Journalism Failed Claudine Gay (and all of us)

It started with Lani Guinier

For me, the idea that journalists were objective died with Lani Guinier.

In 1993, Guinier was a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania. She was later the first Black woman appointed to a tenured professorship at Harvard Law School. She dedicated her career to exploring political representation of Black Americans.

She was against quotas. She thought they would undermine the people they were supposed to support.

She was also against districts drawn on the basis of race. According to a 1993 piece in Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, she argued that it “isolates blacks from potential white allies” and “suppresses the potential development of issue-based campaigning and cross-racial coalitions.”

Those of you who have heard of Lani Guinier know her as someone who was nominated by Bill Clinton - with whom she went to law school at Yale - to work at the Justice Department; who faced a lot of “controversy”; and whose nomination was ultimately rescinded.

Those who might know a bit more are, no doubt, confused by how I describe her above. Because, immediately after her name was put in for Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division, she was skewered by right-wing pundits as “The Quota Queen.”

That charge was led by a headline writer at the Wall Street Journal, and a columnist - Clint Bolick - who had previously worked for the Reagan Administration.

Which explains the similarities between Bolick’s headline to Reagan’s “welfare queen,” racist, bogeyman.

Bolick, according to an academic paper by then-Columbia Journalism grad student Lauren Leff, took a 42-page article in a Harvard law review journal, then pulled out and distorted “one paragraph and two footnotes.”

After that, notes Leff:

Too many reporters uncritically accepted Bolick's and other conservatives' depictions of [Guinier’s] views, the same quotes appearing over and over again in such publications as Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and U.S. News & World Report. And too many reporters substituted code words, such as "quotas," "affirmative action," and "reverse discrimination…”

Oh, like racist code words? That they copied from each other? Isn’t that… plagiarism?

Journalists Leff talked to - like the Washington Post’s Michael Isikoff - admitted they had spent very little time perusing the law review pieces that Bolick used in his smear of Clinton’s nominee. Many reporters didn’t even try to read them, but turned to people they knew had read Guiniers’ writing to get a “quickie summary” to fit their story into a pre-written framework.

"The press reaction was based largely on the Bork model," then-University of Texas law professor Samuel Issacharoff told Leff. "The issue with Bork was: Is he outside the mainstream? Is Guinier outside the mainstream? This was the main question I was asked by all the reporters who called me.”

After it was all over, New York Times legal columnist Anthony Lewis wrote, “Professor Guinier was the target of the most effective smear campaign seen in Washington since Joe McCarthy's day.”

I’ve long been fascinated with Guinier, both for what happened to her says about race in America, and for what it says about journalism in America. Also for what it says about how much Bill Clinton was a spineless dweeb.

History Rhymes

This week, (now) former Harvard president Claudine Gay was the target of a smear campaign just as vicious - and possibly more consequential - than the one against Guinier 20 years ago.

And, like Guinier, this story was picked up and distorted by one person, Christopher Rufo, who started the hysteria over Critical Race Theory and is Ron DeSantis’ water boy in the takeover of New College of Florida.

Rufo was, in this quest against Gay, backed by Bill Ackman, a prominent hedge fund manager and Harvard donor. He recently wrote a 4,000-word screed on X, calling DEI “reverse racism against white people.”

According to Adam Gabbat of The Guardian, since December 5, Ackman has tweeted more than 100 times about Gay, Harvard, or both. He has 1 million followers.

He also, apparently, has a chip on his shoulder. 

“Ackman’s campaign,” Gabbatt wrote, “came after ‘years of resentment,’ the New York Times reported, in part because his donations to Harvard did not give him greater influence over the university.”

I understand that. I mean, Mark Zukerberg’s $500 million donation seems to have gotten disinformation researcher Joan Donovan fired from Harvard after she announced she was publishing papers given to her by a Facebook whistleblower.

Ackman only gave $25 million. Which seems paltry next to Zuck. I guess the cost of firing academics is subject to inflation.

But Ackman was helped, immensely, by New York Congresswoman Elyse Stefanik, and by a duplicitous press corps - and social media - that magnified the drama rather than the truth.

Stefanik grilled Gay, MIT president Sally Kornbluth, and UPenn president Liz Magill with an outstanding performance as Regina George during a December 5 Congressional hearing ostensibly about antisemitism on campus. Rarely have I seen someone bully and harass people while she’s trying to get them to admit to being too tolerant of bullying and harassment.

The fact that the subsequent headlines and coverage were all about how the three university presidents had screwed up - and weren’t about what a fool George, er, Stefanik, made of herself is the most astonishing part of this.

Stefanik first defined “intifada” as “calling for the genocide of Jews,” then noted that students at Harvard, at least, called for intifada, then asked all three presidents if they supported the “genocide of Jews.”

I give her credit. This is an astonishing work of logical manipulation, but surely my fellow journalists are not so stupid as to buy what she was selling?

“Intifada,” of course, means, “uprising.” That is all. It has been used to stoke violence. It has been used to stoke peaceful protest. It is a word of resistance.

Stefanik wielded the word as a weapon. The same way her hero, Trump, wielded Barak Obama’s middle name as a weapon. It was meant to attack free speech, discredit three Ivy League universities, and stoke anti-Muslim fears in one fell swoop. Joseph Geobbels would have been proud.

Within a week, Magill resigned. Harvard was standing behind Gay until Rufo and his pals unearthed her dissertation from 1997, found instances in which footnotes were too similar to other definitions in other footnotes of other academic papers, and made allegations of plagiarism. “Often,” a New York Times analysis found, “the language in question is technical boilerplate.”

This seemed to offer proof to Ackman’s charge that Gay was a “diversity hire” for the job of president. (She was already a tenured professor.)

Gay and Magill (and, now, Kornbluth) were not the only ones targeted here. Rufo told Politico’s Ward this week that Gay’s resignation “shows a successful strategy for the political right. How we have to work the media, how we have to exert pressure and how we have to sequence our campaigns in order to be successful.”

In other words, “most journalists are chumps and we know how to manipulate them.”

As Sherrilyn Ifill noted on Threads a couple of days after Gay resigned, since December 5, the press has stopped talking about antisemitism on campus.

“The anti-DEI folks got what they wanted. White supremacists are thrilled. Stefanik is as pleased as punch,” Ifill wrote.

But… Schadenfreude

The day Gay submitted her resignation, she wrote an op-ed in the Times in which she noted that people like Ackman have been trying to oust her since she was named Harvard president six months ago. 

She warned that “the campaign against me was merely a single skirmish in a broader war to unravel public faith in pillars of American society.

“Never did I imagine needing to defend decades-old and broadly respected research, but the past several weeks have laid waste to truth.”

This was aided and abetted by a press corps whose allegiance is to drama, not truth. And who probably couldn’t be bothered to actually read Gay’s academic writings.

But Business Insider did look at the writings of former MIT professor Neri Oxman. Which renewed my hope in good journalism. They found that Oxman, who is Ackman’s wife, “plagiarized multiple paragraphs of her 2010 doctoral dissertation, including at least one passage directly lifted from other writers without citation.”

Not just boilerplate footnotes, but actual paragraphs.

Business Insider also reported that Oxman, who is Israeli, left MIT in 2021, but a few years before, she created an original sculpture for Jeffrey Epstein after he donated $125,000 to her lab. Emails from 2019 show that Ackman endeavored to cover up the gift once Epstein was arrested.

After the news of Oxman’s plagiarism came out, Ackman vowed on X to launch plagiarism investigations against the heads of many college presidents - starting with Kornbluth at MIT.

This will succeed. Because journalists will not take the time to understand whether or not the charges have merit. They will just report that the charges have been made.

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