How Pervasive Is Academic Corruption?

Whew, what a week it’s been for higher ed!

The Claudine Gay debacle at Harvard has raised some fundamental questions about academia in general. She was president of the university, traditionally seen as the pinnacle of American academia.

But a careful look at her extremely thin academic publishing record was packed with unattributed borrowings from other authors in her own field.

Once all of this became public, and in light of her Congressional testimony in which she found a new love for the free speech that has been heretofore nearly banned at Harvard, it became impossible for her to continue as president and so she resigned.

That’s the headline story but there is surely more going on. The press ran examples of her plagiarism. It was obvious to any graduate student that it qualified as such. It would result in removal from the class and likely the whole program.

And yet the president of Harvard got away with it for many years.

There had already been investigations ongoing but they seemed more performative than prosecutorial, which is a scandal of its own. Once it all came out into the open, thanks to independent reporters and media, there was no other way this could end.

And yet, how long had people known? When she was hired in the first place, why was this never checked? How about when she was appointed Dean? How about when she was at Stanford? How about when she was awarded a prestigious prize for her Harvard dissertation that we now know is compromised? Maybe they knew but pushed her up the ranks anyway.

None of this speaks well of Harvard or academia in general, much less the vaunted “peer review” process.

Stranger still for people on the outside was reading the side-by-side comparisons of her prose and that from which she borrowed. None of it seemed to make much sense or be otherwise meaningful. It is all written in a highly stylized way that only people in academia could possibly understand and probably they cannot understand it either. It has the feel of high-level scholarship without the substance.

One gathers that the thesis of her writing is always the same: racism is all-pervasive. Everything else is just filler. In defense of herself, writing in the New York Times, she essentially blames racism and also distrust of public health and media for forcing her to step down.

“This was merely a single skirmish in a broader war to unravel public faith in pillars of American society …. Trusted institutions of all types—from public health agencies to news organizations—will continue to fall victim to coordinated attempts to undermine their legitimacy and ruin their leaders’ credibility.”

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