Harvard Academics Were Slamming Scandal-Plagued Claudine Gay Long Before Plagiarism Accusations

The Wall Street Journal just published a sympathetic piece on Harvard President Claudine Gay, painting her as the victim of a hit job by ‘detractors who were skeptical of her work and qualifications,’ and who used her ham-fisted response to antisemitism on campus to pounce on Gay, who is both #Stunning and #Brave.

Fluffing intensifies:

From the time she began carving her path through the most elite private schools in the nation to the presidency of Harvard University, Claudine Gay earned plaudits and promotions. 

She also amassed detractors who were skeptical of her work and qualifications and outraged by what they saw as the political decisions she made as an increasingly powerful administrator.  -WSJ

Yes, she was the gold standard until she injected woke politics into Harvard.

Buried about halfway down, the Journal describes how “For years people who identify themselves as academics have aired their resentments and grievances toward Gay on publicly accessible chat boards like the econjobrumors blog and Political Science Rumors,” adding “As Gay rose in prominence the posts about her became more frequent and negative—but they also held some truth.”

The Journal then notes that with generally limited opportunities in academia, bright and competitive scholars are often passed over for the job they think they deserve – and take to said chat boards to bitch. According to Harvard professor of government and African-American studies, Jennifer Hochschild – who has worked with Gay, the message boards can be “toxic.”

“When I was department chair, I sent out notices to my grad students saying, ‘Don’t read these things,’” she said. “There’s a huge negative slant, there’s a piling-on process and tremendous disaffection.”

According to Hochschild, women are disproportionately targeted (see! It’s not the plagiarism, or even the botched study that landed her major tenure at Stanford. It’s sexism…). Others, of course, say there is a ‘double standard for black women in power (see! It’s racism too!). The Journal cites a 2022 McKinsey report that found that black female leaders are more likely to have people question their competence compared with others. (Maybe being a giant woke plagiarist has something to do with it in this case?).

Longstanding Accusations of Plagiarism

Long before journalist Chris Rufo ‘seized and pounced’ (per wsj) on Gay for plagiarism, Harvard academics lodged frequent complaints against Gay, including accusations that she’s a serial plagiarist.

“Whole sentences in her literature review lifted off original sources with no quotation marks,” wrote one anonymous poster who went by “Economist 1f7f” on econjobrumors.com 11 months ago.

“The corporation has to do their homework in the sense that when they make a choice for a leader, they have to look at the entire background of that leader,” said Harvard professor of physics, Avi Loeb. “That’s their responsibility because otherwise, you risk getting into a situation that we’re in right now.”

Alongside rumors of plagiarizing, critics condemned Gay’s publication record as too thin to have earned consideration for the presidency. She has published 11 papers and no books. Her H-Index, which attempts to measure both the productivity and impact of the published work of a scientist or scholar, is an 11, according to Elsevier, an academic publishing company. By comparison, Dartmouth President Sian Beilock, who is younger than Gay, has an H-Index of 54. 

Critics online and on campus took issue with her performance as dean of faculty, which began in 2018, with some saying she lowered Harvard’s standards by indulging a political agenda to attract more faculty of color. They also said she weakened Harvard’s position on academic freedom by censoring conservative points of view. -WSJ

And then, Gay came under fire after Dec. 5 Congressional testimony in which she refused to condemn pro-Palestinian protesters on campus calling for ‘intifada’ (an uprising, not a genocide) against Israel, during which Jewish students on campus felt threatened.

At that moment, Chris Rufo dropped bombshell evidence of Gay’s extensive plagiarism – which Harvard would later review and deem ‘no big deal.’

Christopher Rufo

Rufo, who has advocated against critical race theory and believes universities are advancing a damaging left-wing ideology, received an anonymous file of about 40 pages with side-by-side highlighted passages detailing the alleged plagiarism. He said he knew immediately “that this is a weapon of war.”

“I think the entire corporation needs to resign as well as President Gay,” Rufo said in an interview. “I would be happy to join the corporation to help turn it around.”