The Greatest Scandal Of Any College or University in History?

A few thoughts on Elise Stefanik's dubious empirical claim.

Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash

Yesterday Claudine Gay resigned as president of Harvard University. The Harvard Crimson’s Emma Haidar and Cam Kettles explained that the move, “comes amid growing allegations of plagiarism and lasting doubts over her ability to respond to antisemitism on campus after her disastrous congressional testimony Dec. 5.” As noted previously in this space, an awful lot of the plagiarism claims levied against Gay were unadulterated horseshit. Even those at Harvard who called for her resignation acknowledged that, “there is no evidence that any of her arguments posited as original contributions were plagiarized.” Eventually there was enough there, however, for the plagiarism charges to be the tipping point that ended her tenure in office.

Needless to say, multiple conservatives performed their own political victory laps in response — but none so loudly as House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik. After all, she was the architect of the viral moments of that December 5th testimony that have now felled two college presidents.

Here’s the full text of Stefanik’s statement in the wake of Gay’s resignation:

I will always deliver results. The resignation of Harvard’s antisemitic plagiarist president is long overdue. Claudine Gay’s morally bankrupt answers to my questions made history as the most viewed Congressional testimony in the history of the U.S. Congress. Her answers were absolutely pathetic and devoid of the moral leadership and academic integrity required of the President of Harvard. This is just the beginning of what will be the greatest scandal of any college or university in history. (emphasis added)

Our robust Congressional investigation will continue to move forward to expose the rot in our most “prestigious” higher education institutions and deliver accountability to the American people.

According to Stefanik, Claudine Gay’s embattled presidency is the greatest scandal of any college or university in history. Let that assertion sink in for a second.

I am supposed to believe that Claudine Gay’s presidency at Harvard, and what Stefanik thinks she will discover, is a greater scandal than:¹

• The admissions policies that restricted entry from myriad minority groups for most of the 20th century;

• The cheating scandal that rocked Harvard a decade ago;

• Baylor University’s sexual assault scandal;²

• The Varsity Blues scandal;

• The massive frauds that have been pervasive in for-profit colleges for decades;

• The multiple abject failures of Liberty University;

• The president of Stanford University stepping down due to falsified data appearing in his scholarly publications;

• Waves of conservative political correctness hitting state campuses across the country;

• Whatever you want to call what is going on at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse;

• The very existence of PragerU’s misinformation.³

An awful lot of the stuff listed above comes from the past calendar year alone. Higher education is facing some serious challenges! Stefanik’s hyperbolic statement,⁴ however, highlights the danger of this entire imbroglio. Gay’s departure will merely make it that much harder to find anyone both able and willing to do the job. That will boost the salaries required to hire anyone of stature for the position. Those high salaries will make new university presidents easy targets for conservatives. Rinse. Repeat.

1. It was tempting to add Dinesh D’Souza’s resignation from King’s College to this list, but the truth is D’Souza isn’t that important.

2. Yes, there are plenty of other sexual assault scandals that could have made this list but I didn’t want it to be repetitive.

3. Technically, PragerU is not a university and the program containing the most ridiculous information is targeted at high schools. But this is ridiculous:

In one {PragerU Kids] animation, two time-traveling kids ask Christopher Columbus whether he enslaved Indigenous people. Cartoon Columbus responds, “Being taken as a slave is better than being killed,” and insists it is “estupido” to judge him by modern moral standards. In another, the abolitionist Frederick Douglass defends the Founding Fathers for not outlawing slavery.

4. Who would ever have believed that a person who refuses to acknowledge Joe Biden as the legitimate winner of the 2020 election would be somewhat shaky on their factual assertions?