Harvard, Claudine Gay & 'The Silver Spoon Rule'

It can never, ever, ever be elite higher education’s own fault

The biggest problem with smart people is that they’re incredibly good at using their prefrontal cortices to rationalize what they want to believe in the first place. This is a well-documented phenomenon, and one you can observe yourself right now. Are you inclined to agree with me here? If so, you’re already forming rationalizations about why I’m correct. If you’re inclined to disagree, you’re reading this with an eye for poking holes in everything I’m saying.

But it is a serious problem, summarized well by another Substack, The Prism: 

“The correlation between intelligence and ideological bias is robust, having been found in many other studies, such as Taber & Lodge (2006), Stanovich et al. (2012), and Joslyn & Haider-Markel (2014). These studies found stronger biases in clever people on both sides of the aisle, and since such biases are mutually contradictory, they can’t be a result of greater understanding…

Since we’re a social species, it is intelligent for us to convince ourselves of irrational beliefs if holding those beliefs increases our status and well-being. Dan Kahan calls this behavior “identity-protective cognition” (IPC).

By engaging in IPC, people bind their intelligence to the service of evolutionary impulses, leveraging their logic and learning not to correct delusions but to justify them. Or as the novelist Saul Bellow put it, “a great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.”

And with Claudine Gay’s recent resignation amid mounting accusations of plagiarism, boy, is that rationalizing happening. People have, of course, been clamoring for Gay’s resignation since the Congressional anti-Semitism hearings last month — and they ramped up once then-University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill resigned. However, FIRE and I were concerned that if Gay stepped down then, it would have had a chilling effect on campus free speech and sent the message that the correct response to the current chaos is more censorship.

Plagiarism is another matter entirely, however.

From the start, we saw people bending over backwards to downplay the plagiarism, with Harvard lawyers calling the allegations “demonstrably false” in a threatening letter sent to The New York Post in October — itself an egregiously censorial act — only for the school itself to label the instances of plagiarism mere “duplicative language,” and “inadequate citation” shortly thereafter. Colleagues said the accusations came from “professional vilifiers” and that they wouldn’t consider evidence from “these people.” Of course, more allegations continued to come in. 

Just last week, the Harvard Crimson, which has extensively documented the controversy, published an editorial opining that Gay should remain in her post, saying that the errors “do not appear intentional,” and that Gay’s “top-quality scholarship” made her “eminently qualified.” FIRE’s Adam Goldstein went through the allegations against Gay and compared them to the publications on her CV. Gay’s CV lists 11 articles, four “other publications,” and a working paper. Of those 16, seven are accused of containing plagiarized material. Her CV doesn’t list her dissertation, which also allegedly contains plagiarized material. 

Once Gay resigned, we then saw people like Nikole Hannah-Jones, Ibram X. Kendi, and others (including the Associated Press, with its coverage being mocked for its original headline, “Harvard president’s resignation highlights new conservative weapon against colleges: plagiarism”), pointing the finger at racism and right-wing animus rather than on the real problem: Harvard itself, and our institutions of higher learning as a whole.

In my and Rikki Schlott’s book “The Canceling of the American Mind,” we outline a fourth “Great Untruth” (adding to the first three Jonathan Haidt and I described in “The Coddling of the American Mind”) which is that “bad people only have bad opinions.” This is the foundational assumption of what we call the Perfect Rhetorical Fortress, the method by which cancelers on the political Left shut down arguments. By declaring someone a “conservative,” a “right winger,” — or, if you REALLY want them to be ignored, “far right,” “fascist,” or, my new favorite, “Neo-confederate” — whether they actually are conservative or not, they are also declaring that they are evil and therefore incapable of being correct. This form of non-argumentation, which I have dubbed “fasco-casting”, along with the political Right’s Efficient Rhetorical Fortress tactics (which similarly use labels like “liberal” and “woke” to automatically dismiss counterarguments) is a near-ubiquitous anti-intellectual habit these days. 

So what is next for Harvard?

Well, I believe that they should follow in the footsteps of the University of Pennsylvania faculty and alumni, who drafted a fantastic vision statement that I’ve publicly supported, and deserves a lot more signatures than it currently has. You should consider signing it and sharing it with others, if you haven’t already.

Harvard should also follow the advice of FIRE advisory member Steven Pinker, whose five-point plan for how the school can turn itself around couldn’t be clearer and more on point. 

And of course, Harvard can follow FIRE’s 10 common-sense reforms for colleges and universities, which include protecting free speech in policy and practice, teaching students a scholarly mindset from day one, and cutting administrative bloat.

Beyond that, Harvard and other Ivy League schools need to sweat a little bit — and as I’ve written before, nothing will do that quite like the threat of competition. Rather than giving their money to massive, bloated megacorporations with tens of billions in their coffers, billionaires, millionaires, and small dollar donors alike should consider investing in smaller projects like UATX, pushing for legislative reforms that allow more competition in both the K-12 and higher education space, and cheaper, more rigorous experimentation that could one day render the elite status of institutions like Harvard obsolete.

One last point: For the love of God, if you are defending the status quo in higher education — particularly at Harvard, of all places — you are defending some of the most influential and powerful megacorporations in the country, wherein even regular professors make more than triple what the average American family makes in a year. These schools are so wealthy they can leave tens of billions of dollars in their “rainy day fund.” Whether you’re right or wrong on the points, you are certainly not rebels fighting the power, looking out for the little guy, or, otherwise on the side of “the people.” 

And, yes, I know, there are billionaires on the other side too — but if you haven’t noticed, as far as the media is concerned, they are the ones to blame, not Harvard. This isn’t surprising. Many members of the media graduated from such illustrious and elite schools, and they hold to what I call “the silver spoon rule” (like the golden rule, but bad and with a spoon): It can never, ever, ever be elite higher education’s own fault (even when it is).

SHOT FOR THE ROAD

I had a total blast talking to the great Auren Hoffman on his “World of DaaS” podcast about ‘The Canceling of the American Mind’. He really brings out the best in his guests, check it out: