‘You Hand Them a Knife’: After Claudine Gay’s Ouster, Historians Worry About Weaponization of Plagiarism
Stephanie M. Lee | 09 January 2024 | The Chronicle of Higher Education
The American Historical Association may be dedicated to studying the past, but its annual meeting last week exhibited a deep anxiety over the present. Lectures on the Cold War and the Holocaust were sandwiched between sessions lamenting political attacks on the profession, such as state-legislative efforts to scrap tenure and restrict teaching about race and gender. The cherry on top: Claudine Gay had just stepped down as president of Harvard University after a month of intense scrutiny over accusations of plagiarism in her research as a political scientist. In interviews at the San Francisco conference, historians were less than thrilled that citations, footnotes, and quotation marks were becoming the new fronts in the culture wars. “Well, I wish people would comb through my work,” said Robert W. Cherny, an emeritus professor of history at San Francisco State University and one of 3,000 meeting attendees….