There are more allegations of plagiarism directed at Harvard President Claudine Gay. As news outlets finally started paying attention and investigating the scandal, there were several more instances of Gay lifting other scholars' writing to use in her dissertation.
A committee at Harvard found that Gay used “duplicative language without proper attribution” in the writing of her dissertation. The university said that Gay would submit three "corrections" in response.
Meanwhile, CNN finally conducted a thorough review of Gay's work and discovered that the president of one of the most prestigious universities in America copied the work of others both as a student and as a professor.
The new corrections follow a review by CNN that found that the university leader had lifted language from other scholars and writers in essays she published as a graduate student pursuing her PhD at Harvard and in other articles published during her time as a professor there
They also follow the conclusion of a review by independent experts that Gay herself requested in the wake of an Oct. 24 New York Post inquiry that first raised allegations of plagiarism. That review found that Gay’s actions violated Harvard’s policies on citations and called them “regrettable.” Yet the experts found that her actions did not rise to the level of “research misconduct” as the incidences were not “intentional or reckless.”
Not "intentional"? That's total B.S. and is another example of academia circling the wagons to protect one of their own. The plagiarism is more than "regrettable." Taken together with past revelations of plagiarism, they are a firable offense.
If a student had engaged in that level of deception, trying to pass someone else's work off as theirs, it would be cause for getting kicked out of school.
Some of the plagiarism allegations came from City Journal's Christopher Rufo, a left-wing bête noire. Without addressing the very carefully researched and substantive allegations by Rufo, leftist defenders of Gay ignorantly played the race card.
Harvard Law School professor Charles Fried told The New York Times that Gay was fending off an "extreme right-wing attack on elite institutions."
"If it came from some other quarter, I might be granting it some credence," he said, referring to the plagiarism accusations. "But not from these people."
And Reason reports that "NAACP President Derrick Johnson dismissed all criticism of Gay as 'political theatrics advancing a White supremacist agenda.'"
This attitude, though common, is profoundly mistaken. The charges facing Gay are serious, as recent coverage by mainstream outlets—like the Times and CNN—has finally conceded. Neither Rufo's alleged political agenda nor the timing of these revelations should matter if they are in fact true. There's nothing inherently racist or white supremacist about applying Harvard's own standards for students and faculty to the president of the institution. On the contrary, excusing plagiarism at the most elite levels of academia merely because the people calling it out are on the wrong team would constitute a profound betrayal of the very values the academy supposedly values. Harvard, which has done very little to address the charges, should take note.
As The Atlantic's Elliot Cohen writes, "Harvard Has a Veritas Problem," referring to Harvard's motto, "Veritas."
So far, Harvard's board has stuck by Gay. The members would be drummed out of the Harvard Club if they fired a woman—and a woman of color—for anything less than a criminal offense.
It's sickening. But the members and supporters of these elite institutions could give a flying fig what you and I think. They exist in their own insulated world where they look out the window and watch the rest of us scurrying around like ants while they are perched above it all.
