Harvard president plagiarism scandal likely tip of iceberg of widespread 'academic corruption', scholar says

A constitutional scholar, who's no stranger to elite university liberal orthodoxies, said former Harvard president Claudine Gay's resignation could be the tip of the iceberg when it comes to higher education scandals.

The Manhattan Institute's Ilya Shapiro told Fox News Digital that Gay is the "apotheosis of the anti-intellectual movement that values DEI, identity and activism over truth-seeking, merit and education." 

Gay resigned this week after multiple accusations of plagiarism uncovered by Shapiro's colleague Christopher Rufo and the Washington Free Beacon, which followed Gay's disastrous congressional testimony last month about campus antisemitism.

"That's why this has become national news," Shapiro said. "That's why this is such a big deal. So many aspects of the cultural debates we've been having in the last couple of years are crystallized in her example, and that goes far beyond the plagiarism. And the plagiarism is terrible. She was a mediocre scholar to begin with."

As Shapiro pointed out, "A number of people were defending her, saying that this goes on all the time, which is alarming because students get expelled for minor citation errors."

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Claudine Gay faced dozens of plagiarism allegations prior to her resignation as Harvard president on Tuesday. (Getty Images)

Could wider issues of plagiarism – which, in Gay's case, in some instances included lifting entire portions of text from other scholars without clearly citing where they came from – grip academia if even Harvard's president was implicated? Shapiro thinks so, and he welcomes more investigations on that front.

"I'm sure there is" more where that came from, he said, when asked if he thought there were other academic scandals lurking on major campuses.

"I saw one tweet that said, 'Well, now you're going to have to investigate all the university leaders,' and [my] response is, OK, yes, let's do that," he said, noting other recent plagiarism scandals. He added, "Clearly, there is that kind of academic corruption going on before even getting into issues of people being discriminated against for their viewpoint or being hired because of identity characteristics and things like that."

Shapiro said Gay's academic production, which included no published books, was too thin to get tenure at most schools, let alone ascend to the presidency of one of the world's most prestigious universities. Even after resigning, she will remain a professor at Harvard. 

Her critics have said her ascension is an example of the pitfalls of academy fixation on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) policies that prioritize identity over merit.

"So much of what we've seen in higher ed and its decline and its corruption is because of bureaucratic bloat," Shapiro said. "So she is kind of the figurehead for so many issues converging, not just antisemitism or the response to Oct. 7, not just plagiarism and academic corruption and double standards, not just the age of woke. Just so many different things that are wrapped up in her figure. And the fact that she's the president of Harvard, the biggest brand in American higher ed, just made this a perfect storm."

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Ilya Shapiro left Georgetown on his own terms in 2022 after a lengthy investigation into one of his tweets. (YouTube)

Gay's allies erupted in outrage after she resigned, with various media and academic figures casting her downfall as a bad-faith and even racist witch hunt that was about cutting down an accomplished Black woman, not reforming higher education. 

Gay penned a defiant New York Times guest essay this week, saying she'd been a victim of a coordinated campaign that "recycled tired racial stereotypes about Black talent and temperament."

Shapiro was at the center of a higher education controversy of his own in 2022, although under much different circumstances. After President Biden pledged to choose a Black woman for the Supreme Court, Shapiro was placed on administrative leave by Georgetown Law Center for tweeting a "lesser Black woman" would get a seat instead of another candidate Shapiro deemed more worthy.

Although he meant his words as a critique of identity politics, other students and professors declared it a racist attack and demanded his firing. Following a lengthy "investigation" of his tweet by Georgetown, Shapiro wasn't terminated, but he resigned anyway, saying in a scathing letter that he'd always have a target on his back for violating "progressive orthodoxy." He's since joined the Manhattan Institute as a senior fellow and director of constitutional studies, and his think tank colleague Rufo has been out front in recent weeks on exposing Gay's academic record.

Manhattan Institute Chris Rufo and Claudine Gay split image ("Word On Fire" and Harvard University)

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While Shapiro quit on his own terms, he said Gay's exit was based on "academic malfeasance," not race as her supporters might suggest. Indeed, former Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne, who is White, stepped down under similar circumstances last year. 

University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill, a White woman who testified alongside Gay and also made hedging remarks about whether calls for Jewish genocide violated campus rules, also quit last month as university donors started to pull their funding.

"There's obviously bitterness that Chris and others unearthed the plagiarism and investigators dug deeper and found greater and greater evidence of her academic corruption, and so they tried to play the race card, the feminism card, all of this," Shapiro said.