Plagiarism

Claudine, we hardly knew ye. Gay’s tenure atop Harvard was the shortest in that university’s history. Yet it was still too long. In mere months, she did enormous damage to one of the world’s great universities. Gay is not the only one who should be held accountable for this fiasco. The university’s governing board, the Fellows of Harvard Corporation, should be out, too. They chose her, and their choice did enormous damage to the institution. They should pay for it. Their statement accepting her resignation shows just how feckless they are. Don’t read it if you are glucose intolerant. “First and foremost, we thank President Gay for her deep and unwavering commitment to Harvard and to the pursuit of academic excellence . . .

“This is not a decision I came to easily,” wrote disgraced former Harvard University President Claudine Gay of her resignation just after New Years. That might be the only honest thing Gay has said about the debilitating scandal in which she has devastated her once-prestigious institution over the past three months. Indeed, her decision to resign did not come easily at all. It only came after Gay repeatedly failed to state, including in Congressional testimony, and in the wake of the deadliest anti-Semitic violence since the Holocaust, that calling for the genocidal murder of members of her university community is a violation of its code of conduct.

You are probably almost as sick of hearing about Claudine Gay — as of this writing, still the president of Harvard University — as I am of writing about her. As I pointed out a year ago in this space, Harvard’s appointment of Gay, a black woman, was simply the next chapter in the university’s long-running pursuit of its racial spoils system. Gay’s entire academic career has been a testimony to the power of that enterprise. What a prize Harvard had in Claudine Gay: a black female who was an avid proponent of the whole “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” racket. Could there be any doubt that she was being groomed for the top slot?

Harvard president Claudine Gay’s troubling history of appropriating other people’s idea and words and passing them off as her own has a well-worn name: plagiarism. Every college and university in the United States prohibits plagiarism. Most present students with explicit rules against it and lay out the possibility of drastic punishments, such as failing a course and, depending on the severity of the offense, expulsion from the college. Typically, instructors in freshman English include lessons on the proper ways to quote, paraphrase and cite sources.  Why? What is so wrong with plagiarism? We don’t punish actors for reciting their lines and failing to add, “Mr. William Shakespeare wrote that.