[ A Harvard Professor says plagiarism became a “pretext” to
oust Gay, and discusses the larger right-wing war on education aimed
at undoing progress on race, gender and addressing inequality.]
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HOW A GOP CAMPAIGN OUSTED HARVARD’S CLAUDINE GAY  
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Interview with Khalil Gibran Muhammad by Amy Goodman
January 3, 2024
Democracy Now
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_ A Harvard Professor says plagiarism became a “pretext” to oust
Gay, and discusses the larger right-wing war on education aimed at
undoing progress on race, gender and addressing inequality. _

Claudine Gay, then Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, speaks
during the 368th Commencement Exercises at Harvard University in
Cambridge, Massachusetts, May 30, 2019, Brian Snyder | Reuters

 

AMY GOODMAN: This is _Democracy Now!_, democracynow.org, _The War
and Peace Report_. I’m Amy Goodman.

The first African American and second woman to lead Harvard University
resigned Tuesday after allegations of plagiarism and backlash over her
testimony at a congressional hearing on antisemitism last month
that’s part of a broader effort to restrict pro-Palestinian speech
on college campuses. Claudine Gay’s six-month tenure is the shortest
of any Harvard president in history. Claudine Gay will remain at
Harvard as a tenured professor of government and African and African
American studies.

In a letter Tuesday, she wrote, quote, “It has been distressing to
have doubt cast on my commitments to confronting hate and to upholding
scholarly rigor — two bedrock values that are fundamental to who I
am — and frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats
fueled by racial animus,” she wrote.

The plagiarism allegations against President Gay were part of a
campaign started last month, led in part by conservative activist
Christopher Rufo, who cheered her resignation on X, writing in all
capital letters, ”SCAPLED” [_sic_]. The conservative website The
Washington Free Beacon published new plagiarism allegations against
Gay Tuesday. One of the authors Rufo accused Gay of plagiarizing was
her thesis adviser, Gary King, who has dismissed the allegations,
telling _The Daily Beast_, quote, “There’s not a conceivable case
that this is plagiarism. … Her dissertation and every draft I read
of it met the highest academic standards,” he said.

The Harvard Corporation issued a statement Tuesday, saying Gay, quote,
“acknowledged missteps” and showed, quote, “remarkable
resilience in the face of deeply personal and sustained attacks,”
unquote.

Claudine Gay’s resignation comes after the University of
Pennsylvania President Elizabeth Magill also resigned, just days after
the two appeared, along with MIT President Sally Kornbluth, at a
congressional hearing led by right-wing Republican Congressmember
Elise Stefanik. This is Stefanik questioning President Gay.

CLAUDINE GAY: … free speech extends —

REP. ELISE STEFANIK: It’s a yes-or-no question. Let me ask you
this. You are president of Harvard, so I assume you’re familiar with
the term “intifada,” correct?

CLAUDINE GAY: I have heard that term, yes.

REP. ELISE STEFANIK: And you understand that the use of the term
“intifada” in the context of the Israeli-Arab conflict is indeed a
call for violent armed resistance against the state of Israel,
including violence against civilians and the genocide of Jews. Are you
aware of that?

CLAUDINE GAY: That type of hateful speech is personally abhorrent to
me. …

REP. ELISE STEFANIK: Well, let me ask you this: Will admissions
offers be rescinded or any disciplinary action be taken against
students or applicants who say “from the river to the sea” or
“intifada,” advocating for the murder of Jews.

CLAUDINE GAY: As I have said, that type of hateful, reckless,
offensive speech is personally abhorrent to me.

AMY GOODMAN: That was last month. On Tuesday, Congressmember
Stefanik celebrated Gay’s resignation on social media, writing in
all caps, ”TWO DOWN.” Stefanik added this is, quote, “just the
beginning of what will be the greatest scandal of any college or
university in history,” and vowed to hold more hearings.

Congressmember Stefanik is a major Trump ally and a Harvard alumna who
was removed from a Harvard advisory board in 2021 over her comments
about voter fraud in the 2020 election that had, quote, “no basis in
evidence.”

Meanwhile, the conservative activist Christopher Rufo announced
Tuesday evening he was, quote, “contributing an initial $10,000 to a
'plagiarism hunting' fund.”

For more on all of this, we’re joined by Khalil Gibran Muhammad,
professor of history, race and public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy
School. He’s the author of _The Condemnation of Blackness: Race,
Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America_.

Professor, welcome back to _Democracy Now!_ It’s great to have you
with us. First, if you can respond to, and were you surprised by, the
resignation of Claudine Gay yesterday?

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: Thanks, Amy, for having me on.

I have to admit I wasn’t surprised, but I was extremely
disappointed. This is a terrible moment for higher education. Harvard
and the University of Pennsylvania are just the beginning. The
political attacks that you’ve just profiled by Elise Stefanik and
most other members of the House committee that held those hearings on
December 5th have actually declared war on the independence, on
academic freedom, on the truth of American history and our present at
all colleges and universities, just as Governor DeSantis has done in
Florida and Greg Abbott has done in Texas and other governors and
legislative bodies in many other states.

This is the next step in now a three-year-long campaign to destroy
this country’s capacity to address its past and its present, to deal
with the structural racism, the systemic inequalities that cause
premature death amongst millions of Americans every year. And right
now the Republicans and their allies are winning.

AMY GOODMAN: So, if you can put Claudine Gay in context? The first
Black president, the first Black woman president, the second woman to
lead Harvard University, now her presidency is the shortest in
Harvard’s history. And put it in the context of the whole attack
on DEI, the whole attack on critical race theory. And if you can talk
about this campaign by Stefanik, by Rufo, as they go from the
congressional hearing, which didn’t succeed in taking her down, to
this issue of plagiarism?

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: OK. Well, let me start with the fact that
Harvard is the oldest, wealthiest, most prestigious university in this
country and globally. So, for almost 400 years, Harvard has
systematically excluded white women and people of color, by and large,
from its hallowed corridors, from entering its gates. That’s just an
absolute fact, a fact that the university, under the previous
president, Larry Bacow, admitted to in a report called the Harvard
Legacy of Slavery report, that was issued just over a year ago, a
report that points out precisely how not only did the university
exclude people of color from getting an education, but in fact
collected the bodies of Indigenous people and enslaved people for
scientific research, and led, into the 20th century, calls for
scientific racism that helped to construct the racial hierarchies that
we still live with in this country today. That’s Harvard’s own
history as a leader.

So the very university that finally arrived at a moment where it not
only reckoned with its own history, but also recognized the talent is
universal and that the best of us actually have the ability to move
this country and world forward, in a time when the planet is literally
on fire and most people who will suffer most from that will be people
of color, that is the context that brought Claudine Gay to the
presidency. And she was ably and excellently qualified for that role.
She had proven herself in previous administrative roles as a dean of
the largest school on Harvard’s campus.

So, when we put that in context, the affirmative action decision last
June was the first victory for the conservative right in this country
to dismantle the very possibility that people like Claudine Gay would
have the qualifications, the Harvard and Stanford degrees, necessary
to take on such positions. And so, within that political context, the
attack on affirmative action is one example of what’s been going on,
which is 30 years old, a battle. But additionally, and more proximate
to this moment, people like Christopher Rufo in late 2020, in response
to George Floyd’s killing, have initiated an effort, what we would
call a whitelash or a backlash, forms of misinformation to essentially
define a body of knowledge known as critical race theory, that is the
intellectual basis for understanding how systemic and structural
racism work, as anti-American, as Marxist, as a threat to American
civilization. And that led to 24 states criminalizing the teaching of
history in all its truth about race, about racism, about sex, about
gender. That led to the banning of DEI in places like Florida and,
to some degree, in Texas.

And what we saw happen here with this campaign against Claudine Gay,
where plagiarism became the pretext, kind of like a Black motorist
with tinted windows being stopped only to look for drugs so that they
could be incarcerated as part of a war on Black people during mass
incarceration, that is the context where Christopher Rufo, who
initiated the critical race theory, anti-woke campaign, has now
culminated in yet another victory with taking down Claudine Gay over a
very, very minor offense within academic context.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Khalil Gibran Muhammad, professor of
history, race and public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. I want
to turn to an op-ed
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in _The Harvard Crimson_ by Bernie Steinberg. He was the executive
— he was the executive director of Harvard Hillel from 1993 to
2010. It’s headlined “For the Safety of Jews and Palestinians,
Stop Weaponizing Antisemitism.” In his essay, Steinberg supports
President Gay.

He wrote, quote, “During my long career as a Jewish educator and
leader — including thirteen years living in Jerusalem — I have
seen and lived through my community’s struggles. Now, as an elder
leader, with the benefit of hindsight, I feel compelled to speak to
what I see as a disturbing trend gripping our campus, and many others:
The cynical weaponization of antisemitism by powerful forces who seek
to intimidate and ultimately silence legitimate criticism of Israel
and of American policy on Israel.

“In most cases, it takes the form of bullying pro-Palestine
organizers. In other [cases], these campaigns persecute anyone who
simply doesn’t show due deference to the bullies.”

Steinberg continued, quote, “The recent effort to smear our new
University President, Claudine Gay, is a case in point. I applaud the
decision by the Harvard Corporation to stand by Dr. Gay amid the
ludicrous charges that she somehow supports genocide against Jews, and
I hope Harvard will continue to take a clear and strong stance against
any further efforts by these powerful parties to meddle in university
affairs, especially over personnel decisions.”

Now, again, those are the words of Bernie Steinberg, who was the
executive director of Harvard Hillel from 1993 to 2010. Of course,
this was before the resignation of Claudine Gay. And we can only
assume that the Harvard Corporation, the kind of board of overseers of
Harvard, made a deal with her, you know, helped to force her out. So,
they had first supported her, and now, with tremendous pressure also
from billionaire donors, she is out. If you can talk about the
significance of Harvard Hillel — the former head of Harvard Hillel
talking about the weaponization of antisemitism as a way to suppress
dissent over what Israel is doing in Gaza right now, Professor
Muhammad?

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: Well, I think that his comments and his
testimony in the op-ed that he wrote from his vantage point speaks
very clearly to the absence of a balanced discussion about Claudine
Gay’s testimony, as was true of the two other presidents, Liz Magill
and Kornbluth. The truth is that they all performed as they should
have. They spoke clearly and directly to personally condemning
expressions of antisemitism, of which “intifada,” by definition,
is not necessarily, which we could talk about more. But putting that
aside, they were following the instructions of general counsel and,
likely, the board chairs of their various universities. In the case of
Claudine Gay, for example, you can see Alan Garber, who is now the
current president, the interim president, sitting behind her in
glasses and a beard, almost mouthing her responses, because as second
in charge of the university, they were both prepared to explain the
current policies that deal with hate speech and academic freedom.

And so, what Mr. Steinberg is talking about is the context in which
that entire hearing was a setup, where there was no correct answer to
a lawful question, a legal question, about whether or not certain
forms of speech violate the code of conduct. It always depends. And
the weaponization of Jews in this case, as he described in his op-ed,
suggested to me, in watching that hearing for five hours and 40
minutes, that people like Virginia Foxx had no intention of extending
protections to Jews at Harvard or anywhere else. This was a setup to
take down DEI and antiracism and all of the other things that the
right has been going after, because that’s what she said when she
opened the hearing. She described the hearing as a case of people like
me teaching classes which she identified in her opening remarks as the
real problem, as a prime example of antiracism and critical race
theory creating institutional antisemitism. That’s a lie. It’s a
form of fascist propaganda. I actually teach about antisemitism in
that class.

And so, what Mr. Steinberg is describing is exactly what is happening
here. Jews have been used as a wedge for the right to take down all
the entire edifice that has been put in place to deal with structural
racism in the society.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you feel a chill at the Kennedy School? What about
other African American professors? Your response to Christopher Rufo
cheering the resignation of Gay, writing the word “scalped”?

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: Well, listen, I mean, you know, speaking of
history, in order to even understand that reference, one would have to
understand the war against Indigenous people, the genocide committed
against them and forms of settler colonialism that birthed this
country. This is an evocation of that history in Christopher Rufo, who
is leading the charge against people like me, against Claudine Gay,
against everyone who works in a university who believes in truth and
justice and a future that is better than our past.

It’s not an accident that in the same news week that ultimately
brings us the resignation of Claudine Gay, Nikki Haley was on tape
being a slavery denier. I mean, this is the debate we’re having in
this country about whether you can actually be honest about the
country in all of its complexity. No one is saying that is the whole
story, that all the terrible things that happened in the past are the
only thing that matters. But the truth is that in half the states —
let me repeat — you can’t teach that. And the way things are going
now, you won’t be able to teach it at private universities, either.

* Claudine Gay
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* Harvard University
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* Right-wing attacks
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