Harvard students are expelled for plagiarism. Why does Claudine Gay get a pass?

More than two dozen students were expelled from
Harvard
College for what the school described as academic dishonesty during the 2020–21 academic school year. Of the 138 academic integrity cases heard by Harvard’s Honor Council that year, the second most-cited violation was plagiarism,
according to
the Harvard Crimson. Exam cheating topped the list.

One can only imagine what these former students are thinking in light of the
scandal
involving Claudine Gay, Harvard’s own president.

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For those unaware, it was recently discovered that almost half of Gay’s scholarship contains passages plagiarized from other scholars. Of the 11 journal articles Gay published between 1998 and 2016, five were found to contain plagiarized passages. According to the Washington Free Beacon, Gay “paraphrased or quoted nearly 20 authors”
without
proper attribution, a figure the New York Times
doesn’t contest
.

Despite this plagiarism, Harvard announced last week it was clearing Gay of wrongdoing. Days later, Gay
retroactively edited
two of her articles, including one that was more than 20 years old.

Articles that meet academic standards are rarely retroactively edited, and the idea that Gay was getting off scot-free for committing an academic violation that had ensnared so many students rankled some Harvard faculty members.

“It’s troubling to see the standards we apply to undergrads seem to differ from the standards we apply to faculty,” Theda Skocpol, a professor of government and sociology at Harvard,
told
the New York Times.

Harvard often does not treat such infractions lightly.

Reporting from Harvard’s student newspaper shows that between 50 and 100 students are disciplined each year for academic misconduct, and plagiarism is a leading cause of disciplinary action.

Data show that in 2022 alone, more than 100 students were disciplined — expelled, sanctioned, or put on probation — for academic misconduct. From 2015-2021, more than 100 students were expelled for cheating.

Cheating has been a problem at Harvard for years, and plagiarism has been at the heart of it. A decade ago, a
massive cheating scandal
led to investigations of more than 100 students accused of plagiarism or having “inappropriately collaborated” on exams.

More than half of those students were forced to withdraw from the college. The following academic year, Harvard initiated a crackdown on plagiarism.

“I give a talk [to my class] that consists of basically two simple words,” Ken Urban, a preceptor,
told
the Harvard Crimson in the wake of the scandal. “Don’t plagiarize.”

It’s a message Gay would have done well to hear, though she appears unlikely to face the same consequences an 18-year-old freshman would over a similar violation.

This seems to be a common theme in America today. The rules apply to some more than others, a phenomenon that would not have surprised the great British writer George Orwell.

“All animals are equal,” Orwell famously wrote in Animal Farm, “but some animals are more equal than others.”

It’s a paradox familiar to Gay, who has spent the last several years building a
diversity, equity, and inclusion
empire at Harvard. Baked into the DEI framework is the idea that people shouldn’t be treated equally.

Advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion means giving preferential treatment to certain groups, evidenced by Gay’s defense of Harvard’s racist admissions policies, which the Supreme Court
struck down
this year for violating the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause.

Christopher Rufo, writing at City Journal, argues it is Harvard’s embrace of this ideological framework that is protecting Gay.

“Harvard’s trustees find themselves in a bind: they hired Gay in large part for her identity and cannot fire her for the same reason,” Rufo
writes
.

Rufo might be on to something.

A half-century ago, the Nobel Prize-winning economist F. A. Hayek noted the paradox, and flaw, of social justice, which
he argued seeks to create a more equal society
by treating people unequally.

“The classical demand is that the state ought to treat all people equally in spite of the fact that they are very unequal,” Hayek said. “You can’t deduce from this that because people are unequal, you ought to treat them unequally in order to make them equal. And that’s what social justice amounts to.”

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If Gay survives the scandal, social justice will not be the only explanation. Old-fashioned power will also likely have something to do with it. As
the pandemic showed
, powerful people, regardless of their race, gender, or sexual orientation, are often able to get away with violating laws and protocols for which people with less power are punished.

But social justice ideology helps explain why Gay just might survive this plagiarism scandal, even though countless Harvard students were not so lucky.

Jon Miltimore (
@miltimore79
) is managing editor of FEE.org, the online portal of the Foundation for Economic Education. Follow his work on Substack.