The Next Battle in Higher Ed May Strike at Its Soul: Scholarship

Marc Tessier-Lavigne, president of Stanford, resigned in August after an investigation found serious flaws in studies he had supervised going back decades.

Claudine Gay, president of Harvard, resigned as the new year dawned, under mounting accusations of plagiarism going back to her graduate student days.

Then Neri Oxman, a former star professor at M.I.T., was accused of plagiarizing from Wikipedia, among other sources, in her dissertation. Her husband, the hedge-fund billionaire Bill Ackman, was one of Dr. Gay’s most dogged critics. And he has vowed to scour the records of M.I.T.’s faculty, and its president, Sally Kornbluth, for plagiarism.

The attacks on the integrity of higher education have come fast and furious over the last few years. The federal Varsity Blues investigation, in which wealthy parents were accused of using bribery and fraud to secure spots for their children in résumé-building colleges, launched a debate over merit and the admissions game. The affirmative action lawsuit against Harvard exposed how Asian American students must perform at a higher standard to win entry. And the protests over the Israel-Hamas war opened administrators to charges that they tolerated antisemitism on their campuses.

Now the focus has moved into what may be the very soul of higher education: scholarship.

There are differences among the cases — Dr. Tessier-Lavigne and Dr. Gay were the faces of their institutions, while Dr. Oxman is a former faculty member, who was well known in her field of computational design. Defenders of Dr. Gay and Dr. Oxman say that their lifting of words is minor, and that they were not accused of stealing ideas. And unlike Dr. Tessier-Lavigne, they have not had to retract any papers.