The Exquisite Irony of Claudine Gay's Downfall

with John McWhorter

Defenders of recently ousted Harvard University President Claudine Gay charge that outcries over the plagiarism in her dissertation and scholarly publications are merely a cover. Gay’s critics, the argument goes, actually objected to her support for DEI, her bumbling response to questions about antisemitism at Harvard, and her very race. Had she been white, more artful in addressing antisemitism, and more moderate in her views about DEI, she would still have her job today.

For the sake of argument, let’s assume all of that is correct, and Gay was ousted over matters of identity rather than academic integrity. That still does not explain why she plagiarized in the first place, nor does it excuse the offense. Whether or not one agrees with the motivations of Gay’s opponents, there is no excuse for a professional scholar to do what she did. None of the possible explanations—underhandedness, sloppiness, a belief that small acts of plagiarism don’t matter—could exonerate Gay, because they all betray a similarly cavalier attitude toward the integrity of the scholarly endeavor. Safeguarding that endeavor and ensuring Harvard’s continuing preeminence was a major part of Gay’s job, and she was not up to the task. Anyone who looked at her paper-thin CV could have guessed as much, and now the evidence is in.

It’s no small irony that a DEI ideologue who likely views “merit” as a suspect concept was brought down by her own demonstrable lack of same. Claudine Gay is the victim of her own debased principles. Harvard’s faculty and students deserve a leader who reflects the ideals of the institution, not a functionary with people skills. I don’t know who will be next in line for the job, but if they’re more of the same—another mediocre scholar with the “correct” politics—I’d advise them to rent a place in Cambridge rather than buying.

This clip comes from my latest Q&A session with John McWhorter, which will be released in full to paying subscribers tomorrow. If you’re not yet a subscriber and you want full access to this Q&A, along with our entire archive and other benefits, click below. And if you’re already a paying subscriber: thank you. I couldn’t keep The Glenn Show going without you.

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GLENN LOURY: Okay. From BB:

A question topic that perhaps you can use when you have the inevitable Claudine Gay conversation. I've been having this argument online with some DEI committed people. Do you think being a noteworthy scholar, which Gay isn't and has never been, is a worthwhile prerequisite for college presidents? After all, an argument could be made that they are merely running a bureaucracy and that being an able administrator is the chief prerequisite for the job. She wasn't that big of a scholar. The issue is not so much about her plagiarism as such as how did she ever get tenure at Harvard in the first place.

JOHN MCWHORTER: Glenn, we've talked about this, and you actually made me think. But no, I don't think that to be the president of a university should require that you've written 50 refereed papers. That is a kind of a convention that we've settled into. The problem is, if we're going to talk about that not being the case—and it's not that all Harvard presidents have, but the last few had, and it's what we think of. If we're going to have a conversation about whether or not university presidents should have been serious scholars, you don't have the first exception be black. That's the thing.

For me, it's the same thing as, “Well, how important are standardized tests? What do they really measure?” When you're really only doing it because black students have a harder time with them. No. First, you show that the black students can do it. Then you have that little “conversation,” which you probably aren't gonna have. In this case, the problem was that Claudine Gay was brought in as a black university president with no real scholarly record. But frankly, I'm going with all of the people who are now saying that being a good business person, being a good corporate executive, being a good fundraiser is probably more important.

I'm always a little bit mystified. Here at Columbia, for example, Lee Bollinger, who just stepped down—on purpose—and was replaced by somebody similarly eminent with a scholarly record. I always used to think, he did all of that scholarly work and now he's running this school and going to parties and raising money and making statements, et cetera. What do the two things have to do each other?

So no, I get that. And Glenn, you and I have talked a lot about the issue of black graduate students and black scholars being over-promoted. It's been a reality for the past 40 years. Claudine Gay was not unique in that. I watched it happen as I was coming up. And as I've said on this show more than once and now have said in the Times, it happened to me. If you are a pretty color, you are just yanked in without anything like the qualifications of anyone else. I should say, in terms of tenure, because I'm obsessive, I had written more than enough. My problem is not how many refereed papers I had written. So let's say this: I deserved tenure, but my first jobs I did not deserve in any sense, except that I was brown. So yes, that is an issue.

Claudine Gay came up at the same time I did. We were at Stanford at the same time. I was a grad student and she was an undergrad. I know the world she comes from. Somebody like her is grabbed instantly as a model. It's white people showing that they're not racist. And the problem is, you can't be angry at Gay, because she was raised in this culture. She never knew anything else. If you're never asked to be excellent, then the chances are 99 percent that you won't be.

I have heard you at length. I so profoundly disagree, I don't even know where to begin. This is corruption. What we're talking about here is the corruption of the meritocratic order underlying our most precious institutions of human achievement. This is about mastery. It's about excellence. It's about the quality of mind.

I agree with you that a business executive can run a university. I don't think a business executive can lead a university. The president of Harvard University sits on something called the ad hoc committee. Every tenured appointment at the university is vetted by this committee. Now, given delegation, I'm not sure that every single case has a meeting in which the president is present in order to cast a ballot, but I'm sure that in the most serious appointments in the physics department, in the history department, in the school of medicine, et cetera.

You're leading a university. You're inspiring people. You're giving voice to the central raison d'etre of the enterprise. It's an intellectual enterprise. Now, what we're seeing with Gay is the culmination of a process that is corrupt to its core. How did she get tenure at Harvard? Look at that CV. Read those papers. I've gone to Google Scholar, and I've actually read those papers. They are pedestrian in the extreme. They are okay. There are no, as far as I could tell, original ideas that would stimulate—I'm sure there's citations—further inquiry that are being demonstrated in those papers.

So they're quantitative. They're quantitative social science in the service of a DEI research agenda. Namely, if you draw a congressional district so that you get more black people elected to Congress, that will make white people more conservative and cause a greater enthusiasm and participation in the electoral process from black people. I don't want to go off into the details of what our research is about, but it's pedestrian.

I don't find that interesting.

It's okay. Larry Bacow was the previous president of Harvard. He had been president of Tufts University before that. And he had been a professor, I think, at MIT before that. I'm not sure. Drew Faust was the subsequent president at Harvard who served for a period of time and had a career in the humanities. I'm not sure whether it was literature or what it was that she had, and I'm sure it was okay. I don't know that she was in line for some prizes or anything as a scholar in her field, but I can assure you that her scholarly oeuvre was more comprehensive than that which Gay has presented.

She wrote more than 11 papers. She wrote books.

And some of these papers are just minor … anyway. The ironies are exquisite. She defenestrated Roland Fryer. She tried to destroy him. She requested of Bacow that his tenure be revoked in the context of some bullshit Title IX that has been vetted and discussed. Anybody can see this. I'm not going to rehash the argument, but believe me. The committee recommended that he get some training, and by the time she was through with him, he was suspended, his lab was closed, his teaching was supervised, and he was treated like a sex criminal. He didn't touch or proposition anybody.

Mention the documentary.

Rob Montz, Why Did Harvard Cancel Its Best Black Professor. Here's what I'm saying. They're hoist on their own petard. They believed in this DEI stuff to the point that they put a mediocre intellectual into the position of presiding over the precious jewel in the crown of American academia.

This plagiarism thing—I'm sorry, I know I'm going on. I don't care that somebody didn't put quotes around something. That they had cultivated the practice of drafting their professional research product by cut-and-paste technology. I have to have an intro. Let me see what so-and-so said. I have to describe the data set-up. Let me see how so-and-so did it. That's what's revealed here. That's how she wrote those papers.

What kind of person operates that way? She had lifted sentences for her acknowledgment section, Ruth Marcus reports in the Washington Post. What kind of person conducts themselves [like that]? A person who does not have confidence in their own mental acuity at the craft that they're engaged in. Mediocrity. So I actually don't care that she's black. What I care about is trashing the standards of the institution in the service of an ideology that is itself bankrupt.

The Supreme Court just struck down their affirmative action process. That's a massive thing. Are we not supposed to infer that some of these African Americans youngsters and who are being who are being foisted on us as the créme de la créme are similarly not quite as good as their billing is saying? The whole system is corrupt.

I'm going to be done. We African Americans have to either man up and woman up and master the game at hand or we're always going to be dependent upon Penny Pritzker to bail us out. We're either going to become players like we are on the playing field, where we stand tall because we are commanders of the craft at hand, or we're going to be wards of some Democratic Party sinecure.

I don't disagree with any of that. I cringe watching you criticize her that way, even though you're right. Because she can't help it. I'm going to try something here. It's not her fault. I'm not mad at her. You're correct, Glenn, that all those pictures of her smiling six months ago when she was appointed. “Claudine Gay has been appointed blah, blah, blah excellent.”

The reason they chose her is because of the color of her skin. What makes it even worse is that she comes from a wealthy immigrant family. But the idea is her blackness is a contribution. And you can tell that she thinks that way, too. Her op-ed in the Times. For her, how many papers she's published is less important than the fact that she brings blackness to the office and, I think we're supposed to assume by extension, commitment to DEI, which is considered to be an unassailable approach to American affairs.

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It's disgusting. If she were white, she wouldn't have been chosen. Her blackness was not just one factor. It wasn't a thumb on the scale—it was decisive. She's a token. We don't use that word “token” anymore. We've taken it, and we say “diversity” instead. Penny Pritzker and the gang were tokenizing. But that's not the way she would feel.

And I don't know, Glenn, if you feel this way, but this is something people should know. I'm not going to go on for too long. If you are inside—oh, I'm going to use this—these “black bodies,” so to speak, if you've grown up after about 1970, it is almost impossible not to conceive of yourself in competitions as having blackness as a factor. It's going to be in there. And frankly, although you're not supposed to say this, if you're somebody working in upwardly mobile, middle-class circles, it's a plus, because everybody is waiting to be Penny Pritzker.

Frankly, if I'm trying to get something or if somebody asked me to do something, it's impossible for me not to think of my brown skin, because it's almost always part of it. That's just the way it is. You don't apply for affirmative action. You don't apply for people thinking we need some more diversity. It's just there. I have a slightly unusual situation in that, of course, I get nixed, I get knocked down, I get treated like a real person if I go against the race orthodoxy. And I get essentially kicked out of the Linguistic Society of America. I get dissed in print. But that's the only time that I get to feel “white.”

That's how she feels. It's there. We're never seen without this black bonus.

Okay, John. As you were inclined to accept what I had to say, I'm inclined to accept as inarguable what you just said. It is a fact. You want not to be mad at somebody, and I'm mad at her like I was mad at Ibram X. Kendi. And you didn't want to be mad at him, because in a similar spirit, you said of him, he was just a product of the system, and he just went along. Who wouldn't have gone along if he'd been in a similar situation?

I say a system is corrupt, and I believe it is. You point out that she's from an immigrant family of means, and I want to point out that some outsized percentage of the students of color who get the benefit of affirmative action at Ivy League institutions are themselves either African or Caribbean second-generation immigrant people. I can't cite chapter and verse, but it's not an unnoticed phenomenon that's the case. And over amongst the African Americans who are descendants of slaves, their backgrounds are going to be much more privileged than the average black person in the street.

And yet the real impetus for affirmative action and this representation thing comes from the fact of the gut-level inequalities that you see in the jails and in the public hospital waiting rooms and in the welfare roles and so forth, that unresolved historical marginalization of African Americans. If you didn't have that, if you didn't have the ghetto, if you didn't have mass incarceration, if you didn't have Black Lives Matter, if you didn't have black poverty, it wouldn't be significant that the number of surgeons or the number of people who were mathematical statisticians or the number of people getting in the law school, it just wouldn't have the same cachet. It wouldn't have the same weight.

So there's a deep corruption here. Because the people who are appropriating the benefits from this system of redress we're going to do for black people and the politics of it, the unctuous way in which the left-of-center politicians cultivate the loyalties of black people by appealing to their status as victims and “white supremacy gonna get your mama,” this kind of Joe Bidenesque way of talking to black people. And the universities are actually leaving themselves off the hook. They're not actually developing black talent. They're cream-skimming and looking the other way and not applying the same standards of assessment. And that's ultimately disrespectful.

And Black people who love affirmative action, who are mad at Clarence Thomas and can't understand why he hates affirmative action are selling themselves short. You don't have to settle for what they give you as crumbs from the table. That's your choice. You don't have to settle for it. You can actually say, “I'll play when I'm ready to play. Don't do anything for me. Don't do me any favors.” You can take that attitude into your work life and into your professional life. But you've been seduced, you've been corrupted. You've sold your soul.

You know why more people don't think like us on this? It's the hardest thing. Talk about what we need to make a movie about? Or there should be a documentary about it. Most people think affirmative action is just the thumb on the scale. Most black people would listen to you and think that you're against every student. There's this rainbow coalition of students who've all made 105%, and then somebody decides let's make at least 13 percent of them black. And you're saying, no, let's not do that because some of the white kids had a few more AP courses.

That's, of course, not how affirmative action works. It's about lowering standards. I did a thing at Martha's Vineyard with our friend Randall Kennedy and other people, where he and I locked horns. We were sponsored by Skip Gates. And Lawrence Tribe basically bitch slapped me because I spoke in the way that you and I talk.

And of course, you're just not supposed to think that way. I'm over it. But the thing is most people think it's just a film on the screen. I wish the format of it had been so that I could actually answer him. I'm almost done, but the point is, everybody's nice to me face to face, this well-heeled black Martha's Vineyard audience. One of the worst [audiences] I've had in years, because almost none of them understood that affirmative action in universities is about lowering standards. They don't want to hear it put that way, for one thing. But even if you explain what the data is, you can tell they really don't know. They think it's just a thumb on the scale and that certain evil people are against fairly allowing black people to have their slice of the pie.

That is the one of the hardest things in the race debate. And you try to explain, no, there's this metric and there's that metric and there's this. But real live conversation doesn't allow it. You always get interrupted, and they're not going to read the sources that explain these things, because they figure the sources are written by the devil. It's a tough part of the conversation. That's why many people don't get us on that.

I'll just support what you're saying about it being tough, by one anecdote, which is I'm in my classroom. I'm talking about affirmative action. I've got black kids sitting in the room. What did you just say? You just said it's about lowering standards. So what am I saying when I point out that it's about lowering standards? I'm saying they were admitted under less rigorous standards. So what does that imply? They're not as good on average? What am I saying to them? “Do you think that I don't deserve to be here?”

Now, the answer to the question is, at some level, yeah, that is what I'm saying. I saw your furrowed brow. Precisely. I said “at some level.” I'm not saying that I would answer that question in the negative: “No, you don't deserve to be here.” No, I'm not saying I'd say that to the kid in the classroom. But I'm saying that is somehow embedded within the logic of the critique that I'm advancing. Everybody can't be above average.

I'll join you in saying that, at most, you can't say that the outcry from parents of Asian students of late is misinformed or racist, et cetera. It is legitimate to question the system, the way it actually operates from, for example their point of view. It's a nasty issue.

There are degrees of it. You can mess with scores, et cetera, to an extent and create what is. Clearly a student body where everybody is clearly equal in the general sense, even if there's some numbers issues in the background. You can also be more egregious about it, as has been seen at many schools, especially beyond a certain few.

But people don't know that, Glenn. They really don't know about any of that. Somebody ought to do a series of little spots at the Super Bowl or something, where the system is actually explained and everybody would see it. There need to be TikToks or something. But that's not going to happen.

Have you really sat in a classroom with black students in it and said that?

No. I've sat in a class with black students in it and said, this is a statistical necessity. Not my opinion. If the admissions criteria are correlated with performance after admission, and if lower criteria are used for a subset of the admitted population, on average, that population will perform less well. That's just a statistical necessity. The question is, what are we going to do with that?

Now, in saying that, I haven't said “you.” What I have left unsaid is that everybody cannot be above average. By definition or by implication, it's true about somebody in this room. But I haven't tried to press that point. I haven't tried to get personal about it. Now, if the student asked me, as has happened, “Does that mean that you think that I don't belong here?” my answer would be no, it doesn't mean that. I am not saying that about you.

I'm at Columbia. I don't know what Columbia's practices and numbers are. I don't think it's ever been aired. I don't notice any difference. And I've been there a long time. I've been honest with myself. I don't notice that the black students are different. However, that's Columbia. And I will definitely say that at UC Berkeley, the difference was stark, and it's why I wrote about it in Losing the Race and caught all of that hell for telling the truth.

So it depends on the school. And Berkeley is a different place now than it was then. I don't know. But the Berkeley that I write about of 1996 and 1997, it was an unassailable fact. And anybody knew it, the issue was just whether I was supposed to say it.

The other question is, what are your instruments? If you're writing essays and you're looking at essays, it's a very noisy screen. If you're doing math problems, it's a very precise screen.

So yeah, the implication of my general statement—if you use lower standards, you're gonna get less performance—could be born out in a lot of different ways. People might elect to avoid those areas of study, even within a field, that are most sensitive to the fact that they had lower test scores coming in, the fact that they had fewer advanced placement courses, the fact that they were less academically distinguished coming in. You might be able to nevertheless manage the post-admissions environment credibly.

But I'm just going to repair to the logic of the situation, which is if those test scores are correlated with the way that people perform after admission, and you use lower scores, you're going to get lower performance on average. And if you don't, that's only because they're not correlated with after-admissions performance, in which case, why are you using them in the first place? That's a logic statement.

I can't argue with that in itself.

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