I haven’t been the least bit surprised that Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne, Harvard President Claudine Gay, and now Harvard’s chief diversity and inclusion officer Sherri Ann Charleston have turned out to have past records of plagiarism and/or academic misconduct. What’s surprising is that the hollow credentialism and politicized infotainment that define so much of today’s academic establishment are at last coming to light.

It’s been a long time coming: I’ve spent much of my career feeling queasy about a lot of the content I’ve had to package and sweeten for the market as it is, regardless of when I’ve strongly suspected it to be empirically shaky at best. In terms of the struggle to land jobs and funding and tenure from a stagnant or shrinking pie, even honest scholars with the best of intentions face constant temptation to simply deliver the goods.

From what I’ve seen in public broadcasting and at Columbia Journalism School, that dynamic often incentivized artful incorporation of consistently slanted narratives on hot-button political issues. At Columbia Law, it seemed to be a top priority to help codify talking points into statute—particularly when it came to expansive definitions of “equity.” In nearly a decade of reporting for Columbia Engineering, I watched the school move from sleepy backwater to enthusiastic cheerleader and enabler for whatever the sexier fields desired. And at the School of Public Health, in my final job for Columbia, I helped celebrate striving technocrats testing the outer limits of their authority since, during Covid, almost any social problem could be framed as an “epidemic.”

-Jesse Adams