What You're Getting Wrong About Harvard's Leadership Crisis
Symbolism, Qualifications, Plagiarism, and Why Harvard's Next President Should Be a Black Woman
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Claudine Gay is out as Harvard President. No permanent replacement has been selected amidst the campus leadership crisis. Here’s what should happen next.
Claudine Gay’s Symbolism is More Important than Claudine Gay Herself
I never crossed paths with Gay during my two years at Harvard. Perhaps because I have no personal relationship with her, I find myself less concerned with what this leadership crisis means for her specifically — she has returned to her tenured faculty position, a cushy gig — than what it means for her symbolically as Harvard’s first black, and second female, president.
The political motivations behind her resignation were smuggled under the cloak of plagiarism, and, as a result, Harvard’s long-overdue recognition that there are a number of black women qualified to lead the university is at risk.
Because of this, Harvard’s next president should be a black woman.
There are countless number of black women, in and outside of academia, who are ideal candidates for Harvard’s top job. The same could be said for non-black women of color.
You either believe that there are no black women, besides Gay, qualified to lead Harvard, or you believe there’s no systemic discrimination in a process that has only chosen one black woman to lead a nearly 400-year-old institution. There is no third option.
Harvard’s symbolic recognition of black women’s leadership potential shouldn’t also be a victim of Gay’s mistakes and this coordinated campaign to get rid of her.
University President Qualifications Are About Much More Than Scholarship
The debate that ensued while Gay was being tried for plagiarism in the court of public opinion seemed to be entirely about the quality and quantity of her scholarship.
Claudine Gay aside, that focus on scholarship is myopic.
Years ago, I had a conversation in which someone told me that Barack Obama should one day be the president of Harvard. Surely he’s qualified, I thought, having previously been the president of the country with the world’s largest economy and most powerful military.
By any metric, running Harvard would be decidedly less complex. I doubt President Obama wants the job, but the larger point is that many people could do this job, from political and business leaders to up-and-coming academics and leaders of international organizations.
The qualifications of Harvard’s next president should be broader than is being publicly discussed. What rule says university presidents need to fit this mold of lifelong scholars? The primary job of Harvard president is maintaining and strengthening the strongest brand in the world. If you do that, everything else — academic competitiveness, fundraising, research, and scholarship — will fall in line.
Harvard is the oldest corporation in the Western Hemisphere, the most valuable brand on the planet, the oldest university in the United States, and one of the world’s largest asset managers. Reducing the qualification of its leader to how many papers they’ve published is small-minded and insufficient.
Of course, the president needs strong academic bonafides. They’ll oversee — and need the support of — more than 5,000 faculty and academic researchers. But Harvard’s vast empire is so much more than academics: It has some 11,000 non-academic staff and owns more than 27 million square feet of real estate, including 10% of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Its more than $6 billion in revenue would put it just outside the Fortune 500. Its president needs to manage a large complex organization while raising between $500 million and $1 billion per year.
It’s about more than scholarship.
We Need a Public Adjudication — and Perhaps a Rethinking — of Plagiarism
My wife has a PhD. When I told her that amid the plagiarism allegations, Gay had also used identical phrasing from previously published work in the acknowledgments section of her 1997 Harvard Dissertation, I expected that she might be appalled. After all, she can personally relate to the grueling process of research and writing that goes into a dissertation. I thought she might view Gay’s laziness in lifting language from the entirely personal part of academic work as a bridge too far. —
To my surprise, her reaction was more like, “Who cares?” She felt that nowhere in the acknowledgments or any other alleged acts had Gay come remotely close to stealing any substantive ideas or research.
Is plagiarism confined to the theft of ideas or merely the theft of language? Sometimes those two things are the same. Other times they aren’t.
As we think of it, “plagiarism” is the wrong word for what Claudine Gay did. Academia needs a public adjudication of what actually constitutes plagiarism, and it might be due for an update. Even John McWhorter, the academic, linguist, and New York Times columnist who publicly called for Gay to resign, agrees:
Leave it to a linguist to say this, but we need another word. In this case, we need a word for the relatively minor, “duplicative language” version of plagiarism.
To present someone else’s ideas as one’s own is unquestionably wrong, in academia and elsewhere. However, to cite boilerplate statements — the assumptions basic to a field, for instance — word for word, or close to it, without citing the person who typed the words originally is something different, and vastly less egregious. I would argue, in fact, that there may be nothing wrong with it at all, in particular when it is done accidentally.
In the world of ubiquitous, internet-facilitated content, the definition of plagiarism might need to be narrowed.
I’m sure we’ll soon see many AI-based tools capable of rooting out every historical instance of poor citation. While there is a place for that, I suspect our attention should be on the theft of actual ideas and narrow the term plagiarism to be exactly that.
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