On Tuesday, Claudine Gay resigned as president of Harvard University, just six months into a tenure marked by campus unrest and controversy. After Hamas militants attacked Israel on October 7th, a number of Harvard student groups released a statement blaming Israel for the violence. The administration’s initial response was circumspect; in a statement, the school’s leaders said they were “heartbroken by the death and destruction unleashed by the attack.” After a public outcry, Gay released a follow-up statement explicitly condemning terrorism and distancing Harvard from the student groups. In December, Gay and two other university presidents were hauled before Congress to testify about antisemitism on their campuses. When Representative Elise Stefanik asked Gay whether calling for the genocide of Jews was a violation of Harvard’s policies against bullying and harrassment, Gay replied, “It can be, depending on the context.” Shortly afterward, Gay apologized.
But what ultimately brought Gay down wasn’t the furor over her testimony. It was accusations of plagiarism in her scholarly work, which has focussed in part on Black political participation. Rumors about Gay’s record had been circulating among conservative bloggers for months, but, as the national spotlight turned toward Harvard, media outlets such as the New York Post began investigating. In early December, the activist Christopher Rufo published allegations about Gay in his newsletter, including instances of missing citations and verbatim copying of other scholars’ writing without the use of quotation marks or attribution. In the following weeks, more apparent instances of plagiarism piled up. Gay has admitted to making errors, such as duplicating “other scholars’ language, without proper attribution,” but she has denied claiming credit for other people’s research, and has said that she stands by her work. In any case, on January 2nd, she stepped down from her role, saying that doing so was “in the best interests of Harvard” and that it had been “distressing to have doubt cast on my commitments to confronting hate and to upholding scholarly rigor.” (She will remain on the school’s faculty.)
Many professors have come to Gay’s defense, arguing that the attacks against her were orchestrated by right-wing activists aiming to discredit her because of her work on diversity, equity, and inclusion, and because of her response to October 7th. Perhaps surprisingly, one of her defenders is a professor she allegedly plagiarized from. D. Stephen Voss, an associate professor of political science at the University of Kentucky, knew Gay when they were both graduate students at Harvard. He was her teaching fellow, or T.A., and they worked in the same lab. Voss was a co-author of a 1996 paper that was included in a list of works that Gay allegedly copied from, which, according to the Washington Free Beacon, was compiled in an anonymous complaint to Harvard. One of the two paragraphs in question is pretty technical, describing the methodology of the paper; there are overlapping phrases, but they’re indirect. The other paragraph is a nearly verbatim copying of three or four sentences that Voss and his co-author wrote, with a few words changed.
I spoke with Voss about what it’s been like to get dragged into Harvard’s drama and why academics have been so divided over how to describe Gay’s actions. Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Was what Claudine Gay did plagiarism?
What I teach my students, and what most people in the social sciences teach their students, is that borrowing either large chunks of text or a paragraph’s exact logic constitutes plagiarism. So, yes, that’s technically plagiarism.
Why do you append “technically” to the front of “plagiarism”?
I use the analogy of speeding. If you’re driving fifty-seven miles per hour on a fifty-five-mile-per-hour highway, that’s technically speeding. But we don’t expect law enforcement to crack down any time behavior crosses over the line. The plagiarism in question here did not take an idea of any significance from my work. It didn’t steal my thunder. It didn’t stop me from publishing. And the bit she used from us was not in any way a major component of what made her research important or valuable.
So how serious a violation of academic integrity was this?
From my perspective, what she did was trivial—wholly inconsequential. That’s the reason I’ve so actively tried to defend her.
Does the scope of the allegations change your assessment at all—the fact that it wasn’t just material from your paper that she copied, but multiple instances across her work?
I have carefully tried to avoid speaking to the accusations of serial plagiarism, rather than the part that involved me. I have a conflict of interest, both in the sense of having past associations with Claudine, which might make people think I’d be biased toward her, but also because my work was getting attention. I stood to gain from faking moral outrage over it. So people might think I have a conflict of interest in the other direction.
I’m struck by how clearly you saw the possibility of a prize that you could pursue in all of this—that if you took up this campaign against Gay you could get some mileage out of it, professionally and personally. It’s so cynical, but it also seems right.
I don’t know that I did see it clearly. Once I saw that no significant plagiarism had actually taken place, my gut reaction was to jump to Claudine’s defense. Later on, other people told me, “I admire the approach you’ve taken—that you didn’t try to capitalize on this.” And then it dawned on me.
Do you think that Gay should have been fired from her job rather than being allowed to resign? And do you think that she should get to remain on Harvard’s faculty?
You’re asking me about these bigger-picture academic questions that I’m not comfortable answering. Claudine Gay was an immensely successful political scientist and university administrator. I’m off in the trenches teaching two-hundred-person undergraduate introductory classes. These questions of what should happen to Claudine Gay—we’re so far beyond my pay grade.
As a journalist, I feel like plagiarism is one of the worst possible sins I could commit. It would be an absolute nightmare if I accidentally copied someone’s work or if I were accused of doing so. Is that sense of horror there for academics? Was it there when you were at Harvard?
When I first was told that Claudine may have committed academic dishonesty at my expense, I took it seriously. I’ve had my work stolen before. So I didn’t rule it out. I immediately investigated what she used.
But the difference between plagiarism among academics and plagiarism in journalism or undergraduate papers is that what matters is less a few words or phrases and more the bigger scholarly ideas. Somebody could steal good ideas I had, write them up differently, and they’d have done serious damage to me. Whereas, if Claudine had borrowed three times as many words, but it was all in an unimportant part of the paper, that would have done me no harm. I’ve been stolen from in serious ways. What Claudine did was not it.
It almost seems like you’re suggesting that it’s more serious when students do word-stealing than when academics do word-stealing because ultimately the game for academics is the ideas, not the words. Don’t you think there’s something to be said for modelling for students the codes of ethics you expect them to uphold? Shouldn’t academics be held to a higher standard of performance than undergrads?
I don’t want to suggest that any borrowing from one scholar to another would be O.K., or should be held to a lower standard than we hold students to. But we’re talking about a specific case here, where Claudine and I were in the same lab, working with the same adviser, moving forward the same method. Borrowing is extremely common. Had we been in the natural sciences, I’m not sure the plagiarism case ever would have involved me because there would have been a decent chance that Gary King, our adviser, would have been the final author on both her work and mine.
Has she called you up and apologized?
I’ve never spoken to Claudine Gay about the current controversy, nor have I spoken to her about anything else for many, many years. I don’t feel I’m owed an apology.
Do you think that she owes the public or her students an apology?
Harvard obviously has attracted bad publicity over the last couple of weeks due to a controversy that wasn’t of the institution’s making. I don’t know what better way you can apologize to an institution than by resigning.
I’ve seen a number of academics trying to describe what Gay did as something other than plagiarism. A few weeks ago, for example, before Gay resigned, Harvard itself described her actions as using “duplicative language without appropriate attribution.” Why is it controversial to call what she did plagiarism?
It shouldn’t be controversial to call what Claudine did plagiarism. We teach students that it’s plagiarism all the time. But the problem with using language that’s customary within academic institutions in a public setting is that outsiders will warp what we say. The one phrase I’ve intentionally avoided using is “academic dishonesty.” Within an academic setting, plagiarism is an example of academic dishonesty. But if I’d said she committed academic dishonesty, that would have been warped and manipulated quite deceptively. So I avoided the term.
But why do you think that people don’t want to say the P-word? Why don’t they want to say “plagiarism”?
What happened to me in this controversy is the perfect illustration of why others have been avoiding the word “plagiarism.” My initial response was entirely supportive of Claudine. Yes, it was technically plagiarism, but this is no big deal. And then the right-wing activist Christopher Rufo plucks out the beginning of that sentence and says, Another scholar accuses Claudine Gay of plagiarism. Now, he didn’t lie. I did call it “plagiarism.” I hadn’t framed it as an accusation, but I guess the verb sort of fits. But he was able to get leverage out of something I said, taken out of context, that I then spent two days on Twitter rebutting. So, yeah, in retrospect, do I regret using the word “plagiarism,” given how it was exploited? Maybe.
Really? So you wouldn’t still call it “plagiarism”?
I’m calling it “plagiarism.” That doesn’t mean I didn’t regret it.
I’ve seen a lot of academics resisting the use of the word “plagiarism” because they say that the people who surfaced the allegations against Gay are part of a right-wing machine that wants nothing more than to take her down—allegedly because of her race or because they hate academia or because they want to undermine liberal institutions. What do you make of the argument that it’s worth resisting the frames that someone like Christopher Rufo comes up with to talk about what she did?
If the only way academia can fend off the Christopher Rufos of the world is by shifting their standards in an ad-hominem fashion based on who’s offering the attack, then academia has already lost the cultural battle. The clearer our standards, the more sure we are in what we believe in, the less it matters where a complaint or an attack is originating from. I reject the idea that an accusation that otherwise would have been taken seriously ought to be fended off because the bad guys are using it.
Do you think that it’s healthy for academics to so explicitly reject criticisms of a scholar just because they come from conservatives?
I’ve been disgusted, and sometimes even a little angry, at people suggesting that it’s just fine for scholars to borrow other people’s words or paragraphs almost verbatim. Academia is doing itself no favors by seeming to have dodgy standards based on the politics of the people involved.
Universities have been suffering from a lack of public trust, which is strongest among people on the right. The best way that academia could regain trust is if we were observed applying our standards in a politically neutral way. The way people have squared off during this Claudine Gay controversy has had the opposite appearance. It looks as though élites are dividing into the usual camps.
Do you think that the level of scrutiny that has been applied to Gay’s past work, and that could now be applied to any scholar’s past work because of the Internet, is healthy or helpful for academia?
Much of the research out in the public record now was conducted at a time when electronic resources were much more rudimentary. Most people didn’t realize their words would be archived fifty years later and easily searched. I’ve referred to what Claudine Gay faced as the academic version of doxing. People publishing today know what’s possible. Perhaps they’ll have to hew to stricter standards than scholars were doing at the end of the twentieth century. Insofar as greater scrutiny forces better behavior, I’m all for it.
Has it surprised you to see how Gay has conducted herself in the past few months, from her statements about the October 7th attack in Israel and her testimony before Congress to her conduct amid all these allegations of plagiarism?
Claudine’s a very adaptable person—good at working with others. And she was broadly liked. As I see her leading Harvard, I see those same character traits—an attempt to be adaptable and accommodating. Take, for example, the process through which she refined her message after the Hamas attacks, starting with a brief initial statement, followed by a more elaborate one and a video, followed by an appearance in front of the Hillel, a Jewish student organization on campus. What I saw was someone searching for the right way to balance all of the difficult needs of the circumstances to benefit as many people as possible.
In your academic work, both you and Gay have looked at how race shapes voter behavior. What role do you think race has played in the scrutiny of Gay and in her resignation?
Having been dragged through Christopher Rufo’s fan base—seeing the language people used, even some of their account names and symbols—I have no doubt that part of the hostility toward Claudine results from racism. That being said, I was even more struck by the amount of misogyny. After Rufo publicized my comments, the number of responses attacking my masculinity really jumped out. I was called a beta male. They said I had been emasculated. Also: Claudine has short hair. The number of people who assumed she was lesbian, even though she is married to a guy I went to graduate school with, was also striking.
Setting the accusations of plagiarism aside, Gay’s right-wing critics have consistently pointed to her academic record as evidence that she’s not qualified to be Harvard’s president—that with only eleven peer-reviewed papers and no solely authored book, she wasn’t enough of a scholarly heavyweight to merit the job. As someone who works in a similar lane, what do you make of that assessment?
Outsiders trying to judge the publication expectations of the field are going to misunderstand. Claudine had several papers at the two top crossover journals in our field, authored solely by her, which represents a major accomplishment. One way to put it is: Maybe she didn’t write as many songs. But the ones she did write were chart-toppers.
Do you think race plays into the claim that she was never qualified to be president of Harvard?
Only indirectly. Claudine Gay has gotten the level of hostile attention she received because she symbolizes, in part, racial change at the élite level. Most people doxing her or trying to tear her down are reaching for whatever they can find.
You did your graduate training at Harvard, but you’ve spent your academic life at the University of Kentucky, which is a very different institution. How has all of the drama at Harvard looked from where you sit, teaching at a large state school?
The clashes over Middle Eastern politics have been more severe at élite institutions. People look to places like Harvard to serve as cultural guideposts. Standard research-one universities or public state flagships don’t face pressure to take a stand on every global controversy. Leaders at Harvard do. What stands out is the pressure-cooker environment that being part of an élite institution entails.
Do you think the student population is more polarized at a place like Harvard?
Students at Harvard, judging from when I taught there, do have a sense of their importance. When I hear about dozens of student organizations banding together to issue a statement, and then it’s getting covered internationally—that’s a unique feature of life at those top institutions. It would be hard to imagine dozens of Kentucky student groups banding together to issue a statement, let alone having that statement be taken seriously across the world.
Do you think that degree of self-regard is pathological?
No! If you look at the makeup of the U.S. Supreme Court or Congress, it’s clear that the students at those élite institutions are going on to positions of power and influence.
Do you think that we—and, by we, I mean academics and journalists and maybe America writ large—care too much about what goes on at Harvard?
All three of my children went to the University of Kentucky. I respect that the selection process at those top places means that they’re skimming some of the best talent from across the country, and, for that matter, globally. But the amount of attention a handful of top institutions receive is unfair to the talent that we have at state universities all across the country. ♦
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