She has resigned.
*********************
[T]he important question for Harvard was never whether Gay should step down. It was why she was brought on in the first place, after one of the shortest presidential searches in Harvard’s recent history. How did someone with a scholarly record as thin as hers — she has not written a single book, has published only 11 journal articles in the past 26 years and made no seminal contributions to her field — reach the pinnacle of American academia?
So here’s UD‘s take on that one. Although it sounds unpleasantly snobby and snippy to say things like “has not written a single book,” it’s true that in many fields (not all), books are the currency, and UD too was surprised that one of the world’s preeminent universities chose as president someone with, yes, a “thin” scholarly record.
Yet if Gay hadn’t plagiarized throughout her career, UD would have let the thinness go, mainly because Gay seems to have moved from scholarship to administration pretty early, and if you’re a brilliant administrator (I have no idea whether she was), it’s arguable that you can be expected to ease up on your writing.
And listen — excellent essays can often have greater accessibility and impact than books. Think of ground-breaking essays by S. Huntington, J. Nash, R. Putnam… If one of Gay’s had been – not as staggering as those, but interestingly original, and seriously influential – UD also would have had no problem. A great essay, in any field, can sometimes demonstrate your scholarly quality better than a book. So for me the thinness is not about the lack of a book in particular; it’s about the lack of some form of impactful intellectual work.
January 2nd, 2024 at 9:50PM
Wait, this was about affirmative action? OK, Bret.
So we’re supposed to believe that the ranks of Black female political scientists are so thin that even *Harvard* has to settle for mediocrities who check off the necessary boxes. That seems…unlikely. It’s not as though she was recruited to Harvard from Fresno State; she was already tenured at Stanford.
I’m a fellow political scientist, but not in her field, so I looked her up in Google Scholar. She doesn’t have her own page (and good for her!), but her top five publications have each been cited 300-600 times, so it’s not as though she labors in obscurity.
Is this a Harvard-worthy record? Don’t ask me: all my degrees are from public AAU institutions, so I’m not even sure I’m allowed a seat at this table. But she’s no joke as an academic, or at least she wasn’t before the plagiarism revelations.
Weird pattern of plagiarism, though, lifting boilerplate language rather than big ideas. Kind of like buying your wardrobe at Nordstroms and then shoplifting your accessories from Walmart.
January 3rd, 2024 at 3:09AM
TAFKAU: I think it’s not hard to make the case that Gay’s research record doesn’t accord with Drew Faust’s, Larry Summers, Lawrence Bacow’s — not merely her absence of high-profile research (and I don’t know how Harvard’s counting, but here is an example where she’s one of four authors writing a book’s intro, and that’s it – she has not written an essay for the book – but is featured prominently on the cover), but the rather pedestrian nature of her insights and arguments.
Condoleezza Rice comes to mind, for instance, as obviously Harvard-worthy.
January 3rd, 2024 at 6:36PM
Sometimes there is a disturbance in the Force. Dan O’Donnell, a Milwaukee radio talker I dipped into enroute to a hobby shop this morning, also proposed Condi as a candidate who ticks the right boxes.
That’s probably a black swan event, UD and O’Donnell (to the right of Charlie Sykes, also a Milwaukee talker) identifying the same candidate.
January 4th, 2024 at 12:06AM
Gay was still a professor when I was in grad school and she was my comps examiner for one of my fields. She spent the entire exam staring at her phone and then looked up when it was her turn to ask me the following (her only) question: “Which book in American politics did you find most interesting?” Let me tell you, that was a real hardball! And with that, I got an MA from Harvard.
But ok, this silly moment aside, it’s true that in quantitative political science, books now matter much less than in the past and articles more. But even her articles are 1) too few, and 2) too lacking in innovation and originality to have even merited her initial tenure at Stanford (she only had 5 or 6 then, I think), no less her further promotion at Harvard. They’d be fine for a lower-ranked institution, but the expectations at Harvard are much higher. Consider, eg, the CVs of her colleagues in the same department and subfield (like this one, and since she’s older, you can just look at her publications since 1998, when Gay started publishing, and still see that she has absolutely outdone Gay). Even when she was still just faculty, she never seemed to chair any grad student committees or train anyone; she was already seen as deadwood.
It’s also true that you don’t have to be a brilliant scholar to be a good administrator. Many university presidents aren’t even scholars – think of all the military/businessmen/politicians, and some of them do quite well in the role (like David Boren at Oklahoma). And, ok, Harvard doesn’t go in for that kind of plebeian thing, but you don’t even have to look too far back to find another thinly-published prof who quickly ditched scholarship for admin and ascended to Harvard’s presidency – Neil Rudenstine. Did he have any impact in his field? Probably not too much. But he was good at a big part of the job – fundraising (and seemingly not much else…). What exactly was Gay good at when she was selected? No one quite knows. She’d been a dean for a while, but what were her deanly achievements? Uncertain. I think there was obviously a big push for a black person, preferably a woman, and no one at Harvard wants a Republican, so definitely no Condi, and another tenable black woman candidate, Danielle Allen, had already been nixed in the previous presidential search, so there she was, Ms. Harvard, sitting quietly in Mass Hall, doing little more than being present and correctly-identified. I guess now they will rethink that strategy.
January 4th, 2024 at 4:18AM
Rita: I read through my David Boren posts, and meh. He maintained the school as a rich, winning, dirty football program, but, like most jockshop presidents, pauperized the profs and anyone else not carrying a football. But I guess you’re right about him – he did what the place – and the legislature – wanted him to do.
ONE person at Harvard wants a Republican school prez – Archbishop Vermeule.
January 4th, 2024 at 5:03AM
Rita: The Ambitious Administrator Scrolling Through Her Phone While Important Exams, Speeches, Ceremonies Etc Etc Are Going On is, in my experience, a 21st century university archetype. One must convey one’s urgent important engagement in the next engagement. David Lodge would feature this behavior in all his novels if he were still writing.
January 4th, 2024 at 11:56AM
When I was visiting OU 2 yrs ago, Boren was hailed as a hero who revitalized undergrad academics by recruiting some actually literate students to the university through scholarship programs to induce them to stay in-state. I think your standard is too high – public universities are accountable to the public, and the public of the American West loves college football more than life, so absolutely nothing will be achieved at these institutions by attacking sports. You will just get canned if you try. So you have to work with them and do what you can to turn their profits to salutary ends.
Ha, Vermeule has no interest in Republicans; he only cares about Catholics. No Condi for him either.