low on talent. (Or both)
There is literally nothing in her PhD work that is exceptional although it seems she won “the Toppan Prize for best dissertation in political science” for it. One wonders how many other Toppan Prize winning dissertations have so much plagiarism duplicative text in them? Could it be that the Toppan Prize judges wanted a diversity winner and so placed her above nerdy white and Asian males? The only other thing that stands out about her dissertation is that her adviser appears to have been the Gary King quoted above and whose statistical technique she botched in the follow up to the dissertation.
Bluntly it suggests to me that Gay played a combination of the “Diversity card” and the “I’m from Harvard card” very well and hinted at important connections (with King) should she join some other faculty along with her female, black, immigrant etc. status.
Indeed it looks to me, as an outsider, that she’s played the “diversity card” repeatedly as she worked her way up the ladder in the grievance studies departments of Harvard. Given subsequent events, it is not impossible that she combined that with a few stabs in the back of potential competitors as well as making herself known as a loyal underling who will help cover up embarrassments to those who could advance her career.
The Dean of Cover-ups
As documented at the Karlstack post linked below (and in links from it) Gay seems to have made her way up the top part of the ladder of career advancement by loyally protecting superiors and former superiors who had something to worry about.
This also no doubt explains why she felt no need to resign after people started digging into the plagiarism thing. Now it was her turn at the top and she had trusted underlings who would do the right thing and get all these troublesome accusations cleared away.
Prior to her congressional contextal performance this seemed to have worked. Sure troublesome gadflies like Mr Brunet would continue to raise further evidence of poor academic practice but her fellow administrators in Harvard had her back and could be sure to protect her in the event that such complaints reached a wider audience.
This was of course what happened a couple of months ago when the plagiarism claims made it to the NY Post and I have no doubt that Gay expected similar loyalty in the future.
Congress is not Academia
And this is, as I say, where we come to the point where I have sympathy for the poor president. Her entire life up until December was one where no one with any power could do anything to her because she had her political backers and her diversity card. So she could get away with the murder of careers if not actual murder.
Well unfortunately for her, there’s a group of people now who can’t be silenced by the usual methods and she doesn’t appear to be aware of this. Yes her supporters will claim that it’s all racism and sexism and evil republicans but the real problem is not that the House of Representatives investigates her, it’s that the allegations can not now be buried and so people that Harvard cares about (e.g. donors) want to see something happen. Another class of people that Harvard (indirectly) cares about are the potential employers of Harvard graduates. If those people think Harvard is anti-semitic and led by a plagiarist they may decide to not offer a high paying job to graduates from the place believing that a Harvard degree no longer indicates excellence. A third group that Harvard cares about are the students who think about applying to study there.
And the news in all three cases was not positive for Gay over the last month. Billionaire donors have cancelled significant planned donations. I saw somewhere that the total of cancelled donations is now over $100M which is significant even for a college as well funded as Harvard. Of course the donors are often would be employers and a number of them have declined to hire at least the Harvard students who are clearly antisemitic. Finally there’s evidence that fewer would be students are applying.
This is why her sticking it out is going to hurt, because although she has resigned as President she remains a tenured senior professor. I see no reason why people will not continue digging and, as well as continuing to check her academic record, looking into all sorts of scandals that Harvard and Gay thought were successfully dealt with. The cases of Carole Hooven, Ryan Enos, Roland Fryer and Jorge Domínguez are four that, in addition to Gay’s own lack of scholarship, seem obvious things to take a look at. As I linked above, her mentor Gary King’s scholarship may also come under the microscope in public (in private parts of academia it seems the verdict is in, and it’s a solid two thumbs down) and since King is also a leading light in the Political Science department (see also Enos, R mentioned above) that may spread to an analysis of the recent scholarship of the entire department. I suspect that such an analysis will show that few, if any, of the faculty are any good.
Looking Wider
But those are just the obvious, easy choices. Not that there won’t be things to make public there which demonstrate that large sections of Harvard are now second or third rate institutions thoroughly riddled with wokism and lacking intellectual rigor. However a public investigation into Harvard as a whole recently is likely to come up with all sorts of suspicious acts. For example it would be worth investigating the role Harvard may have played in the Wuflu mess. The Evergrande donation looks particularly suspect and it is worth looking at because it includes Provost Alan Garber, who is the interim president following Gay’s departure. And of course that leads into investigating why Harvard was a leading recipient of Chinese funding (archive link) in the 2010s and what the PRC got in return.
The other area to look at, of course, is the DEI scam in general. Gay and her fellow grievance studies faculty at Harvard are undoubtedly far from alone in their lack of intellectual rigor and ripe for having someone shine lights on places that they would prefer remain obscured.
A Fisking
Finally, the resignation letter Gay wrote deserves comment.
This satirical alternative resignation letter is good for a laugh, but the real thing provides quite a lot of amusement if you allow me to read between the lines as it were:
Dear Members of the Harvard Community,
It is with a heavy heart but a deep love for Harvard that I write to share that I will be stepping down as president. This is not a decision I came to easily.
In fact I had to be forced to resign at (probably) metaphorical gunpoint because I loved the $1M + salary, all the perks and the chance to lecture the world on how racist everything is
Indeed, it has been difficult beyond words because I have looked forward to working with so many of you to advance the commitment to academic excellence that has propelled this great university across centuries.
Academic excellence being things like defining plagiarism down, faking data, and using shoddy statistics to generate the results wanted no matter what the data actually says.
But, after consultation with members of the Corporation, it has become clear that it is in the best interests of Harvard for me to resign so that our community can navigate this moment of extraordinary challenge with a focus on the institution rather than any individual.
The Corporation explained to me that they had more blackmail material on me than I had on them and that Hilary Clinton was a personal friend so if I went now I could keep my professorship as long as I kept quiet
It is a singular honor to be a member of this university, which has been my home and my inspiration for most of my professional career.
Because I was the fixer my mentors needed and I know where the bodies are buried.
My deep sense of connection to Harvard and its people has made it all the more painful to witness the tensions and divisions that have riven our community in recent months, weakening the bonds of trust and reciprocity that should be our sources of strength and support in times of crisis.
Those pesky joos. Whining in their white cisgender heterosexual privilege about being threatened by the real victims, the transgender PoC Queers for Palestine. And then having the cheek to share actual video on racist sites like X showing that there were actual threats to their physical well-being. Don’t they realize they are supposed to get in the cattle cars without complaining?
Amidst all of this, 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.
I did too confront hate. All those TERFs and white supremacists like Roland Fryer know that. And as for scholarly rigor? Hah! I gave scholarship Rigor Mortis. That’s Rigor, right? People have accused me of being an incompetent diversity hire who is too stupid to do sums or write her own sentences and when I’ve tried to play my RACISS card to counter them, they ignored it. This hurt my feelings and made me worry about my future without a $1M /year salary.
I believe in the people of Harvard because I see in you the possibility and the promise of a better future. These last weeks have helped make clear the work we need to do to build that future—to combat bias and hate in all its forms, to create a learning environment in which we respect each other’s dignity and treat one another with compassion, and to affirm our enduring commitment to open inquiry and free expression in the pursuit of truth.
I believe we have within us all that we need to heal from this period of tension and division and to emerge stronger. I had hoped with all my heart to lead us on that journey, in partnership with all of you. As I now return to the faculty, and to the scholarship and teaching that are the lifeblood of what we do, I pledge to continue working alongside you to build the community we all deserve.
It seems that I am the wrong person to lead Harvard to the sunny uplands of Wokanda, but I’ll still be here in the backround. I still know where the bodies are buried and trust me I’ll be plotting revenge on all those inside Harvard that failed to stand by me.
When I became president, I considered myself particularly blessed by the opportunity to serve people from around the world who saw in my presidency a vision of Harvard that affirmed their sense of belonging—their sense that Harvard welcomes people of talent and promise, from every background imaginable, to learn from and grow with one another. To all of you, please know that those doors remain open, and Harvard will be stronger and better because they do.
Every deserving background. Whites, Joos and Asians were far too pushy, though the nice Chinese did give us all those nice perks and Confucius Institutes in exchange for a few USB sticks
As we welcome a new year and a new semester, I hope we can all look forward to brighter days. Sad as I am to be sending this message, my hopes for Harvard remain undimmed. When my brief presidency is remembered, I hope it will be seen as a moment of reawakening to the importance of striving to find our common humanity—and of not allowing rancor and vituperation to undermine the vital process of education.
My hopes for Harvard include not stopping the DEI mission and making sure that those who complain about sloppy scholarship from minorities are silenced with a pillow. It’s not rancor if no one can hear them
I trust we will all find ways, in this time of intense challenge and controversy, to recommit ourselves to the excellence, the openness, and the independence that are crucial to what our university stands for—and to our capacity to serve the world.
Sincerely,
Claudine Gay
Harvard now has an unparalleled reputaion for excellence in plagiarism and I hope that remains the case. The corporation and faculty need to understand that they’ve got plenty of money so they can be independent from all those annoying Jewish donors who bitch and moan about antisemitism. Plus if we play our cards right we can get more donations from places like Qatar to counteract the drop in support from the joos.
Update: please read my fisking of Gay’s NY Times opinion piece
Apart from the hope that this brings down DEI, I heartily agree. A few years ago she would have been known as an “affirmative action hire”. That program has finally been ruled unconstitutional and we cheered at the news of that beast’s death, failing to drive a stake in its heart before we buried it. It has risen anew as DEI. Except, that is not exactly true as affirmative action died far more recently that DEI arrived on scene. Perhaps it is more correct to say that we cheered when the head of the Affirmative action dragon was severed; not realizing that what lurked in the shadows was not the body of a dragon but that of a hydra that had only shown us one of its heads. The DEI head may be in the process of being whacked off, but others are still out there.
In my 50 some years, I have yet to see any case where the left is beaten. They just rebrand and repackage what we thought we eliminated. They never stop.