Add the far-left New York Times to the list of corporate media outlets no longer willing to protect Harvard president and antisemite Claudine Gay.
About two weeks ago, Gay became an infamous national figure after testifying before Congress about the Jew hatred that has run rampant on left-wing campuses, including hers. Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-Awesome) asked Gay what should have been an easy lay-up: “Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate [your school’s] code of conduct?”
Rather than answering the obvious — Of course it does, Congresswoman! — she dissembled about “context,” which means that at Harvard, it is okay to call for the extermination of Jews within a certain context.
Yikes.
Gay wasn’t alone. Two other Ivy League chiefs — University of Pennsylvania’s Liz Magill and MIT’s Sally Kornbluth — also dissembled about context. Magill has since resigned in disgrace (though she remains on staff as a tenured professor). Kornbluth is still in place. Gay would also be safe today, but the controversy of her Eva Braun approach to antsemitism thrust her into the spotlight and the exposure brought with it a breathtaking pile of credible plagiarism allegations.
At first, as we all expect, the corporate media defended Gay from the allegations, especially after Harvard “cleared” her.
However, like most alleged plagiarists, it’s never just once or twice, or three times. Over the past ten days or so, it seemed like a handful of new allegations popped up every other day, including as many as 40(!) in a single case.
Well, we are now at that rare stage where the evidence is so damning the corporate media have no choice but to cover something negative about a fellow leftist, a sacred cow. Even CNNLOL, which normally excuses anything done by leftists (including the burning of cities), has been forced to take note. But it is Thursday’s story in the New York Times that will likely put an end to Harvard’s DEI experiment with the wholly unimpressive Claudine Gay.
The Times piece even admits “conservative media” uncovered and drove the story, especially “activist Christopher Rufo” and the Washington Free Beacon.
Then the Times lays the hammer down hard:
The controversy swirling around Dr. Gay raises questions about what it means for a premier American university when its scholarly leader — who at Harvard has final approval on all tenure decisions — has been accused of failing to adhere to scholarly standards. The allegations against her are landing in the middle of a charged political battle. But they have also prompted some to wonder whether Harvard is treating its leader with greater latitude than it would its students.
“Altogether, the allegations accuse Dr. Gay … of using material from other sources without proper attribution in her dissertation and about half of the 11 journal articles listed on her résumé,” admits the Times. “The examples range from brief snippets of technical definitions to paragraphs summing up other scholars’ research that are only lightly paraphrased[.]”
“[I]n some cases,” the report continues, those examples “lack any direct citation of the other scholars.”
The left-leaning Boston Globe editorial board was also scathing about Harvard’s initial statement on the plagiarism allegations, which it called “confusing.”
“If Gay didn’t violate any standards of research, why would she need to correct anything?” it asked.
We all know that a student found guilty of even one-tenth of this amount of plagiarism would find his scholarship career in shambles. Gay, however, enjoys all kinds of “plagiarism privilege” because she’s black, female, and a leftist, and Harvard would rather hold on to its disgrace than hand conservative media a scalp.
In a sane and moral world, Gay would have been fired after her obscene congressional testimony. But even if she is eventually fired, look at the dozens and dozens of sins she had to commit before the corporate media were forced to pay attention and the once-prestigious Harvard University had no choice but to pull the pin on her career.
The plagiarism bar for leftists is impossibly high. Proof of that is CNN serial plagiarist, Fareed Zakaria… The man still has his job.
As someone who writes a few thousand words almost every day, I’m sympathetic to how easy it is to make an honest mistake. Something as simple as forgetting to indent entire paragraphs pasted from another publication makes it look like you are claiming those paragraphs as your own. Because the plagiarism bar for guys like me is about ankle-high, it is a constant worry, and I’m sympathetic to those kinds of mistakes. This isn’t that.
What we do know is that…
Democrats sure got it good.
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