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[SPECIAL JANUARY PROMOTION: Spend $50+ In The FPM Store And Receive A Free Copy Of “Final Battle” By David Horowitz.]
Harvard may assume the forced resignation of its president, Claudine Gay, has finally ended its month-long scandal over her tenure.
Gay stepped down, remember, amid serious allegations of serial plagiarism—without refuting the charges. She proved either unable or unwilling to discipline those on her campus who were defiantly anti-Semitic in speech and action.
But Gay’s removal is not the end of Harvard’s dilemma. Rather, it is the beginning.
In the respective press releases from both Gay and the Harvard Corporation, racial animus was cited as a reason for her removal.
Gay did not even refer to her failure to stop anti-Semitism on her campus or her own record of blatant plagiarism.
Yet playing the race card reflects poorly on both and for a variety of reasons.
One, Gay’s meager publication record—a mere eleven articles without a single published book of her own—had somehow earned her a prior Harvard full professorship and presidency. Such a thin resume leading to academic stardom is unprecedented.
Two, the University of Pennsylvania forced the resignation of its president, Liz Magill. She sat next to Gay during that now-infamous congressional hearing in which they both claimed they were unable to discipline blatant anti-Semitism on their campuses.
Instead, both plead “free speech” and “context” considerations.
Such excuses were blatantly amoral and untrue. In truth, ivy-league campuses routinely sanction, punish, or remove staff, faculty, or students deemed culpable for speech or behavior deemed hurtful to protected minorities—except apparently white males and Jews.
Yet Magill was immediately forced to resign, and Gay was not. Also noteworthy was Magill’s far more impressive and extensive administrative experience, along with a more prestigious scholarship that was free of even a suggestion of plagiarism.
Academia’s immediate firing of a white woman while trying desperately to save the career of a less qualified and ethically challenged black woman will be seen not as a case of racial bias but more likely of racial preference.
Indeed, to keep Gay’s job and to defend her from plagiarism charges, both Harvard and Gay herself were willing to say things that were simply absurd, if not patently untrue.
Harvard invented a new phrase “duplicative language” to euphemize the reality of Gay’s intellectual theft.
Even after Gay resigned, Harvard jumped the shark by further downplaying her plagiarism by dubbing it as mere “missteps.”
Harvard and its supporters further embarrassed themselves by alleging that if the victims of Gay’s plagiarism didn’t object, then why did her expropriation matter that much?
Are we then to assume that plagiarism is not a serious violation of the entire ethos of scholarship, quite in addition to the aggrieved plagiarized party?
The university descended even further by suggesting that if the complaints were lodged by anonymous scholars, they were somehow less serious.
Has Harvard ever heard of the reasons why whistleblowers are often protected from retribution by grants of anonymity?
Liberal Harvard, through its lawyers, even threatened the New York Post with legal action if it aired charges of Gay’s plagiarism.
Yet only days later, the university was swamped by further proof of Gay’s scholarly misconduct, involving improper use of data and more plagiarism extending back even to her dissertation.
Harvard, remember, claimed that it had conducted a thorough investigation that had cleared her of actionable plagiarism—even as more charges arose of her prior culpability.
But more importantly, what happens to ex-president Gay now?
Does resigning from the Harvard presidency and returning to a full professorship mean that charges of plagiarism disappear?
Would any other Harvard professors continue to be employed without addressing over two dozen separate charges of plagiarism lodged against them?
Do Gay, the Harvard Corporation, and the more than 700 Harvard professors who closed ranks and wrote a letter supporting Gay now argue that plagiarism is no longer a serious offense at the nation’s supposedly most preeminent university?
Will students who emulate Gay’s habit of copy-and-paste, failure-to-footnote, and misuse-of-data now be exempt from dismissal or suspension?
After Gay’s embarrassing December 5 congressional testimony and her resignation, what now is the Harvard policy toward anti-Semitism?
If next week, anti-Israel students once again call for the destruction of the Jewish people in Israel all the way “from the river to the sea,” or if they again storm Harvard’s Widener library, screaming support for the October 7 massacre and intimidating Jewish students, what will the new—or old—Harvard do?
Again nothing?
Finally, Harvard insinuated that Gay was fired by racist outside pressure—despite the fact that many of her critics were large donors furious about the diminution of the reputation of their alma mater.
Is Harvard suggesting that its own mega-donors are racists?
What then might come next?
The resignation of the entire board of the Harvard Corporation that is the ultimate cause of Harvard’s descent into mediocrity.
Before becoming Harvard president, Gay was a dean. As such she lowered the standards of discipline for plagiarism for faculty, but not students.
I hope they get scoured over this whole incident. Mr. Howells old Alma Matter goes down the Drain
When White men are totally removed from positions of power in America.
America will no longer exist as a World power.
The rest of the world will have trouble figuring out how to turn on the lights.
Just remember all of the Worlds wonderful technology came from the hated White Man.
Harvard and its Gay woes are emblematic of the plague that has taken over the country, and it doesn’t look like it is going away. Gay is sticking around, that’s already a given. Having succumbed to mediocrity Harvard will remain as the pre=eminently mediocre Ivy League school.
Exactly so.
A college that so highly values mediocrity, will not be respected for scholarship and good results.
Harvard is a full Islamist institution at this point. Judeo Christian values have been fully rejected. This means rejecting the pursuit of truth, beauty, and the good for power and submission. These are the values of Hamas. This is the blood lust of neomodernists. Harvard values are Hamas values to the core.
Celebrating driving nails into girls thighs does not offend, but anything that smacks of Christian common sense is verboten.
That is where the culture is at now, celebrating events of demonic evil as the highest good.
America is a complex nation that has a system that makes the totalitarian tendencies of Islamists and their acolytes cumbersome. Violence is likely inevitable at this point.
The article fails to sufficiently underscore that Gay’s “resignation” was not because of her disgraceful support for antisemitism, emerged during the hearing, where she basically said that harrassement of Jews is ok depending on the context, but because of “plagiarism”, a clear pretext. That means that Harvard itself is ok with Gay’s position. Insisting on the plagiarism argument is following a strawman.
Moreover, the article apparently plays down the gravity of what Gay and her corrupt colleagues said on that day, when it states that the problem was that they “claimed they were unable to discipline blatant anti-Semitism on their campuses.” They weren’t unable, they were unwilling, which is a totally different story.
What comes next Mr. VDH? A further repudiation of meritocracy.
Further decline, the end of this civilization.
They believe fully believe prioritizing mediocracy is beneficial, not knowing they prioritize our own destruction. Full of self-satisfaction and over-confident, they lack humility and have no inkling of what they do NOT know. It’s a historic pattern, civilizations rise and fall, over and over again.
Harvard still has Gay on staff at $900.000/year so she didn’t lose anything except her pride and maybe bruise her narcissism. She should have been fired and allowed to see just what her Political Science PHD is worth in the real world.
BTW I’m really getting tired of seeing and hearing about her.
I’m also reminded of a quote:
‘Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach’ from George Bernard Shaw’s 1905 Play.
“And those who can’t teach, teach phys ed.”
Plagiarism, a badge of honor for the uniparty.
You are forgetting that nothing Harvard or Gay say is what normal people consider the truth – an accurate recounting of fact and reality. They just use a different definition, one that we have heard before. To them, truth is that which serves the revolution. Since the Left has decided that it will smash our society on the anvil of race, the revolution is served by claiming that her resignation was the result of racism rather than the truth, which is that she wouldn’t have had her academic history if she was white and would have been fired as soon as her plagiarism was discovered. But that does serve the revolution.
No, the entire Harvard board or any part of it will not resign. They will reinstate Gay instead. They were happy with her destruction of Harvard’s reputation and they like defrauding their students of the good reputation of their school. They want to see Harvard and the USA collapse, so they’ll take any opportunity to destroy anything good, the slimy little demons.