There is no question that Claudine Gay’s resignation was long overdue. Her offences included examples of both linguistic plagiarism (including footnotes lifted wholesale from other sources) and key ideas borrowed from other scholars without attribution. But how did her work even survive peer review by knowledgeable scholars in the fields of political science and African American studies? Why did it take a group of conservative journalists to discover her record of academic dishonesty?

An answer to these questions may be found in Gay’s petulant parting shot at her detractors, published as a “Guest Essay” in yesterday’s New York Times. In the essay, after conveniently downgrading her academic felony of plagiarism to the misdemeanours of “duplicating other scholars’ language” and “citation errors”, she makes a startling argument: 

Gay’s claim here perfectly illustrates one way that activist professors have inverted the scholarly ideal in their capture of American academic institutions. Asking us to disregard the shoddiness of her work, the ex-president instead asks that we judge her by her conclusions. If those conclusions are good (such as pointing to the need for increased minority representation in politics), then the scholarship is good; no need for us to look any more closely into the process by which she reached those conclusions. And vice versa: if the conclusions (or, indeed, the research questions themselves) were regarded as bad, no level of assiduity over scholarly methods would be sufficient to justify them. 

Up until now, the charity Gay asks of us is something activist scholars have taken as a matter of course. Evidence that it’s a good assumption abounds. One need only look across the Charles River from fair Harvard to find Boston University (BU). There, Ibram X. Kendi — author of only one book that can fairly be described as scholarly, and progenitor of a number of ahistorical but fashionable ideas — holds the Mellon Professorship in the Humanities. The only previous holder of this prestigious BU professorship was the Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel. 

On the opposite side of the ledger, consider the Stanford-based research group led by epidemiologist Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who ran afoul of Dr. Anthony Fauci and the public health establishment when its April 2020 study of Covid-19 antibody prevalence found that the disease was more widespread and less deadly than widely believed. A preprint of the group’s research led to a relentless skewering of its research methods in both scientific and popular outlets. Despite the uproar and a months-long Stanford University investigation, the paper’s methods would be vindicated by its publication following peer review in the International Journal of Epidemiology, its conclusion substantially unchanged. This only occurred the following year, however, once the paper’s policy impact had been suitably blunted.

These are two instances in a list that could be miles long — of academics who say the “right” things and skate by unquestioned; or say the wrong thing and can’t achieve tenure, can’t get published, or (as happened to Gay’s Harvard colleague Roland Fryer) find their lab shuttered amid a shadowy Title IX investigation. 

If Gay’s scholarship ever had to face any criticism under the old system, it was to come internally, quietly, and gently from other “right-minded” scholars. As if to prove this point, Harvard Law Professor Charles Fried, speaking to the New York Times in December, labelled the investigation into Gay’s plagiarism “part of this extreme right-wing attack on elite institutions”, adding that “if it came from some other quarter, I might be granting it some credence. But not from these people.” 

The problem is that over recent years, “these people” have been the only ones willing to question the assumption that the ends justify the means in scholarship. In Gay’s case, the purportedly legitimate academics chose not to uphold scholarly standards, but instead to uphold each other. If academia wishes to preserve its legitimacy, it must supply its own answer to Juvenal’s millennia-old question: who will guard the guards themselves?