When the United States Department of Justice failed to punish Al Capone for the many murders he had committed, they did a runaround and made sure he did ‘hard time’ for tax evasion.

Unlike murder, where evidence can be muddled, tax evasion is clear-cut. The same could be said of academic plagiarism.

It also has an extremely clear-cut standard for journal articles, which is not subject to institutional discretion. One must credit assiduously any previously published work.

The penalties for tax evasion have been considerably lowered today, but the seriousness of plagiarism-the whole broad spectrum of it from minimal and inadvertent, to extensive and deliberate-remains high at quality tertiary institutions, in particular. In those spaces, it is still a ‘hard time’ crime.

Consider the case of Claudine Gay. She was one of three woman presidents of Ivy League universities-Harvard, Penn and MIT-who appeared before a US Republican-led subcommittee to explain their responses to pro-Palestinian/anti-Israel student protests on their campuses.

Their attempts to walk the fine line between expressing personal revulsion at the Hamas attack on Israeli civilians on October 7 and their students’ right to freedom of speech, so enshrined in the character of US institutions of higher learning, brought condemnation against all three. They were accused of anti-Semitism.

The president of Penn resigned almost immediately, but Claudine Gay stood her ground with a clear conscience-for almost a month after the hearing on December 6, 2023. She stood her ground until allegations of plagiarism were brought against her by fellow Harvard professors, angry at her handling of the protests and looking to make sure they got something for which she could do ‘hard time’-namely, resign as president.

Prof Gay was the first black woman president at Harvard University. She had been appointed with great fanfare only six months before.

It is obvious that the institution would be reluctant to see her vacate this position after so short a time, especially as she is both black and a woman.

Further, Harvard found that her plagiarism was unintentional and minimal. She is a social scientist-a discipline well-populated with practitioners and with so much niche jargon that it is extremely challenging to form any statement which does not have considerable commonality with something somebody wrote/said before.

She didn’t use someone else’s data and not cite them. It was found that a few of the citations, regarding statements in her article, were missingnegligence more than deliberation. Yet, look at how this panned out.

The allegations pertained to a journal article, done not at Harvard but at Stanford, not recent but published decades before. Yet, Prof Gay, once her scholarship was challenged at all, fell on her sword and resigned. She knew Harvard would be more tarnished by a president accused of plagiarism than of anti-Semitism.

The institution itself wrote no exculpatory memorandum about her behaviour. Nor did Harvard punish the professors who went digging into her past, looking for dirt, and who brought these allegations. There was no coverup and no misplaced punishment. Prof Gay took responsibility and apologised. She left and a new acting president was appointed the same day.

This is what happens when quality runs deep in an institution. Their checks and balances work. Can our tertiary institutions ever meet these standards? I hold out no hope.

V Stoute
Port of Spain