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**DECEMBER 22, 2023**
On the Prospect website
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The University of Phoenixification of Elite Education
What does the oligarch behind the 'Ivy League antisemitism
crisis' actually want? BY MAUREEN TKACIK
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How Amazon's Outsourcing Facilitates Union Busting
Employees at the company's Queens warehouse actually work for a
third-party subcontractor. This fissured workplace is an obstacle to
collective-bargaining rights. BY LUKE GOLDSTEIN
Omaha Bans Ghost Gun Kits-for Now
As the ghost gun threat accelerates, red states are going after blue
cities trying to control the proliferation of the weapons. BY JACK
STYLER
Bracing for 'Argentina's Trump'
Both friends and foes of the newly elected populist president say their
future under him is uncertain, but the certain misery of the present led
to his win. BY KELLY CANDAELE
Kuttner on TAP
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**** Will Claudine Gay Keep Her Job?
The assault on the beleaguered president of Harvard continues.
The microscopic reviews of Gay's dissertation and her published papers
are persisting.
The pattern appears to be that Gay will occasionally cite a source but
neglect to put a short passage in quotes
.
Once again the Harvard Corporation, the university's top governing
body, reviewed the latest allegations and found that they didn't rise
to the level of plagiarism.
On Wednesday, the school issued a statement that in a few cases Gay had
not rigorously followed the Harvard Guide to Using Sources. Gay has now
submitted a total of seven corrections to scholarly articles
adding quotation marks and revising citations.
In a letter to Penny Pritzker, head of the Harvard Corporation, Rep.
Virginia Foxx (R-NC) cites the definition of plagiarism in the
school's honor code and asks, "Does Harvard hold its faculty-and its
own president-to the same standards?"
Assuming that nothing worse is unearthed, the Harvard Corporation has
decided to stand by its president, at least for now. Meanwhile, the
donor pressure continues. The hedge fund manipulator William Ackman, a
major Harvard donor, has been saying out loud what others have
whispered: that Gay got the Harvard post because of her race.
Donors have far too much influence at universities. In a just world,
Harvard would tell Ackman where to shove his money. But in this
corrupted world, Gay will also need to repair relations with other
donors if she is to survive.
Let's also be honest about how affirmative action works. An
institution's leadership will admit that it is far too white and far
too male, and make systematic efforts to identify qualified candidates
who are nonwhite and female or both. Ackman is right that some white
male, somewhere, had better credentials than Gay, at least on paper.
Four hundred years after slavery, the diversification of the top
leadership of top institutions is still far from complete. Black leaders
who break ceilings are expected to be above reproach, as Barack Obama
was. As John McWhorter writes in
**The New York Times**
,
"If she stays in her job, the optics will be that a middling publication
record and chronically lackadaisical attention to crediting sources is
somehow OK for a university president if she is Black."
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However, there's an instructive comparison with one failed white male
Harvard president whom the governing corporation gave chance after
chance to clean up his act before finally deciding in a divided vote
that he had to go.
Though Larry Summers (or his legions of research assistants) made sure
not to forget the quotation marks, his errors of scholarship were far
more serious than Gay's
. They
included assuming that deregulation of finance, which he relentlessly
promoted, would not lead to a financial collapse; and that pushing
postcommunist Russia to helter-skelter privatization would not lead to a
deep depression that ended with Putin. Lately, Summers has failed to
correct his egregious errors in his assessment of the recent bout of
inflation and his calls for austerity.
Summers also cost the Harvard endowment far more than whatever donors
have bailed on Gay, with reckless speculations that overruled
Harvard's professional investment staff. It was his high-handedness
with faculty and boorish sexist comments that finally did Summers in as
Harvard president. But Harvard's governing board, led at the time by
Summers sponsor Robert Rubin, cut the arrogant Summers far more slack
than it has cut Gay.
It's painful to have to parse whether Harvard's first Black woman
president technically committed plagiarism. Assuming that Gay survives
this hazing, her long-term survival in the job will depend on what kind
of leader she turns out to be, and whether she can turn the antisemitism
crisis into a constructive opportunity for dialogue.
If the Harvard powers do decide she has to go, they will follow the
usual establishment protocol and find the kind of nice soft landing for
Gay that they arranged for University Professor Lawrence Summers.
~ ROBERT KUTTNER
Follow Robert Kuttner on Twitter
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