Will Harvard axe Kaavya to save face?

MUMBAI: The nightmare keeps getting worse for Kaavya Viswanathan. Close on the heels of her debut novel being pulled from book stores across the US after plagiarisation charges stuck, the Indian-origin author’s deal with Hollywood movie studio DreamWorks is in danger of being stillborn.

According to movie newsmagazine Variety, DreamWorks had just received the final version of the screenplay based on Viswanathan’s book, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life, when the plagiarisation scandal broke. The studio, according to unnamed sources, soon decided to junk the screenplay.

Many of the attacks directed at Viswanathan are coming from faculty and students, present and past, of Harvard University.

The famed institution has seen four of its professors hauled up in as many years for plagiarism (see box below).  

Also, America’s best-known black scholar, Cornel West, resigned as professor from the University after coming under attack by president Lawrence Summers, who, in turn, was accused of poor intellectual leadership and
worse.  

Should the University haul up Viswanathan, who submitted the Opal manuscript as part of her admission package, to salvage its reputation? Delhi-based activist and writer Gautam Bhan, a Harvard alumnus, thinks it will have to. "If Harvard is to save face, Kaavya will have to face the axe," he says.

The Harvard Crimson, The Advocate and The Independent, publications that have been reporting widely on the scandal, are currently rife with support, dissent, cries of xenophobia and confusion. "I fail to understand how this girl can be allowed to stay at Harvard," writes old boy Lindon Hogner in the Crimson. "Give her the boot and let the storm blow over."

Sahil Mahtani, a sophomore like Viswanathan and a member of the editorial board at Crimson, speaks in the Asian voice when he raises the xenophobia factor in his piece ‘Little, Brown, and stereotyped’.

Senior editor Matthew Meisel put the fears in perspective when he wrote: "Kaavya’s roost was atop the same rickety tower of meritocracy that so many of us built on our way to our Harvard admission."

Bhan encapsulates the angst on the Harvard campus. "It’s not the American dream that’s lost, it’s the Harvard dream - little brown girl immigrant comes to Ivy league university with oodles of talent, works meticulously at course work by day and burns midnight oil to write that multimillion-dollar novel, is discovered, and makes it big. Every student in Harvard is living the dream. That’s what’s lost."