The Scandalous Saga of Claudine Gay

EXCLUSIVE: @RealChrisBrunet and I have obtained documentation demonstrating that Harvard President Claudine Gay plagiarized multiple sections of her Ph.D. thesis, violating Harvard's policies on academic integrity.

This is a bombshell. 🧵

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) December 10, 2023

Her colleagues in the profession of political science have had a great deal to say about Harvard President Claudine Gay, none of it having to do with the moral failure exhibited in her recent testimony about how she would deal with threats of “genocide” made to Jewish students on the Harvard campus. But her saga — her resistible affirmative-actionable rise to the top — does provide a case study in much that is wrong in American academic life today. People in her field have described her “shoddy and practically non-existent scholarship,” the “worst example of affirmative action I have ever seen,” “a petty and vicious little woman,” her work is “flawed and fraudulent,” “virtually all of her meager body of work is flawed,” her publications are “almost without exception flawed and dishonest” and much more in that vein. Yet here she is — despite all that — the President of Harvard.

For those who wish to see the many other academic and campus scandals, each one worse than the next, in which Claudine Gay has been involved, see this extensive exposé that was published over a year and a half ago but got little attention: “The Curious Case of Claudine Gay,” by Christopher Brunet, Karlstack, April 17, 2022:

Claudine Gay first came to my attention about a month ago, when she emerged as the central figure in the Ryan Enos data fabrication scandal, as documented in these 3 articles:

1. EXCLUSIVE: Leaked Report Shows Harvard Professor Fabricated Data

2. Why Is Jesse Singal Whitewashing Harvard’s Corruption?

3. Pressure Mounts on Harvard Professor to Come Clean Over Fraudulent Data

Gay’s Role in the Ryan Enos Scandal

I will briefly summarize Gay’s ~*~alleged~*~ involvement in the Enos scandal.

In 2018, a whistleblower approached Harvard with a report that showed Ryan Enos, a professor in the department of government, falsified the dataset used in his AJPS article and CUP book. Rather than investigate this claim, Claudine Gay had the Harvard Committee on Professional Conduct write a dismissal letter with the justification that CPC is not the appropriate unit to investigate, so the report is dismissed.

This is both false and contradictory: If it *had* been true, then the CPC should have forwarded the letter to the appropriate unit to investigate and would have had no authority to dismiss the report. Plus the Chief Research Integrity Officer in the Provost’s Office had initially forwarded the report to the CPC to investigate. So the dismissal letter, which could only have been issued with Gay’s approval, also contradicts the statement of an official in the Harvard Provost’s office.

According to the Harvard policy, there were only two possible reasons to dismiss the report without launching an inquiry, 1) Allegations do not meet the definition of misconduct, and 2) there was not enough information for investigators to be able to verify the misconduct. Neither of those two reasons applies in this case.

This scandal was Gay’s ticket to failing upward: a previously scheduled Dean search was cancelled*** to ensure this Enos blunder stayed swept under the rug, Gay was abruptly fast-tracked from Dean of Social Sciences to Dean of Faculty.

***I asked Harvard spokesperson directly about this Dean search and they maintain it never existed. Other insiders have told me it did exist:

“What happened at Harvard? Why didn’t they have the normal search for new FAS Dean? Something is very fishy here. Did she do something wrong and they’re trying to help her get away with it?”

— Anonymous

Update: after I posted this article, an anonymous commenter confirmed that the Dean search did exist by leaking the specific email. Meaning, if this person is correct, Harvard officials lied to my face about the Dean search never existing.

The reason Gay is so aggressively covering for Enos is that he works in the same niche subfield of “racial threat theory” like her; they cite each other in their papers extensively. Despite this conflict of interest, Gay did not recuse herself from investigating Enos. Rather, she used the opportunity to aggressively cover up his research misconduct. She knows that if his papers are proven to be fake, then her papers will also be proven to be fake — even more fake than they have already proven to be (more on this later). If he goes down, she goes down.

This mutually assured destruction is doubly true because Harvard policy also states that covering up research misconduct is itself research misconduct. Meaning according to Harvard’s own rules, Gay has already committed research misconduct by sweeping Enos’ research misconduct under the rug. So Claudine Gay now has no choice but to keep doubling down… and doubling down… and doubling down… and doubling down… and doubling down… letting the snowball of lies build.

“Failure to report observed research misconduct: covering up or otherwise failing to report observed, suspected, or apparent research misconduct by others;”

— Harvard’s Policy and Procedures for Responding to Allegations of Research Misconduct

This mutually assured destruction is triply true because the only time Enos has ever addressed this scandal, he threw Gay under the bus. What he’s implicitly saying in this Twitter thread is that she never brought the allegations to his attention (which she was obligated to do, anonymous or not).:

If I am Harvard President Lawrence Bacow or Provost Alan Garber [as of 2022, when this article was written] reading this inept Twitter thread, I am furious at the PR damage Enos is doing to Harvard.

By not addressing any of the issues in the report Enos is making Claudine Gay look really bad. If she had a valid reason to “readily dismiss” the report it should have been something so trivial and obvious he could have addressed that in one tweet. Instead he posts 16 tweets, none of which even attempt to offer plausible deniability of falsification and fabrication.

— Anonymous…

Gay’s Role in the Jeffrey Epstein Scandal

The previous Edgerley Family Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences who Gay replaced in 2018, Michael Smith, had drawn too much heat for the numerous scandals he himself was embroiled in, such as the fact that he had approved Jeffrey Epstein’s phone & office (the Program on Evolutionary Dynamics is part of FAS). Claudine Gay allowed Michael Smith to get away scot-free in the Harvard-Epstein ties investigation — she came in and nicely whitewashed it all away. Claudine Gay has Epstein coverup stink on her, and Michael Smith has major Epstein stink on him….

The fact is, Bacow [Gay’s predecessor as Presdient of Harvard] and Garber know that the Enos report was dismissed with a legally illiterate response, they know of Gay’s conflicts of interests she had about covering up for Enos, they know that Enos has not been able to contend with one single claim of the report, and they have seen him throw Gay under the bus with that Twitter thread. They also know that everyone else knows that they know. At this point is there any doubt in anyone’s mind that Enos committed fraud? Is there any doubt that Claudine is incompetent and deeply corrupt?

Bacow and Garber have to choose [remember: this was written in 2022] between throwing Claudine Gay under the bus or going down in flames with her in a huge public scandal. Just as with Dominguez, the Enos case needs to be reopened at Harvard and investigated properly this time. The longer Harvard takes to fire them, the higher the reputation costs.

I am actually pretty optimistic that the right thing will eventually be done here. Why? Because this scandal is barely a month old. Harvard doesn’t do anything in a couple of weeks, or a couple of months. The game is still very much afoot. Harvard is notoriously slow to act in misconduct cases. In the Hauser case, it took them several years to do the right thing. In the end, Hauser resigned citing “exciting opportunities in the private sector.” As in the Hauser case, Harvard will probably first pressure Enos to resign, and if he refuses they will terminate him for cause and revoke tenure. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Gay gracefully step down sometime this summer. If I had to guess, I would say that she will probably scamper off to be President at some LAC somewhere.

His optimism was, alas, unjustified. Claudine Gay did not step down in 2022, when this piece was written. Despite her monstrous record of shoddy and dishonest work, and her protection of others equally guilty of shoddy and dishonest work, instead of being discharged from Harvard, she instead was selected to be Harvard’s new president.

That is how Harvard rolls. There will be consequences, but those consequences will involve a golden parachute much like the parachute that was given to former Harvard Law School Dean of Students Marcia Sells, who as described in my HARVARD LIE SCHOOL article, withdrew from her role as Dean of Students abruptly and instead got a cushy job being “Head of Diversity” at the Metropolitan Opera.

Claudine Gay didn’t get a golden parachute. Instead, she was given the Grand Prize — President of Harvard. How many members of the Corporation who picked her had any idea of her reputation among her colleagues as a poor and dishonest scholar, who has now ridden the Affirmative Action bus all the way from Stanford to her new presidential office at Massachusetts Hall?

Since her remarkable record of lack of accomplishment, now set out so methodically by Chris Brunet, has not been enough to derail her, perhaps it will be Claudine Gay’s mealy-mouthed answers to Congresswoman Stefanik that will finally put paid to her career. Let us hope.