In case you thought that there was some sort of victory afoot at Harvard University for conservatives/meritocrats/sane humans, let me disabuse you of that notion and warn you that the fight on that front has only just begun.
With the resignation of Claudine Gay as that university’s president in the wake of the major plagiarism scandal that brewed up after she failed to offer the faintest opprobrium of the genocidal pro-Hamas agitators plying their trade on her campus in a congressional hearing, what you should have now is a national discussion of what exactly constitutes scholarship at our overpriced, over-politicized, overdiversified, and overfed institutions of higher learning. And, also, what can be done to restore some semblance of quality and honesty to our corrupted educational centers now that we know that even the supposed crème de la crème is utterly degenerate and covered with the stench of academic fraud and DEI.
But it’s rapidly becoming clear that’s not the direction this conversation is going in. For example, there was this breathtaking joke of a “news article” run by the Associated Press in the wake of Gay’s resignation:
American higher education has long viewed plagiarism as a cardinal sin. Accusations of academic dishonesty have ruined the careers of faculty and undergraduates alike.
The latest target is Harvard President Claudine Gay, who resigned Tuesday. In her case, the outrage came not from her academic peers but her political foes, led by conservatives who put her career under intense scrutiny.
Reviews by Harvard found multiple shortcomings in Gay’s academic citations, including several instances of “ duplicative language.” The university concluded the errors “were not considered intentional or reckless” and didn’t rise to misconduct. But the allegations continued, with new ones as recently as Monday.
Gay wasn’t a “target.” She was a plagiarizer who was caught out when people were interested in scrutinizing her after she refused to say that genocidal anti-Semitism is beneath the Harvard standard of public conduct. It’s not as though it were difficult to uncover the dozens of incidents when she stole someone else’s work and called it her own; plagiarism soils practically every scholarly work she’s ever put her name to.
And then, this:
Conservatives zeroed in on Gay amid backlash over her congressional testimony about antisemitism on campus. Her detractors charged that Gay — who has a Ph.D. in government, was a professor at Harvard and Stanford and headed Harvard’s largest division before being promoted — got the top job in large part because she is a Black woman.
Well, of course, that’s how she got the job. Does anybody think a white dude who committed more than 40 incidents of plagiarism as he built a curriculum vitae could have possibly made it to the presidency of Harvard?
And if you do think that, then why do we even care about Harvard at all, since it’s obviously on the academic level of a dumpy community college where even the top brass is a collection of frauds who get where they are based on their position on the intersectional totem pole, or whatever other identity-politics faux-criteria are in fashion? (READ MORE: Here’s the Perfect Solution, Harvard)
But wait, we’re not done:
Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist who helped orchestrate the effort against Gay, celebrated her departure as a win in his campaign against elite institutions of higher education. On X, formerly Twitter, he wrote “SCALPED,” as if Gay was a trophy of violence, invoking a gruesome practice taken up by white colonists who sought to eradicate Native Americans and also used by some tribes against their enemies.
Ahhh, yes. Conservatives pounce, says the AP, in yet another exposition of the new narrative that holding certain favored groups and individuals accountable for misconduct is somehow a partisan affair rather than speaking truth to power, which we were told was heroic and virtuous.
And then there’s the gratuitous idiocy of “white guys inventing scalping and poor Native Americans paying the price,” which couldn’t sum up the asinine beliefs elites in this country hold any better.
The two so-called journalists responsible for this partial-birth abortion of a news story are Collin Binkley and Moriah Balingit. They’re a pair of typical establishment hacks, with Binkley one who works the “education” beat for the Associated Press — which is to say they’re propagandists who spew out the party line of the hard Left hegemons in control of those corrupted institutions.
So it’s not surprising that a piece about Gay’s forced resignation amid revelations that she’s an utter and complete fraud, an empress with no clothes who rose as she did through the opposite of the meritocracy that this country was founded on and desperately wishes to return to, turns into an attack on Christopher Rufo.
But that’s what you’re going to get.
Here’s another one of our favorite DEI darlings, the ridiculous Ibram X. Kendi — who spews anti-white racism and literal Jim Crow segregationist cant from a reverse perspective and is nonetheless lauded rather than hooted down for the sheer stupidity of his arguments — on the martyrdom of Claudine Gay:
That’s how anti-Black racist attacks have been justified. The seemingly legitimate reason, in this latest case at Harvard, is primarily academic misconduct or plagiarism. The question to assess whether this was a racist attack isn’t whether Dr. Gay engaged in any misconduct. 2/4
— Ibram X. Kendi (@ibramxk) January 2, 2024
It isn’t hard to figure out why the racist mob is cheering right now and saying “go woke go broke” and President Gay wasn’t qualified and the “tide is turning against woke and DEI” and “this is the beginning of the end of woke.” 4/4
— Ibram X. Kendi (@ibramxk) January 2, 2024
Got that? If you aren’t willing to excuse Claudine Gay for her serial sins of academic fraud, then you’re a racist, because honkies have been getting away with the same thing again and again.
Honkies …. getting away with it …. hmmmm:
Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne will resign effective Aug. 31 [2023], according to communications released by the University Wednesday morning. He will also retract or issue lengthy corrections to five widely cited papers for which he was principal author after a Stanford-sponsored investigation found “manipulation of research data.”
According to Jerry Yang, chair of the Stanford Board of Trustees, Tessier-Lavigne will step down “in light of the report and its impact on his ability to lead Stanford.” Former Dean of Humanities Richard Saller will serve as interim president. In a separate statement, Tessier-Lavigne defended his reputation but acknowledged that issues with his research, first raised in a [Stanford] Daily investigation last autumn, meant that Stanford requires a president “whose leadership is not hampered by such discussions.”
“At various times when concerns with Dr. Tessier-Lavigne’s papers emerged—in 2001, the early 2010s, 2015-2016, and March 2021—Dr. Tessier-Lavigne failed to decisively and forthrightly correct mistakes in the scientific record,” Stanford’s report said, identifying a number of apparent manipulations in Tessier-Lavigne’s neuroscientific research.
You almost certainly never heard of Marc Tessier-Lavigne, he/him, a person of pallor packed off to career purgatory, because nobody was upset over a privileged cracker with a funny, froggy, hyphenated name getting what was coming to him.
And maybe, given that Ibram X. Kendi, as a maven of DEI culture, can’t be expected to actually know a damn thing about that on which he rants, it’s not a surprise that Kendi overlooked Tessier-Lavigne’s denouement at Stanford.
There’s something bigger going on here, which we’ll get to in just a second. But please understand that Claudine Gay isn’t being persecuted, burned at the stake, or even denied entry to Harvard’s Faculty Club.
Disgraced Harvard President Claudine Gay, who resigned on Tuesday following antisemitism scandals, disastrous congressional testimony, and scores of plagiarism allegations, will stay on the Ivy League university’s faculty as a professor with a salary of at least $900,000.
The outgoing Harvard president, who was previously a political science professor and later a dean, will stay at the university, where she [will] be given a faculty position.
Gay will likely be making nearly $900,000 a year at the Ivy League institution, despite being forced to resign from the school’s presidency after scores of plagiarism allegations against her were filed in official academic complaints at Harvard, according to multiple reports.
That’s not bad comp for a martyr, frankly. Lots of us might line up to suffer so much at the hands of right-wing “scalpers” like Rufo.
What matters here isn’t that Harvard’s prestige lies in ruins. We ought to be long past giving a hoot about that puffed-up whitened sepulcher of a college, much less clamoring to hire the indoctrinated marks it spews out. What’s more important is what it tells us about that hard Left elite who have such a stranglehold on so many of our institutions.
I noted this in a political context in yesterday’s column, which is that these people — whether they’re Obama Democrats, DEI kakistocrats in academia, Hollywood radicals, “shareholder capitalists,” or any other of the countless manifestations of the Marxist anti-American Coptotermes formosanus infesting our culture, politics, and economics — do not quit. (READ THE PIECE: Beware the Wounded Animal in 2024)
They don’t accept the loss of their power or influence. They certainly don’t accept accountability for even the grandest of their failings.
Instead, they escalate.
That AP story, Kendi’s rantings, and all of the countless other leftist rants defending Gay from the “racists” who would have her career in the dumpster over her manifest lack of merit are an escalation. They’re now a demand for free license for people in protected classes to engage in academic fraud.
They’re telling you that the institutions they control are no longer subject to scrutiny for the quality of their personnel or product. That those institutions may be completely politicized and made utterly devoid of value with no consequences to their saboteurs — because, at the end of that process, 2 plus 2 will equal 5, or whatever other number they choose.
Reject this and they will demand your cancellation. As a “racist,” a “homophobe,” or some other horrible thing.
If you consider where this path leads, you’ll soon realize what an utter house of cards this all is, and how the game begins to change when you have the courage to laugh in an Ibram X. Kendi’s face when he calls you names.
And that will be a good day. But it won’t be the last, because they do not quit. And neither must you.
READ MORE from Scott McKay:
Five Quick Things: Blue Cities Drown in Joe Biden’s Flood
Barack’s Lieutenant: The Racism, Revenge, and Ruin of Claudine Gay
