It was less than three weeks ago, December 5, when the name of Claudine Gay, President of Harvard University, suddenly burst into the news. That was the day that she, along with the Presidents of Penn and MIT, testified before Congress — and could not give a clear answer as to whether it was against the policy at their schools to call for the genocide of Jews. All three women attempted to use the occasion to paint themselves as defenders of free speech, particularly important in such extreme cases.
Manhattan Contrarian readers already knew that Ms. Gay was the opposite of a defender of free speech. In a post on December 16, 2022 with the title “Goodnight, Poor Harvard!” — written on the occasion of the announcement that Ms. Gay would become the next President of Harvard — I reviewed her record on the subject. My conclusion, based on multiple examples mostly from the work of independent journalist Christopher Brunet, was that Ms. Gay was “the enforcer-in-chief of wokist orthodoxy at Harvard.”
In the few short weeks since December 5, the news as to Ms. Gay has gotten worse and worse, seemingly by the day. First, some big donors ramped up threats to pull their funding. Then came a handful of allegations of plagiarism found in a few among Ms. Gay’s small number of academic papers. On December 12 the New York Times reported that the Harvard Corporation had appointed a special committee to investigate the allegations of plagiarism, and that the committee had cleared Ms. Gay.
Then it emerged that a source had given the allegations of plagiarism to the New York Post back in October, and the Post had sent them to Harvard for confirmation — only to get in return a threatening letter from the Clare Locke law firm (the same firm that had recovered over $700 million from Fox in the Dominion Voting case) asserting that the accusations of plagiarism were “demonstrably false.”
Then (December 19 in the Washington Free Beacon) there emerged a new dossier now with some 40 instances of alleged plagiarism — almost four for each of Ms. Gay’s eleven academic articles — many of the new allegations much more serious than the ones that the special committee had just deemed minor.
So by December 19 the Clare Locke letter and the attempt of the special committee to whitewash Ms. Gay’s plagiarism had blown up in the face of the Harvard Corporation. On December 22 the New York Post ran a big story demonstrating that the special committee had cleared Ms. Gay before investigating her work. Could it get any worse for Ms. Gay?
Yes. Here’s the latest from Christopher Brunet in a post at something called The Dossier yesterday: Claudine Gay has been asked for, but has refused to provide, the data that underlie a 2001 article she published in the American Political Science Review (“The Effect of Black Congressional Representation on Political Participation”).
The 2001 APSR article was a critical piece in Ms. Gay receiving tenure from Stanford. In 2002, two researchers who had looked at the APSR paper — Michael Herron of Dartmouth and Kenneth Schotts of Stanford — thought the result anomalous and sought the underlying data from Gay. Herron and Schotts reported the results of that effort in a working paper they presented at the 2002 conference of the Society for Political Methodology. Brunet has obtained a copy of the Herron/Schotts working paper, and links to it at his piece. Here is the key quote from the Herron/Schotts working paper:
We were, however, unable to scrutinize Gay’s results because she would not release her dataset to us (personal communication with Claudine Gay, 2002).
Consider Gay’s (2001) EI–R analysis of the precinct-level socioeconomic covariates that affect black and white turnout. […] For Gay’s Michigan and Pennsylvania EI–R analyses to be logically consistent, it must be true that knowledge of a precinct’s percent black (Xi) tells us nothing about the precinct’s per capita income (an element of Gay’s Zi).
This is untenable in light of contemporary American social realities: if a precinct has a large African-American population, then all things equal this precinct will have a relatively low per capita income. Nonetheless, without assuming that a precinct’s per capita income is not a function of its racial composition, and without making a host of similarly implausible assumptions for the other right hand side variables in her second stage regressions, Gay’s use of EI–R is logically inconsistent.
Yes, it’s technical mumbo-jumbo, but the gist is that the Gay paper’s methodology appears on its face to be “logically inconsistent,” so the authors asked for the underlying data, and they were refused. As far as I am concerned, failure by a researcher to share the underlying data as to published work is prima facie evidence that the data have been falsified. The ability to disprove that inference is completely in the hands of the researcher, here Ms. Gay, and there is no reason to refuse disclosure other than known problems in the data. Readers here know that the phenomenon of refusal to disclose underlying data is endemic in narrative-supporting politicized “science,” most famously in the Hockey Stick graph of Mann, et al., that is the primary basis of the global warming scare.
Is there any other reason to think that something suspicious is going on here? Well, the Herron/Schotts paper from which the above quote comes appears nowhere on the internet (except as Brunet has now posted it), and there is evidence to suggest that the paper was intentionally disappeared. Brunet:
The program for every PolMeth conference from 1984-2021 is available for download on the PolMeth website, except for 2002, indicating the missing year of 2002 was deliberately removed from this span, seemingly to protect Gay. This is especially true because there was no internet in e.g. 1984, so there is clearly a repository of old programs somewhere that was uploaded to the website at one point, from which 2002 is conspicuously missing. Perhaps 2002 was the sole year lost in the shuffle during this span.
Was the reason for disappearance of the Herron/Schotts paper to protect Gay, as Brunet hypothesizes? You be the judge. Anyway, it is completely in Ms. Gay’s hands to disprove any inference of data manipulation by disclosing her data. I’m somehow guessing that that’s not going to happen.
As they used to say about Donald Trump, “the walls are closing in” on Claudine Gay.
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