Source: Intellectuals
Source: Harvard University's official website
Written by | Zhou Yebin
On January 2, 2024, the first working day of the new year, Claudine Gay, president of Harvard University, who has recently been mired in crisis, announced that he would resign as president. The first African-American and second female president in Harvard's 388-year history had to resign under pressure after only six months in office, becoming the shortest-serving president in Harvard's history.
What caused Claudine Gay's tenure as president to be so short-lived? The immediate trigger was undoubtedly the storm of public opinion that Gay, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania's three presidents responded to antisemitism on campus during congressional hearings in early December. But in fact, it was a concentrated explosion of dissatisfaction with the general left-wing bias of universities in the United States, which seriously shook the foundation of American higher education - academic and intellectual freedom.
Anti-Semitic controversy
On October 7, 2023, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict broke out again after Israel suffered the worst terrorist attack since the founding of the state. And the discussion of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict has become the hottest topic on American college campuses. But in these discussions, the thoughts and speeches of the most diverse generation of young people in American history have had a profound impact on mainstream American society.
On October 11, a group of students at Harvard University signed a joint letter accusing the Israeli government of taking full responsibility for the violent clashes between Palestine and Israel [2]. Although the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has lasted for nearly 80 years and Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories has been widely condemned by the international community, it is undoubtedly one-sided to hold Israel fully responsible – even for terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians (and foreigners visiting Israel).
Some influential figures in the US political and business circles, including well-known alumni and donors of Harvard, have demanded that Harvard and other prestigious universities condemn and deal with such inappropriate remarks. It should be noted that some business people have even demanded that the names of students be published and placed on the so-called blacklist. For American universities that promote free expression, this is also clearly an extreme demand.
In the face of public pressure, on October 12, Claudine Gay, in her capacity as Harvard's president, issued a statement condemning the terrorist attacks against Israel, saying that students have freedom of expression, but no student organization can represent the views of Harvard University, and called for more inspiring rather than stimulating words to communicate with each other at special moments. The statement both clarified Harvard's official stance on the terrorist attacks on Israel and supported students' freedom of speech.
But such statements did not quell the controversy. On December 6, 2023, Gay was questioned before Congress with the presidents of MIT and the University of Pennsylvania about whether these top universities are doing enough to combat hate speech on campus. In a questioning that later went viral on social media, Gay was asked whether advocating genocide of Jews violated Harvard's anti-bullying and harassment policies, to which Gay replied that it depended on the context. The MP who responded to the question immediately believed that he should take the blame and resign[4].
In the wake of the questioning, which has been widely criticized by all sectors in the United States, all three principals have come under tremendous pressure to call for their resignations – it is worth noting that all three principals are women. Among them, the president of the University of Pennsylvania was forced to resign after being under more pressure in Pennsylvania. But Gay quickly gained the full support of the school board and seemed hopeful of getting through the storm.
Plagiarism disputes
From gaining the support of the board of trustees to voluntarily resigning, Gay's persistence in the position of Harvard president has not been even a month.
In fact, there is a reason for the strong support of the board of trustees: Gay, as the first African-American and second female president in Harvard's history, has been appointed for less than half a year, and if he is convicted for his words, it will undoubtedly bring more confusion to Harvard. Gay has also been a successful performer in university administration, having been the dean of Harvard's largest school, the Dean of Arts and Sciences, before becoming president of Harvard. From 2018 to 2023, her tenure coincided with leading Harvard College of Arts and Sciences through the unprecedented challenge of the pandemic. In 2021, Harvard's College of Arts and Sciences, which was expected to run a deficit of US$112 million, actually posted a surplus of US$51 million[5].
In addition to how to define the line between hate speech and free speech, there is another storm gathering over Gay: plagiarism.
Shortly after the disastrous congressional inquiry, several right-wing activists in the United States began accusing Gay of plagiarism in his past academic and doctoral dissertations. In fact, on October 24, 2023, the New York Post, a right-wing newspaper in the United States, informed Harvard that it was doing an issue on the plagiarism of Gay's past published papers. Harvard, through an outside law firm, sent a lawyer's letter to the New York Post, accusing its unpublished story of being "demonstrably false" and facing defamation charges if published[6].
But a few days later, on Oct. 29, Gay himself volunteered to ask the board to lead an independent investigation committee to review past papers for plagiarism. According to various reports so far, the content of the review was two papers accused of plagiarism by the New York Post, and on December 9, the investigation committee announced to the school board that the two papers were "insufficiently cited". In announcing its support for Gay on December 12, the Board of Trustees also mentioned that the plagiarism investigation had been completed and that Gay would revise the citations of both papers (Gay submitted the revisions two days later) [6].
But Harvard's response to Gay is clearly out of touch. Because after the congressional questioning on December 6, several right-wing activists took to social networks and on right-wing websites to accuse Gay of plagiarism in more of his dissertation and even his doctoral dissertation. And these right-wing activists are not shy about saying that they just see that now is the time to deal the biggest blow to Gay, and they seize the opportunity to attack. The previous lawyer's letter also made Harvard and Gay extremely passive at this time: while accusing others of nonsense, while investigating on their own, it seems difficult to gain a wider range of sympathy and understanding.
Plagiarism or misquotation?
When Gay was caught in a storm of public opinion because of the congressional questioning, several right-wing activists did choose the best opportunity to make a statement, and the plagiarism revelations on social media attracted widespread attention. However, it is worth exploring whether many of the serious academic misconduct described by these right-wing activists can be plagiarized.
For example, Gay's 1997 doctoral dissertation was accused of having a technical description that was almost identical to the text in a 1996 dissertation [7]:
However, this is a paragraph describing technical methods, and academic writing emphasizes retelling in one's own words, that is, not distorting the original meaning, but not being like others in terms of word choice. However, it is also necessary to pay attention to many technical descriptions, and the words that can be transformed are limited, and such accusations are somewhat nitpicking. One of the authors of the 1996 paper (Voss), Gay's teacher at Harvard, argued that "technically plagiarism, but it's so subtle that it doesn't make much sense," and that such technical descriptive language similarities are common in academia.
Other allegations are directly refuted by the parties as absurd[7]:
In this passage, Gay makes it clear that this is the discovery of Bobo and Gilliam, except that there is a lot of repetition of the language of the authors' original paper. The original author, Bobo (chair of the sociology department at Harvard University), said in an interview that Gay had clearly cited it, and he didn't think there was a problem at all. King, another "plagiarism victim" who has been upset by right-wing activists and Gay's mentor, called the accusations crazy and absurd, pointing out that the key to plagiarism is to take someone else's stuff for herself, and reading the above excerpt from Gay's paper, "Do you think she is not relaying someone else's research, but her own findings?" [7].
Of all the victims of "plagiarism", I have seen only one person who said that Gay's actions constituted plagiarism, and that it was very problematic if it was intentional, if not intentional[7]. And there are two places where this author has been plagiarized, one of which is actually Gay marked with a citation:
It's just that the citation is placed after the second sentence of the paragraph, and considering that the content in the second sentence is also quoted from the same paper, the author can't understand what the problem is.
The second is probably the most problematic of all the accusations, in my opinion:
Gay's doctoral dissertation has a number of similarities with Swain's 1995 book, describing "the two concepts that sociologists have so far distorted: descriptive representation and substantive representation," followed by Gay's 19 citations, but not Swain's book. While it is not excluded that Gay did read 19 original texts and happened to use the same language as Swain to summarize, it is more likely that Gay borrowed from Swain's inductive summary and omitted citations.
But this is still a relatively minor issue. What's more, this is not an academic thesis, but a doctoral dissertation. The length of a doctoral dissertation is often hundreds of pages, and the list of citations may be dozens of pages.
Condoning hate speech and plagiarism is just an excuse
In Gay's resignation, she noted that she was troubled by questions about her opposition to hatred and adherence to academic rigor, and that accepting her resignation would allow Harvard to focus on the whole rather than the individual. Gay's resignation was undoubtedly under tremendous pressure to continue effectively serving Harvard as president.
However, looking at the past words and deeds of right-wing politicians and activists in the United States, accusing Gay of condoning hate speech and plagiarism is really just an excuse. In recent years, some far-right and even Ku Klux Klan members have taken to American college campuses to give speeches, but the students who have protested and boycotted have been accused of undermining freedom of speech by right-wing politicians and activists who are now shouting that universities cannot allow hate speech[8]. A few years ago, when the FBI director suggested during a congressional questioning that a large number of Chinese students were spies, we did not see a single right-wing lawmaker come forward and accuse this of being discriminatory and inappropriate[9].
Even when the Palestinian-Israeli conflict triggered the controversy over hate speech on American campuses called for Gay to step down, and proposed to blacklist Israeli students for blacklisting Bill Ackman, Elon Musk said that it was not anti-Semitic when he praised the obvious anti-Semitic remarks on social networks.
Some of the students who signed the letter accusing Israel had been doxxed and harassed, and Gay had recounted threats and racist attacks in his resignation. What do the members of parliament who have shown a strong anti-hate attitude at the congressional question say about these hate speeches and even actions? I have not seen it in any of the news.
Gay's rebuke, as well as the criticism of the University of Pennsylvania's former president, stems from the dissatisfaction of the American right with the general left-wing bias of elite universities. What is really worrying is not Harvard's ineffective fight against hate speech, but the fact that conservative forces in the United States are finding various excuses to infringe on the foundation of higher education, academic and intellectual freedom.
Universities are places to educate people, and successful education is inseparable from allowing students to have the freedom to think and the collision of various points of view on campus. Hate speech should not be labelled as a stigma just because a student's views are different from those of mainstream society.
In fact, even after a congressional inquiry, Harvard faculty and staff support for the president was overwhelming.
Ryan Enos, a professor of government at Harvard University, said, "I am saddened by Harvard and higher education, which are being attacked by mob politics — something that should have been seriously alarmed." ”
At the congressional inquiry that plunged Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT into a storm of public opinion, social media went viral, and what made the three presidents criticized was a conversation of only a few tens of seconds, in which we saw several presidents hesitating to question whether "genocide of Jews" violated school rules. But what was missed in the tens of seconds of conversation was the hours of questioning, and in the minutes leading up to those tens of seconds of conversation, the congressman, who now calls himself an opponent of hate speech, included many of the common slogans of pro-Palestinian marches on American campuses and in American society as anti-Semitic rhetoric, arguing that they were calls for genocide against Jews[4].
Perhaps these three principals were dissatisfied with these dozens of seconds in the hours of questioning. But the real regret is that we ignore the fact that in the elite education of the United States, where gender and ethnic inequality have long existed, there were three female principals on this day, including a minority principal, who stood on the stage and faced the inducing questions, and did not choose the answers that were more likely to satisfy the audience, but tried to insist on the students' right to think freely and express freely.
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