The Counterpublic Papers vol. 8 no. 6

A week or so ago, Claudine Gay resigned as President of Harvard University, having served the shortest tenure in Harvard’s history. Since she was announced as its President, she’s received…let’s call it “pushback” (I wish she’d share even a small subset of the emails she’s received since her appointment), but when she appeared before the House Committee on Education (alongside Penn’s President who also resigned, and the President of MIT) her detractors (which include Harvard alum billionaire Bill Ackman and a host of reactionary activists) used the opportunity to push back against her hire. I’ve written about the broader context we find ourselves in, one in which higher education is under threat from a combination of conservative reactionary forces interested in taking the US back to the early twentieth century before the Civil Rights and New Deal eras, and hedge fund capital. 

But what I didn’t fully consider was the role of the mass media itself. Ackman and Rufio were by no means alone. They were aided and abetted by a host of mainstream media. I want to use Graeme Wood and Tom Nichols at The Atlantic as particular examples. 

Here’s Wood:

In The Best and the Brightest, David Halberstam described the elevation of McGeorge Bundy first to full professor, then to the deanship of Harvard in 1953. Bundy had a lowly appointment in the government department when his colleagues submitted his name to Harvard’s president, the distinguished chemist James Bryant Conant, for tenure. One wonders what could have been in Bundy’s dossier: He hadn’t written much, and his sole degree was a bachelor’s in mathematics from Yale. But Bundy was a known genius. Conant, according to Halberstam, signed off with a sigh. Tenure in government, for a man who had no Ph.D.—in fact had never taken a class in government—and few publications? “All I can say is that it couldn’t have happened in Chemistry,” Conant said.

Yesterday, another Harvard president, Claudine Gay, announced her intention to resign, after nearly a month of critique, justified and not, of her response to alleged campus anti-Semitism and her academic record. Her publication record is extremely thin, and much of it contains passages cribbed from other scholars. The end of her presidency took too long to come, and the delay was at her expense. Once the conservative gadfly Christopher Rufo and the Washington Free Beacon reporter Aaron Sibarium sensed her weakness, they found more and more instances of cribbing. (Graeme Wood, “Harvard’s Bundy Standard”, The Atlantic Monthly)

Wood’s lede read “Claudine Gay’s defenders erred in trying to suggest she was a scholar’s scholar.“ In concluding his piece he suggested that perhaps Gay—who is going back to Harvard’s Government Department—can now take the time to do what she hadn’t done before, publish research in top-tier academic journals.

And here’s Nichols:

 Perhaps in a few instances, Gay forgot to attribute a source or place a footnote. But that’s not the issue. All of us who write academic works (I’ve written seven books, five for university presses) could probably get called out for some clunky paraphrasing or a few bad footnotes. And sure, maybe her dissertation committee and her later peer reviewers and editors might have been too forgiving (or inattentive). No scholars carry a full compendium of their field’s works in their head; spotting plagiarism or poor attribution is difficult even with advanced software, and it was a lot harder to do before such technological innovations.

Further:

Some of Gay’s defenders, especially in academia, have nevertheless taken the bait from right-wingers who always wanted to make Gay’s very existence as Harvard’s president into a larger debate about diversity and race on campus. Gay herself, in her resignation letter, speaks of racist attacks against her. (Gay has been subjected to harassment and threats since the moment she appeared on the Hill—and likely a lot earlier—and certainly before anyone had even bothered to look at her published work.)

But none of that is relevant to the charges themselves. Look, there is a term for the particular kind of plagiarism discovered by racists and other bad people:

Plagiarism. (Tom Nichols, “Claudine Gay’s resignation was overdue” The Atlantic Monthly)

Because Gay and I are the same age, work in the same discipline and the same subfield (in fact, I’ve known her for years), I was going to provide a lengthier analysis of Gay’s work and its importance inside and outside of the discipline. Thankfully Alvin Tillery beat me to the punch, as did Gay herself. What stands out about Gay is not only that she consistently published in our top three journals (when the overwhelming majority of card-carrying political scientists barely publish one article in any of them) but she did so at a time when the discipline itself largely ignored racial phenomenon, thinking it to be pre- or even a-political. Further, she did so as a single author, something that as Tillery notes none of the last several American Political Science Association presidents in her subfield have done once. 

Wood would’ve known this, had he cared to do even a bit of a background check. Even a little bit of reporting. Hell, Tillery created a table that shows the publication records and citations of the last several Harvard Presidents. All he needed to create that table was Google Scholar. 

And if Wood was too lazy, then his editor could’ve done it. 

Nope. Wood’s done reporting before. He just didn’t do it here.   

On Nichols and the plagiarism charge. I think Kareem Carr’s done the best job of analyzing some of the quotes Gay was accused of plagiarizing, and I bet a broader examination would show a similar conclusion.   

But Nichols didn’t do it. Nichols himself is a card-carrying political scientist, and could’ve performed an analysis of his own work. He didn’t do that either, preferring instead to pontificate. (Ian Bogost actually DID run his dissertation through a plagiarism detector, finding nothing.)

What struck me about these pieces in particular was how similar in tone both appeared to be to the articles written during the 2016 presidential campaign about the revelation that Hillary Clinton used private email servers to receive and send top-secret emails. After Comey’s investigation became public, the mainstream press focused on the emails with zeal, even though their own reporting suggested that the number of emails Clinton was found to have received and then sent was remarkably small. 

And even though on the other hand, there was evidence that Trump was guilty of far worse.

Wood simply took for granted the idea that Gay wasn’t already a scholar. For Nichols the context in which we came to become aware of Gay’s scholarship is of far less importance than the scholarship itself. Oh. Right. There’s no discussion of Gay’s scholarship. Rather, the context in which we became aware of Gay’s citation practice is of far less importance than the practice itself. Which means again, Nichols doesn’t have to do much more than pontificate.

Both dodge the scale and scope of Gay’s violation (and relatedly her scholarship), and then the nature of the project arrayed against her (and by extension American institutions).

I’m going to go back to Bill Ackman. 

After Gay resigned, Bill Ackman suggested that it wasn’t enough that she step down as President. She should be fired from Harvard, given her history of plagiarism. Besides being a prominent Harvard donor, Ackman’s wife is a former MIT professor. Business Insider decided to examine Ackman’s wife’s record. 

As I would’ve predicted, they found (through simple investigation) that her dissertation contained the types of plagiarism, Ackman accused Gay of. Ackman, in response, suggested he’d perform an analysis of MIT’s entire faculty and make the results public. Second—and I just saw this yesterday (Sunday)—he suggested that the types of plagiarism Gay was accused of, was, in fact routine. 

I don’t know if Ackman’s claim comes after he’d already performed the analysis. But if journalists would’ve done this before it would’ve made the project Ackman and the reactionary right are engaged in clear for the broader American public. They don’t do this though in part because they’re already predisposed to accept the consensus that mainstream institutions are failing in part because of “wokeness.” And that “wokeness” is inherently corrosive. In this way, individuals like Wood and Nichols function as the loose equivalent of collaborators. And the institution of journalism itself further reveals its inability to respond to the forces arrayed against us.

So this is the first post from the new system. Let me know what you think. If you’re reading this and aren’t a subscriber, subscribe if you’re so inclined.