American higher education has long regarded plagiarism as a cardinal sin. Accusations of academic dishonesty have ruined the careers of both teachers and students.

The latest target is Harvard President Claudine Gay, who resigned on Tuesday. In her case, the outrage came not from her academic colleagues, but from her political enemies, led by conservatives who scrutinized her career.

Harvard reviews found multiple flaws in Gay’s academic citations, including several instances of double language. The university concluded that the errors were not considered intentional or reckless and did not amount to misconduct. But the accusations continued, and new ones were added only on Monday.

Conservatives targeted Gay amid criticism of her testimony in Congress about anti-Semitism on campus. Her opponents alleged that Gay, who has a doctorate in government, was a professor at Harvard and Stanford and headed Harvard’s largest division before getting her PhD, got the top job in large part because she is a black woman.

Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist who helped organize the fight against homosexuals, celebrated her departure as a victory in his campaign against elite institutions of higher learning. On

Tomorrow we will resume the fight, he said on X, describing a playbook against institutions that conservatives consider too liberal. His latest goal: efforts to promote diversity, equity and inclusion in education and business.

We must not stop until we eliminate the DEI ideology from every institution in America, he said. In another post, he announced a new plagiarism hunt fund, pledging to expose the rot in the Ivy League and establish truth, rather than racist ideology, as the highest principle in academic life. to recover.

Gay did not directly address the plagiarism allegations in a campus letter announcing her resignation, but she noted that she was concerned about the doubts being cast over her commitment to upholding scientific accuracy. She also referred indirectly to the December congressional hearing that launched the onslaught of criticism, where she did not say unequivocally that calls for genocide of Jews would violate Harvard policy.

Her departure comes just six months after she became Harvard’s first black president.

As figureheads at their universities, presidents often face mounting criticism, and countless leaders have been felled by plagiarism scandals. The president of Stanford University resigned last year amid findings that he manipulated scientific data in his research. A University of South Carolina president resigned in 2021 after retracting parts of his speech at a graduation ceremony.

In Gay’s case, many academics were concerned about how the plagiarism came to light: as part of a coordinated campaign to discredit Gay and force her from office, in part because of her involvement in racial justice efforts at the campus. Her resignation came after calls for her ouster from prominent conservatives, including Rep. Elise Stefanik, a Harvard alumna, and Bill Ackman, a billionaire hedge fund manager who has donated millions to Harvard.

The campaign against Gay and other Ivy League presidents has become part of a broader right-wing effort to reshape higher education, which is often seen as a bastion of liberalism. Republican opponents have sought to defund public universities, roll back tenure and ban initiatives that make colleges more welcoming to students of color, disabled students and the LGBTQ+ community. They have also strived to limit the way race and gender are discussed in the classroom.

Walter M. Kimbrough, the former president of the historically Black Dillard University, said what unfolded at Harvard reminded him of a saying from his mother, a black graduate of

the University of California, UC

Berkley

,

in the fifties.

As a black person in academia, you always have to be two or three times as good, he said.

There will be people, especially if they have any suspicion that the person of color is not the most qualified, who will label them as a DEI hire, like they tried to label her,” Kimbrough said. Like it [Harvard] There will be people who want to disqualify you.

The allegations against Gay initially came from conservative activists, some of whom remained anonymous. They looked for the kind of double sentences that students should avoid in training, even with source references.

In dozens of cases first published by the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative website, Gay’s work includes long stretches of prose that mirror the language of other published works. A review commissioned by Harvard acknowledged that she duplicated the language without using quotation marks.

Harvard previously said Gay had updated her dissertation and requested corrections from journals.

Her critics in conservative circles and academia say the findings show that Gay, as a top scientist at the pinnacle of American higher education, is unfit to serve. Her defenders say it’s not that clear.

In highly specialized fields, scholars often use similar language to describe the same concepts, says Davarian Baldwin, a historian at Trinity College who writes about race and higher education. Gay clearly made mistakes, he said, but with the spread of software designed to detect plagiarism, it wouldn’t be difficult to find similar overlap in the works of other presidents and professors.

The tool becomes dangerous, he added, when it falls into the hands of those who claim that academia in general is a cesspool of incompetence and bad actors.

John Pelissero, a former interim college president who now works for the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, said cases of plagiarism deserve to be assessed individually and that it is not always that simple.

You find out whether there was intent to mislead or inappropriately adopt the ideas of others in your work, Pelissero said. Or was there an honest mistake?

Without commenting on the merits of the allegations against Gay, American Assn. President Irene Mulvey said. of college professors say they fear plagiarism research could be used to pursue a political agenda.

There is currently a right-wing political attack on higher education that feels like an existential threat to the academic freedom that is the envy of the world, Mulvey said.

She worries that Gay’s departure will put new pressure on college presidents. In addition to their work to woo donors, policymakers, and alumni, presidents are supposed to protect faculty from interference so they can conduct unfettered research.

If presidents are impeached this way, it doesn’t bode well for academic freedom, she said. I think this will cool the climate for academic freedom. And it may make university presidents less likely to speak out against this inappropriate interference, for fear of losing their jobs or being targeted.

Binkley reported from Washington, Balingit from Sacramento.