Truth grounds Yale’s mission. We emphasized as much in our September piece on Yale’s presidential search process, where we mentioned it not once but six times. The imbroglio of shame, anger and disappointment emerging from recent events at Harvard is a much-needed warning call to institutions that stray too far from their mission and bend to external influences. Whoever Yale’s next president may be, they should embody Yale’s values, the linchpin of which is the free exchange of ideas in pursuit of truth.
To repeatedly pass off others’ work as one’s own is to lie. Harvard students are not allowed to do it, and neither are we. To threaten to sue a newspaper holding power accountable — no matter the political lean of the publication — is to perpetuate that lie. Leaders who obscure and lie “undermine the ideals animating Harvard since its founding: excellence, openness, independence, truth.” This is exactly how Claudine Gay described unnamed “demagogues” after her resignation. Retrospectively, the statement also appears to be an unwitting self-reflection for her and her institution.
Gay’s plagiarism merited her resignation. To those who disagree, allow us to contextualize. Let’s start with one of our own: journalist-pundit Fareed Zakaria ’86 resigned from the Yale Corporation in 2012 after it was discovered that he had lifted a single paragraph from another writer. Former University of South Carolina President Robert Caslen resigned after using a paragraph in his 2021 commencement speech without proper attribution. Just like Zakaria and Caslen, Claudine Gay plagiarized. Or consider the resignation of Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne just last year: a Stanford committee found that several of Tessier-Lavigne’s papers fell below academic standards because of errors made by others in his labs. Claudine Gay was not unique in resigning.
The problem is bigger than just plagiarism and the fact that it was overlooked by Harvard’s search committee. By her own admission, Claudine Gay “fell into a well-laid trap” at the Congressional hearing. Well-laid or not, a university president’s responses should amount to more than mere legalese. That Claudine Gay failed to articulate why free speech matters or reconcile it with the tensions it engenders betrays a lack of appreciation for its role as a bedrock for the free exchange of ideas. Any university president, especially one whose institution elects to make “veritas” a part of its motto, should be able to confidently and tactfully defend this principle.
Clearly, Harvard has had its internal failings, but it would be remiss to forget that powerful figures opposed President Gay from the moment of her inauguration. Members of Congress and billionaire donors were all too happy to capitalize on her plagiarism — wielding it as a tool to serve their own agendas. We recognize that Harvard cannot ratchet down these external pressures, but it can better navigate them. More importantly, so can we.
Universities like ours are increasingly finding themselves in the crosshairs of broad and varied interest groups. Each president of Yale faces daunting challenges: demagogues who revile our campus and influential donors who seek to stifle our academic freedom, amongst countless others. At the heart of meeting these challenges is adhering to Yale’s mission; at the heart of Yale’s mission is an honest commitment to the ideal of truth, as sought by a “company of scholars” — one hopes “a society of friends” — who champion the free exchange of ideas.
This means holding our leaders to principled standards of integrity and refusing to cede control of our priorities and curriculum to interest groups. The only way to forge ahead in this confusing and turbulent time is to recommit to the ideal we share, or once shared, with Harvard: “veritas.”
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This piece was written by a two-thirds majority of Publius. Members of the body include:
Leadership
Violet Barnett, Grace Hopper ’25
Miami, FL
Edos Herwegh Vonk, Davenport ’26
London, United Kingdom
Members
Alex Bavalsky, Timothy Dwight ’25
Brooklyn, NY
Justin Crosby, Silliman ’25
Middleton, MA
Josephine Cureton, Ezra Stiles ’24
San Francisco, CA
Hannah Figueroa Velazquez, Berkeley ’26
Portland, OR
Adam Tufts, Berkeley ’26
Livermore, CA