The Poisoned Ivy: MAUREEN CALLAHAN eviscerates Harvard for shamelessly lying about Claudine Gay’s academic theft
By Maureen Callahan For DailyMail.Com[1]
Published: 17:47, 23 December 2023 | Updated: 17:48, 23 December 2023
Talk about intellectual dishonesty.
For two weeks now, Harvard and its leftist media cheerleaders have been defending university president Claudine Gay against charges of plagiarism — at least 40 instances at this count.
Now there’s reporting[2] that the university board, known as Harvard Corporation, found Gay innocent of plagiarism before ever opening an investigation.
And back in October — long before Gay’s damning testimony before Congress[3], refusing to condemn antisemitism and insisting that calls for the genocide of Jews needed to be evaluated by ‘context’ — Harvard threatened the New York Post with an ‘immense’ defamation lawsuit if it published the plagiarism allegations.
As the saying goes, the fish rots from the head.
The entire board has been engaged in a cover-up regarding Gay for months. They tried to bully and suppress newsgathering. They lied when they told the Post that ‘these allegations of plagiarism are demonstrably false’ — demonstrably how?
They hadn’t even begun looking into Gay’s thin academic record.
Now even Harvard ‘s admits that her sticky-fingered scholarship contains ‘duplicative language without appropriate attribution.’
Ah, the maddeningly decorous language of the elite. Let’s just call it what it is: plagiarism!
It’s not just Gay who needs to be fired. The entire board is compromised.
Since this scandal broke, Gay has lost the university £1 billion in endowments.
Every day, it seems, brings a new layer of scandal — but Harvard Corporation, at the top of their website, says that ‘In this tumultuous and difficult time, we unanimously stand in support of President Gay’.
Now there’s reporting that the university board, known as Harvard Corporation, found Gay (above) innocent of plagiarism before ever opening an investigation.
The entire board has been engaged in a cover-up regarding Gay for months.
They tried to bully and suppress newsgathering. (Above) Billionaire Penny Pritzker led the search for Harvard’s president and selected Gay
Imagine if this were a straight white male refusing to condemn antisemitism, then found to be the beneficiary of an institutional cover-up regarding his own serial plagiarism. He’d have been cut loose weeks ago.
But Claudine Gay is held to a different standard, and it’s one that should bring her shame. For that standard is low, and it sends a terrible message to every student, scholar, professor and American: The meritocracy is dead.
If you check the right boxes — those under the diversity, equity and inclusion umbrella — then Harvard doesn’t care if you’re qualified, or smart or skilled enough, or if you express bigoted views or have cheated your way up the greasy pole of academia.
As the Jewish Insider reported, billionaire Penny Pritzker bought her way onto the board with a £100 million donation, then ‘personally led’ the search for a new president.
Despite Gay having only 11 papers to her name — almost half of those, we now know, in some way plagiarized — and no published books, despite 23 years in academia, she was anointed.
Does Pritzker feel embarrassed? Probably not, if we’re to go by her former boss and Harvard alum Barack Obama, who has reportedly been quietly lobbying for Gay.
This entire thing is a farce. It makes a mockery of higher education.
And Harvard’s would-be students know it: The Post reports that applications for early admission have recently plunged by 17 percent.
Here’s billionaire hedge fund manager and Harvard alum Bill Ackman on X Thursday: ‘We are well past the point where Claudine Gay is the only one to blame for the mess that is Harvard. . . .
The reputations of the eleven individuals who comprise the board are in the process of being destroyed’.
They have only themselves to blame. If the board needs it said plainly: They are sullying their own dignity, and that of one of the world’s top universities, in defending a liar who will not do the only honorable thing and resign.
Instead she holds her head up high! What a disgrace.
It is not racist to fire Claudine Gay.
But it is unacceptable to keep her.
To go by her predecessor’s salary, Gay is pulling in £1.3 million a year. One would think such compensation would be commensurate with academic scholarship and integrity.
Does Pritzker feel embarrassed? Probably not, if we’re to go by her former boss and Harvard alum Barack Obama, who has reportedly been quietly lobbying for Gay. (Above) President Obama nominates Penny Pritzker for Commerce Secretary on May 2, 2013
Here’s billionaire hedge fund manager and Harvard alum Bill Ackman (above) on X Thursday: ‘We are well past the point where Claudine Gay is the only one to blame for the mess that is Harvard. . . . The reputations of the eleven individuals who comprise the board are in the process of being destroyed’.
One would think any Harvard student spending nearly £60,000 in yearly tuition would demand the same. That is not a big ask.
One would hope that any of the 27 students expelled from Harvard last year for plagiarism are consulting with attorneys.
Gay isn’t just guilty of lifting some passages here and there.
She seems fully incapable of original thought, despite those defenders who say sure, it’s okay that she claimed the work of others as her own and flipped some syntax.
She copied the personal acknowledgments of another scholar.
Here is author Jennifer L. Hoschschild, in a book published in 1996, thanking someone who ‘showed me the importance of getting the data right and of following where they lead without fear or favor’ and ‘drove me much harder than I sometimes wanted to be driven’.
Now let’s turn to Gay, in her dissertation, thanking an adviser who ‘reminded me of the importance of getting the data right and following where they lead without fear or favor’, and her family who ‘drove me harder than I sometimes wanted to be driven’.
How lazy. How insincere.
How brazen.
Gay’s apologists on the left are framing this as a partisan battle, that only those on the right want Gay gone, and the subtext here is unmissable: Ergo, everyone on the right is a racist.
But is it not racist to hold different groups to different standards? Is it not racist to tell black students and faculty that less is expected of them, because no one would ever expect them to measure up to a universal academic standard?
Is it not racist for Harvard to selectively enforce the punishment of plagiarism?
Yet Gay remains unbowed.
‘I stand by the integrity of my scholarship’, she said in a recent statement.
Gay isn’t just guilty of lifting some passages here and there. She seems fully incapable of original thought.
Is she for real?
‘Throughout my career’, ‘ Gay continued, ‘I have worked to ensure my scholarship adheres to the highest academic standards’.
Well, when you copy from the best . . .
Claudine Gay is either in serious denial or she is a chronic liar. For what is plagiarism if not a lie?
Worse than that — it’s theft.
She has stolen the intellectual property of others for decades and claimed it as her own. Just as you can’t sample a song without paying for it, you cannot reprint the work of other writers and scholars and claim it as your own.
This is a very simple concept. You don’t need an Ivy League education to grasp that.
How long will Harvard back this front-facing fraud?
Even members of Gay’s own cohort, our leading black intellectuals, are calling for her termination.
The black scholar Carol M. Swain, writing in the Wall Street Journal, says that Gay stole from her, that the damage wrought is extensive, and that there is no excuse.
‘Fire Claudine Gay posthaste’, Swain wrote on X. ‘Hire the best man or woman who can steer the university back towards sanity’.
Claudine Gay is either in serious denial or she is a chronic liar. For what is plagiarism if not a lie? (Above) A panel truck with an electronic billboard display calling for Gay to be fired was parked outside of the Harvard Campus
The black scholar Carol M. Swain (above), writing in the Wall Street Journal, says that Gay stole from her, that the damage wrought is extensive, and that there is no excuse.
No less an authority than John McWhorter, an author and associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University, has also said that Gay must go.
If anyone’s an authority on words, it’s McWhorter.
‘That Dr. Gay is Black gives this an especially bad look’, McWhorter wrote in a New York Times op-ed. ‘If she stays in her job, the optics will be that a middling publication record and chronically lackadaisical attention to crediting sources is somehow OK for a university president if she is Black’.
Indeed.
Claudine Gay is an intellectual thief who, worse than that, refused to condemn antisemitism on her own campus.
Harvard, with its £50 billion endowment, can sustain the continued loss of billionaire donors.
But the longer they prop Gay up — the longer they send the message that antisemitism is acceptable, that plagiarism will be judged by DEI standards, and that less is expected from anyone who happens to be black — the greater their reputational disgrace.
Fire her.
Then clean house at Harvard Corp.
References
- ^ Maureen Callahan For DailyMail.Com (www.dailymail.co.uk)
- ^ there’s reporting (www.dailymail.co.uk)
- ^ Congress (www.dailymail.co.uk)
- ^ US Congress (www.dailymail.co.uk)