Posted on 01/03/2024 3:32:09 AM PST by definitelynotaliberal
As we wrote here earlier, it was inevitable that Claudine Gay would eventually step down.
A while back, we listed reason #1 of ten why she would resign: "Harvard can claim to be America’s preeminent university, or have a plagiarist as its president—but not both.”
To paraphrase Churchill, Harvard had an initial choice between a scandal and dishonor; it chose dishonor and now it will have scandal.
The latest six allegations of plagiarism (now totaling some two dozen), if they were to be further excused, ignored, or contextualized, would have continued to have made a mockery of Harvard’s own codes on intellectual theft, given:
1) Her plagiarism was not sporadic, but characteristic, systematic, and serial, dating back to her PhD dissertation. 2) It was not a matter of rephrasing the work of others (which in itself is often deemed [especially by Harvard] plagiarism even when cited), but rather word-for-word expropriation. 3) She was not “proactive” as she earlier had claimed in addressing the allegations, but reactive. On the occasion of a new accusation, she habitually insisted she had adhered to the highest standards of scholarship, until she hadn’t—and her growing history of plagiarism made such assertions preposterous—and exposed the Harvard corporation that swallowed them as itself ethically compromised.
What follows?
If Harvard appoints as its permanent president another candidate on the basis of DEI without a record of substantial scholarship, intellectual probity, recognized teaching, and administrative excellence, then the university will only reinforce the now growing consensus that it has abandoned even the veneer of meritocracy. And the institution will thus continue on its current Target/Disney/Bud Lite trajectory.
Its salvation at this nadir is to select a preeminent scholar and nonpartisan, and have most of the current board members/fellows of the Harvard Corporation resign (especially the partisan chairwoman/senior fellow) for incompetence if not worse.
The members' official media release concerning the Gay resignation continued to show blind hubris through tsk-tsking the very unethical behavior that got Gay in trouble in the first place—while pro forma adding the charge of “racism.” (But did “racism” explain why Pennsylvania President Liz McGill also resigned [with Gay, one of three college presidents who shocked the nation by testifying to Congress that they really could/would do little if anything to students and faculty who called for the genocide of Jews and the destruction of Israel?]).
Finally what is one to make of this paragraph from Harvard’s current public announcement of Gay’s resignation: We do so with sorrow. While President Gay has acknowledged missteps and has taken responsibility for them, it is also true that she has shown remarkable resilience in the face of deeply personal and sustained attacks. While some of this has played out in the public domain, much of it has taken the form of repugnant and in some cases racist vitriol directed at her through disgraceful emails and phone calls. We condemn such attacks in the strongest possible terms.
Are we to believe, then, that President Gay leaves mostly because of “deeply personal and sustained attacks” and “racist vitriol”—and not her decades-long habit of passing off the intellectual work of others as her own—well aside from her misleading congressional testimony that it was her commitment to free speech that had prevented her from acting against clear anti-Semitic activity at her university?
Note in Harvard’s world, plagiarism became “duplicative language” and now it is euphemized further as “missteps”.
Once more, Gay never took “responsibility for them”, but in the face of damning evidence on each case claimed she had always adhered to the highest standards of scholarship and was now “proactively” addressing her plagiarism. In fact, she corrected plagiarism only when called out, and always in a reactive fashion.
As far as the “public domain” snark, Harvard could retain its privacy in addressing its compromised president, by simply not accepting federal research monies, paying the IRS income tax on its huge endowment annual income, not accepting federal guaranteed student loan tuition money—and thus freeing itself from us, the taxpaying rubes of the “public domain”.
Tokens are like blackmail photos you keep paying.
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