Seeing Through Smokescreens

USS Public Intellectual races into battle

Harvard President Claudine Gay is under attack! All destroyers, make smoke!

Not enough smoke! More smoke!

She’s an extremely distinguished scholar with a sterling academic record, THOUGH MAYBE YOU CAN’T SEE THAT THROUGH YOUR KLAN HOOD!!!!!!!!

So let’s check. Start here:

Click here and look at the academic c.v. of former Harvard President Larry Summers. He wrote five books, edited another, and published dozens of peer-reviewed articles; just listing his record of peer-reviewed articles takes several pages.

Then click here and look at the academic c.v. of former Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust. Wrote six books, edited two, won the extremely important Bancroft Prize, has a long list of articles in the top journals for her field.

Then click here and look at the academic c.v. of the current president of Harvard, for crying out loud. Thirty years of scholarship with no books — zero books — and eleven peer-reviewed articles.

It’s a joke. No one believes that Claudine Gay is a distinguished scholar.

Don’t just take my word for anything, now or ever. Do your own test. Pick one land grant university and one small liberal arts college near you, search up the list of political science faculty, and look at some associate professors. Claudine Gay was a professor at Stanford when Harvard desperately worked to lure her away because of her amazingly brilliant performance as a scholar, so let’s choose the very first associate professor listed in the poli sci department there and look at his academic c.v. for comparison.

Adam Bonica, a young associate professor who completed his PhD in 2011 — not quite twenty years after Claudine Gay finished hers — has published a book, 28 peer-reviewed articles and a couple of student-editor-reviewed law review articles, and a handful of book chapters. Weirdly, he does not seem to be considered a shockingly distinguished professor who should be running Harvard.

By the way, notice this on Adam Bonica’s c.v.:

Reviewer for American Journal of Political Science, American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, Journal of Experimental Politics, Quarterly Journal of Political Science, State Politics and Policy Quarterly, Legislative Studies Quarterly, Political Research Quarterly, Health Affairs, Economics and Politics, American Economics Journal: Economic Policy, Journal of Research and Politics, Research and Politics, Journal of Legal Studies, Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Political Behavior, Political Analysis, Public Choice, Political Science Research and Methods, and Public Opinion Quarterly.

Some context:

Professors at teaching universities like the many campuses of the California State University system usually have something like a 4-4 teaching load: four courses in the fall, four courses in the spring. A 5-5 isn’t unheard of, out in the academic hinterlands, and community college professors sometimes carry a 7-7. They teach; research is much less important as they’re evaluated for tenure and promotion.

Professors at the top small liberal arts colleges have something more like a 2-3 teaching load, and they’re expected to publish publish publish, but they’re also expected to take a close interest in undergraduate education, doing things like advising on senior theses. I went to a small liberal arts college, and the professors graded ordinary undergraduate papers with a written page of discussion stapled to the back that closely examined the strengths and weaknesses of the thing.

At major research universities, professors are protected from the grubby little task of dealing with undergraduates. They teach a 2-2 or a 2-3, in a mix of graduate and undergraduate classes, with a generous menu of “teaching releases” for service work that can reduce that courseload. Increasingly, non-tenure-track lecturers cover some of the actual undergraduate teaching. Professors deploy a screen of graduate teaching assistants to answer student questions and grade undergraduate exams; click the link for a description of the role of grad student assistants at Stanford, where Claudine Gay started her career.

Professors at research universities have light teaching duties, then, on the premise that their role is to be researchers — advancing knowledge and building the future of their scholarly field. So Adam Bonica, aggressively writing and publishing and doing peer review for a loooong list of scholarly journals, is the norm. For professors at Stanford, the point is to publish, and to participate in the world of academic publishing.

Adam Bonica: twelve years, one book, thirty articles.

Claudine Gay: thirty years, no books, eleven articles.

Claudine Gay is not a distinguished scholar. By the normal standards of a major research university, she’s not an adequate early-career associate professor.

Ahhh, but you’re just measuring by volume, you lying hater, and clearly Claudine Gay has only published a few research papers because each one is so brilliantly crafted. She must have written eleven pieces of shockingly creative scholarship that changed the trajectory of her field, right? Her scholarly intervention must be infinitely vast!

I’ve linked to her c.v., above, and you can find those papers online easily enough. Here’s one: “Spirals of Trust? The Effect of Descriptive Representation on the Relationship between Citizens and Their Government.” It asks a set of noticeably simple questions, analyses them using data from an existing database of survey data that Claudine Gay didn’t create, and then offers some fairly obvious and simple answers to her not-enormously-complex questions. Read it and tell me I’m wrong, if you want, but I’m not wrong. Even without reaching the questions about plagiarism and following in the intellectual footsteps of other professors, her work is ordinary, her prose is dull, and her analysis is…okay.

And yet there’s an army of people screeching at you that she’s amazingly distinguished and important as a scholar. Flatly, she is not.

As always, the point is larger than the single example of the moment. A loudly and insistently repeated claim is obvious nonsense, but it’s still loudly and insistently repeated. That’s the water we swim in. We live in a world of Potemkin villages, and we know it.