Mick Hartley

Jenny Holland at Spiked on Harvard's Claudine Gay:

Plagiarism is a cardinal sin of the academic world. It is almost universally considered to be an act for which there is little to no redemption. The usual punishment is being expelled from your institution. Unless, apparently, you are the president of Harvard.

Harvard president Claudine Gay’s academic work has recently come under scrutiny for what looks like plagiarism. Earlier this week, conservative writer Chris Rufo made a series of posts on X showing examples of Gay’s work that were eerily similar to that of other scholars. And it turns out the New York Post has been investigating allegations of plagiarism against Gay since October. The Post this week revealed that it was threatened by a high-powered defamation lawyer hired by Harvard as part of an attempt to cover up these alleged academic misdeeds.

Despite these revelations, Gay’s position is safe for now. Harvard’s board issued a statement yesterday saying ‘we… reaffirm our support for President Gay’s continued leadership of Harvard University’….

In fact, despite posing as a free-speech champion in front of congress, Gay is well known for her dabblings in cancel culture. Back in 2022, when she was arts and sciences dean at Harvard, she played a crucial role in the cancellation of economist Roland Fryer, the youngest African-American academic to ever receive tenure at Harvard. Fryer had previously drawn the ire of politically correct colleagues for his work dismantling some of their most cherished ideological shibboleths. For instance, Fryer’s research found that, when all variables are controlled for, black Americans are no more likely to be shot by police than white Americans. Coincidentally, Fryer suddenly became the target of sexual-harassment allegations.

Despite a Harvard investigation that found in Fryer’s favour, Quillette noted last year that Claudine Gay ‘reportedly went so far as to ask Harvard’s president to revoke Fryer’s tenure’. Gay’s request was denied, but Fryer was suspended without pay for two years. He was ‘stripped of his named professorship, banned from interacting with graduate students, subjected to constant Title IX surveillance, and demoted to teaching undergraduates’.

Harvard clearly has some questionable double standards. The university is quite happy to punish an unwoke professor, even after he was cleared by an investigation, seemingly due to the political bent of his research. Meanwhile, the Harvard board stands in solidarity with a president accused of plagiarism and of equivocating over anti-Semitism on her own campus. At Harvard, no person – no matter how brilliant or admirable – will be spared the wrath of woke bureaucrats if they veer from the party line. Those like Gay who do trot out the standard woke narrative are free to do as they please.

Also:

A Tale of Two Harvard Presidents

In 2006, Harvard president Larry Summers was forced to resign.

His crime, among other things, was a speech he had given the year prior, in which he suggested that gender disparities in science and engineering might be the result of innate…

— Nate Hochman (@njhochman) December 13, 2023

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Full text:

In 2006, Harvard president Larry Summers was forced to resign.

His crime, among other things, was a speech he had given the year prior, in which he suggested that gender disparities in science and engineering might be the result of innate differences between men and women. The speech led to a furious backlash, and a no-confidence vote from Harvard faculty.

When Summers became president of Harvard in 2001, he boasted an impressive resume: He had served as the Secretary of the US Treasury, chief economist at the World Bank, and the youngest-ever Harvard economics professor to achieve tenure.

He had published six books and well over 100 academic articles. None of his work had ever been accused of plagiarism.

Fast forward to 2022: Harvard appoints Claudine Gay to serve as its newest president.

At the time, Gay had published a career total of 11 academic articles. For context, Summers published more than that in the single year of 1987.

Gay had never published an academic book. As David Randall of @NASorg noted when she was appointed, "very few professors can even get tenure with so thin a publication record — absent the tailwind from [diversity] quotas."

But Gay was able to ascend to the most prestigious position at the most prestigious university in the world.

Now, thanks to the reporting of @realchrisrufo and @realChrisBrunet , we know that Gay's anemic academic output wasn't even all hers. She lifted entire paragraphs of her work from other authors, without proper attribution.

As we saw with Larry Summers, Harvard presidents have been ousted for far less. But in spite of all that, the Harvard board is unanimously standing by Gay — and the legacy media is circling the wagons.

This is business as usual for modern academia: Political favoritism, racial preferences, and corrupt self-dealing. It's a racket. And if the polls are any indication, Americans are finally beginning to realize as much.