#833 Musings Beyond the Bunker (Thursday January 11)
Good morning,
By now, we all know that Claudine Gay as president of Harvard University last week. The election denying Trump sycophant Elise Stefanik claimed it was her grueling cross-examination of Dr. Gay regarding the appropriateness of genocidal speech at Harvard that brought her down. While it may have been a contributing factor, there were other factors at play.
In any event, I don’t see this resignation either as a victory, as Ms. Stefanik would have it, nor a defeat, as Al Sharpton has portrayed it. To me, it simply is sad and is a commentary about much of what ails our world.
The House committee hearing was a piece of political theatre. Stefanik presented hypotheticals to the presidents of Harvard, Penn and Columbia, each of whom sat befuddled and incapable of answering a clear question. They were presented with a slow hanging curveball of a question and they failed to respond in a way that seemed genuine or logical. It is likely that they were “over-lawyered” and were simply following instructions from counsel. After all, I don’t believe any of these presidents (two of which have resigned under pressure) actually believes that genocidal speech against any people is permissible under their respective institutions’ codes of conduct or the protections accorded to free speech. In the end, the test at the House committee hearing was not one of whether one supports genocidal speech but, rather, a test of one of the ability to think on one’s feet—a test that all three presidents failed to one degree or another. Even so, it wasn’t the primary reason Dr. Gay eventually was forced out.
Many explanations for her departure have been shared but I believe that, in the end, she was forced out because she violated the basic tenets of academic scholarship. She used the work of others, some lifted nearly word-for-word, without citation or attribution. Had she been an assistant professor, she likely would not get tenure. If she were a student, she would have been reprimanded, suspended, or worse.
The reason this episode is so sad is because of what it says about the state of higher education in America, the performance demands placed upon those in the public eye, the issue of cancellation, the persistence of racism (and its opposite—the defense of someone because of their race), the out-sized influence donors possess, the unreasonableness of our systems and society and, perhaps most important of all, the ugliness of our civil discourse and humanity.
There are several basic claims regarding Dr. Gay’s departure:
1. She didn’t respond adequately before the House committee that genocidal speech at Harvard, directed toward Jews, was speech that was beyond acceptability. As I have said, the inability of the president of one of the world’s great academic institutions to understand a question (and the purpose of the question) and to formulate a cogent answer is not indicative of latent antisemitism or support of the genocide of Jews. What it represents, rather, is a failure of authenticity and the intellectual elasticity necessary to respond in real time to an unexpected question. Hardly worth removal from office.
2. Indicative of the above, Dr. Gay seems to have been ill-prepared for the job. Her rise in administration at Harvard has been described as pretty meteoric—perhaps too much so. Perhaps a few more years in the positions of dean and provost would better have prepared her for the complexities of the job of a university president. There are those who claim race and gender were factors in her rise. But while those may well have been factors, her performance was not any worse than the other two university presidents at the hearing—and any number of administrators nationally who failed to adequately respond to the October 7th rampage. Again, hardly justifying stepping down.
3. Some claim Dr. Gay was an insufficient academician—that she hadn’t published a meaningful body of work. Certainly her output is below the norm. But people really misunderstand that when a professor chooses the route of academic administration, that necessarily means that there will be a drop in research and writing output. The broad portfolio of a university president, coupled the multiple constituencies that demand satisfaction and regularly comment on the job being done, is significant. Something has to give. Again, this hardly rises to justification for calls for her resignation.
4. But the real reason Dr. Gay ultimately had to resign from her post is that she was caught red-handed violating the University’s policies on the originality of one’s work, and generally accepted standards imposed on academicians on each other. Yes, yes, there are those who claim her type of research was more quantitative than qualitative, and the level of peer review is not (and need not be) as great. There are those who claim the attacks on Dr. Gay smack of racism, and it is difficult not to imagine some saw this as an opening to claim she was granted privileges because of race. Despite that ugliness, there has emerged a fairly broad consensus among academics that her repeated lapses of attribution were unacceptable. For this reason—not Representative Stefanik, not her short time on the job, and not her lesser academic output—she should have stepped down, and she did.
I think what is so sordid about this tale is that there are few, if any, people who have emerged casting aspersions on the job she’s been doing, her intellectual capacity, her academic merit, or her fundamental character. If she is a victim of cancelation, it began because she didn’t perform as expected in a public setting. The weakness of that performance invited further examination of her career. Had the further examination led nowhere, she might still be president. But the investigation disclosed some serious lapses, for which the consequences in the academic sphere are hardly surprising.
Just as there are some who maintain Dr. Gay’s rise was the result of her race, there are other who suggest that Dr. Gay’s fall was the result of people who singled her out for attack because of her race or her gender. While no doubt there is some segment of the far/racist right that may derive glee from Dr. Gay’s fall, their hostility is not what got her in the soup. Some people seem to believe she should not have resigned and that she should be forgiven her transgressions because of her race. These arguments are unworthy of her and unworthy of the vast number of successful Black Americans in academia and elsewhere. We cannot have a separate set of standards because one has climbed to the pinnacle of one’s profession as a member of an underrepresented group, despite the obstacles before them. After all, President Magill of Penn, also forced to resign, was not Black, though a woman. And many other university presidents have been dismissed or pushed-out for lesser transgressions. When one plays at this high level, one must be squeaky-clean to the potential vulnerability to outside discoveries. Dr. Gay is not being fired from her job as a tenured faculty member, nor is she being banished from academia. She has left a job that is a privilege that is temporary and fluid. She will survive and so will Harvard University.
In the meantime, there are greater issues before our nation and before higher education and its reestablishing itself as a place of learning, the interplay of ideas, and collective respect for speech—even that which may be uncomfortable. Let’s get on with those issues.
Have a good day,
Glenn