Research misconduct or racism? Academics show double standard between black woman, white man

Two elite universities on opposite coasts investigated their respective presidents for allegedly chronic research misconduct earlier in their careers, claims brought to the forefront by campus and conservative media.

Both presidents ended up stepping down and returning to their faculty positions. But one got a much gentler exit and maintains a raft of powerful defenders, compared to the other. A plausible reason: one is a white male, the other is a black female.

Every new revelation about the failure of Stanford University's Marc Tessier-Lavigne to correct fraudulent or manipulated data in research papers he coauthored, most recently over New Year's weekend, has seemingly quieted his remaining defenders.

Not so with supporters of Harvard's Claudine Gay, from a university governing board to prominent academics in pop culture, following every new documentation of her alleged plagiarism from scholars including a fellow black woman, Carol Swain.

They portray Gay as a victim of racism and bullying who was targeted because of her intersectional identity and caught making overblown errors that are frequently – and routinely ignored – in academia. 

Other than Swain, the academics allegedly denied proper credit by Gay in her scholarly work have gone out of their way to exonerate her. University of Wisconsin political scientist David Canon told the Washington Free Beacon that Gay's passage in a 2001 paper that nearly matches one from his 1999 book was not "even close to an example of academic plagiarism."

Political science professor Nicholas Giordano said on a recent "John Solomon Reports" podcast: "If any of my students engage in plagiarism, they immediately receive an F" and could be expelled if they committed as many instances as Gay allegedly did.

"Shouldn't we hold college presidents to the very same standard?" he asked rhetorically. "And unfortunately, in this day and age, the answer is no, because it is based on that equity thing."

Giordano contrasted the treatment of Gay for committing "the cardinal sin of academia" with how her predecessor, Larry Summers, a white man, was "almost immediately [...] skewered and forced to resign" for citing sex differences as a factor in male domination of STEM fields.

Once a superstar neuroscientist, Tessier-Lavigne hasn't received the Gay treatment.

A Stanford-commissioned external investigation this summer determined the president didn't himself falsify data but "failed to decisively and forthrightly correct mistakes in the scientific record" when brought to his attention going back nearly two decades.

The pile-on resumed in recent days when The Stanford Daily pointed to a little-noticed Dec. 18 retraction notice on an Alzheimer's disease paper published by Nature in 2009, coauthored by Tessier-Lavigne when he was a senior executive at Genentech. 

It was the student newspaper that broke Genentech employee allegations in February that the biotech company found "falsification of data" in the Alzheimer's paper, which the external investigation report also flagged as having "multiple problems."

While Tessier-Lavigne refused to retract the paper as recently as July, he and his coauthors now concede that "certain conclusions" were "incorrect" and the paper includes several "anomalies" that nonetheless "do not affect the conclusions presented in the affected figures."

It's the fourth retraction for Tessier-Lavigne in four months and may not be his last, according to the Daily, noting that Nature applied an "editorial expression of concern" to another of his papers for alleged "manipulation of research data" the same day as the retraction. 

He returned to Stanford's biology department as a professor and still runs a research lab.

The plagiarism allegations against Gay initially looked like an opportunity for the university to dispose of the president on viewpoint-neutral grounds, rather than explicitly bow to demands to fire her for refusing to say in a Dec. 5 congressional hearing that calling for genocide of Jews would inherently violate Harvard's code of conduct.

But the Harvard Corporation stuck by Gay amid a swell of new allegations throughout December, dismissing her near-verbatim copying of others' work as "duplicative language without appropriate attribution" and "inadequate citation" rather than research misconduct.

Gay announced her resignation Tuesday in the wake of another half-dozen purported plagiarism examples, saying she had become a distraction to Harvard. She alluded to both the plagiarism and antisemitism claims against her while implying they contributed to "personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus" against Gay.

The Harvard Corporation echoed her framing in a same-day statement grudgingly accepting her resignation and effusively praising Gay, whose "commitment to the institution and its mission is deep and selfless." 

She has endured "repugnant and in some cases racist vitriol" in private emails and calls in response to "missteps" for which Gay "has taken responsibility," the board said, again drastically downplaying the severity and breadth of plagiarism allegations against her.

Rep. Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y., followed suit in a post on X. "This isn’t about plagiarism or antisemitism. This is about racism and intimidation," the black lawmaker said. "The only winners are fascists who bullied a brilliant & historic Black woman into resignation."

1619 Project architect Nikole Hannah-Jones called Gay's ordeal "an extension of what happened to me" when the University of North Carolina balked at giving the crusading journalist a tenured position, prompting her exit even after UNC backed down. "Black women will be made to pay. Our so-called allies too often lack any real courage," she wrote on X.

Clean-energy and politics journalist David Roberts, who is white, groused in a lengthy X thread that the "center-left pundit approach" had accepted the conservative framing of the dispute: "whether particular instances qualify as plagiarism as described in the rules."

They should instead look at the "context" of Gay's work, recognize "they were used as instruments by bad people to achieve bad things" and highlight that "[c]orruption is endemic in virtually every conservative Institution [sic]" such as the Supreme Court, Roberts said.

"Racist mobs won’t stop until they topple all Black people from positions of power and influence who are not reinforcing the structure of racism," antiracism popularizer Ibram Kendi wrote on X, saying reporters who ignore this framing are seeking "conflicts and clicks." 

Kendi's reputation has also taken a hit since September, when his antiracism research center at Boston University laid off most of its staff despite fundraising $55 million in three years, during which it did little research. The university soon exonerated Kendi of financial mismanagement.

Gay has some surprising critics as well. An undergraduate member of the Honor Council, which judges academic-integrity cases against students, anonymously called for her resignation in The Harvard Crimson last month.

"What is striking about the allegations of plagiarism against President Gay is that the improprieties are routine and pervasive" – conditions that would typically get a student removed from Harvard for two semesters, the student wrote.

Harvard law professor Ronald Sullivan, who is black, tweeted "Karma" in the wake of Gay's resignation before deleting it. 

As dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, according to the Crimson, Gay played a role in Harvard's decision to dump Sullivan as faculty dean of Winthrop House following student protests against Sullivan's representation of disgraced Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein in his sexual assault trial. 

She also punished a rising black economist known for challenging popular academic narratives on racial dynamics in policing, Roland Fryer, after a questionable sexual harassment investigation.

Gay is expected to earn a faculty salary "comparable" to her nearly $900,000 haul in 2021 as FAS dean, before consideration of what portion of her presidential salary she'll receive, according to the New York Post. 

Harvard's outside lawyers threatened the newspaper with a defamation lawsuit when it asked for the university's response to 27 examples of Gay's purported plagiarism in late October, the Post disclosed last month. 

Diversity, equity and inclusion "is the new system for inequality in higher education," Zachary Marschall, editor-in-chief of the conservative college publication Campus Reform, told "Just the News, No Noise." Four-year students learn that "as long as you are the so-called correct gender, the so-called correct ethnicity, then you can kind of make it up as you go along."

The proper response is to "go after the administrators," department chairs and deans, who have "orchestrated and designed the hiring and promotion criteria and the processes that got people like Claudine Gay into the president's office and keep her $900,000 salary," Marshall said.