Elite US universities face a political crisis they can’t control
The plagiarism controversy surrounding Harvard’s president is the most recent episode in which elite academia appears to be playing directly into the hands of ex-President Donald Trump’s populist Republicans.
First, the presidents of three top universities equivocated in a congressional hearing about the seemingly obvious question of whether calling for genocide against Jews infringed their universities’ codes of conduct.
Now, Harvard leader Claudine Gay is embroiled in a controversy over plagiarism that is posing the question of whether the academic standards that are applied to students also cover those at the top of the ivory tower. Facing a drip-drip of allegations, she’s requesting additional corrections of her past work, after last week issuing corrections to two scholarly articles she wrote in the 2000s. A GOP-led House committee, meanwhile, is widening an existing investigation into Harvard to include the plagiarism allegations.
While there are clear political motivations at play in the right’s assault on the country’s most storied universities, the controversies are also unfolding at a fraught moment in higher education. Elite universities are also being buffeted by claims that they are tainted by the political doctrines of the left and that colleges are becoming less a place to prepare new generations and more an incubator of radical ideology.
The new controversy over Gay could hardly have come at a worse time for her university, whose highest-governing body, the Harvard Corporation, only last week rejected demands for her firing over the antisemitism controversy.
By definition, academia deals in nuance. Universities have traditionally been places where ideas are pushed to their limits, even those that many regard as unacceptable, in order to preserve the definitional need for free speech and inquiry. But, there’s a growing sense that the balance is off kilter and that necessary actions to reform institutions that for years discriminated on the basis of gender, race and class have become consumed by their own radicalizing social revolution.
It shouldn’t, for instance, have been that hard for Gay – and her counterparts from the University of Pennsylvania and MIT – to come up with a clear condemnation of antisemitism that most Americans, outside the rarified air of the academy, could identify.
Are university leaders held to the same accountability as their students?
A Harvard spokesperson told CNN on Thursday Gay would update her 1997 dissertation to correct additional instances of “inadequate citation.” The new corrections, first reported by the Harvard Crimson, follow two previous updates Gay issued last week to scholarly articles she wrote in the 2000s.
A review by CNN published Wednesday had found Gay’s previous requested corrections did not address even clearer examples of plagiarism from her earlier academic work, including her dissertation. Plagiarism charges against Gay were first circulated by conservative activists and later reported by the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative publication.
Ivy League institutions are a favorite target for the new Trump populist right and reflect the evolution of the Republican Party in recent years away from its own elitist roots. And Gay’s latest troubles have already become a new opening for Republicans on Capitol Hill.
Rep. Virginia Foxx, a Republican from North Carolina who chairs the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, said this week she had widened an existing investigation into campus antisemitism to include the plagiarism allegations. “An allegation of plagiarism by a top school official at any university would be reason for concern, but Harvard is not just any university. It styles itself as one of the top educational institutions in the country,” Foxx wrote in a letter to Penny Pritzker, the senior fellow of the Harvard Corporation.
The showdown is made to measure for Foxx, an enthusiastic advocate for Trump, as it allows her to hit the MAGA sweet spot of assaulting one of the ultimate establishment institutions in the United States. She is heaping pressure on a Harvard president seen as a standard bearer for the kind of diversity and inclusion programs that many on the right see as antithetical to their view of American values.
Civil rights lawyer Sherrilyn Ifill called the investigation “shocking and dangerous” on Thursday and questioned why members of Congress are spending their time probing Harvard rather than passing a border bill or aid to Ukraine. “When you challenge the independence of private institutions, you are challenging a core element of our democracy. We should be on alert,” Ifill told CNN’s Brianna Keilar on “The Source.”
“If Harvard wants to do its own investigation, it is free to do so. But for members of Congress to decide that they want to meddle into the private affairs of a private institution in order to score political points and to target a Black president is incredibly dangerous,” added Ifill, the former president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a graduate of Yale and Harvard, has been relatively quiet on Gay’s most recently controversy. But he’s made waging a fight against elite institutions a cornerstone of his tenure and his campaign. He wrote in his autobiography, “The Courage to be Free,” that he detected more wisdom in working-class communities in Ohio and Pennsylvania than he encountered at both schools, where “entitled and tenured professors reigned as potentates, sure in the smugness of their positions, but utterly unaware of the lives of most Americans, including those that they professed to care about.”
His comments may be self-serving attempts to bolster his political mythology – or hint at a sincere reaction to his education that powered his political rise – or both. But DeSantis is also tapping into a powerful seam in the Trump-era GOP that was also evident, for example, in the demonizing of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious diseases specialist during the Covid-19 emergency.
But the plagiarism allegations, and the way Harvard handled them, also pose legitimatize questions over whether the university is holding its president — the guarantor and epitome of its standards of scholarship – to the same standards it’d apply to an undergraduate student. “If a university is willing to look the other way and not hold faculty accountable for engaging in academically dishonest behavior, it cheapens its mission and the value of its education,” Foxx wrote. “Students must be evaluated fairly, under known standards – and have a right to see that faculty are, too.”
Antisemitism controversy widened criticism of top academic presidents beyond conservatives
The heat on universities is likely to intensify next year as the presidential election heats up. But the appearance of Gay and two other university presidents at a hearing of the House Education Committee earlier this month threatens to become a seminal moment that underscored how, especially in the age of social media, elite institutions and their leaders can quickly appear out of touch with American society.
The most high-profile questioning was conducted by New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, a Harvard graduate who repudiated her more moderate Republicanism to emerge as a clarion for Trumpism — with swift benefits for her political career.
Stefanik asked Gay, MIT President Sally Kornbluth and then-University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill whether calls for genocide against Jews violated the codes of conduct at their respective institutions.
Gay said she found such speech personally abhorrent and offensive to Harvard’s values, but added that “when speech crosses into conduct that violates our policies, including policies against bullying, harassment or intimidation, we take action.” This answer came across as academic and overly technical given the shocking rise of antisemitism following the Hamas terror attacks on Israel. Many Americans believe that a call for genocide in itself constitutes abhorrent conduct. Gay later apologized for her remarks, telling the Harvard Crimson, “Words matter.”
Magill’s answers appeared even more evasive than those of Gay, crossing into apparent academic contempt for Stefanik’s black-and-white line of politicized interrogation. Magill later clarified her remarks but didn’t apologize and resigned amid a political firestorm and under pressure from University of Pennsylvania graduates and donors.
Some defenders of Gay and her colleagues argued that the situation was more complex than it seemed since Stefanik specifically asked the witnesses to comment on the phrase “globalize the intifada,” which has been used by pro-Palestinian demonstrators and others since the war erupted. The Arabic word intifada, meaning “shaking off,” refers to two, years-long popular uprisings by Palestinians in 1987 and 2000 against Israeli rule of the occupied West Bank and Gaza strip. The terminology was used to reference resistance to Israeli government policy not genocide against Jews.
But there have been instances in which the phrase was used by some pro-Hamas protesters following the group’s horrific terror attacks against civilians inside Israel.
So while the university presidents may have been protecting the core principle of free speech with their remarks, their distinction between someone advocating genocide and acting upon it came across as insensitive, absurd and morally barren.
The encounter presented a huge political victory for Stefanik, whose support for Trump has lifted her to the top echelons of leadership as chair of the House Republican conference. It prompted her critics, like Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, to ask why she failed to condemn the ex-president’s meeting with Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes and Kanye West, now known as Ye, who has long been accused of antisemitic rhetoric.
But more than anything else, it encapsulated the public crisis facing top American universities and accusations that they are not just isolated from the rest of society, but are threatening their own intellectual mission with political equivocation.
CNN