It really didn’t take all that long for the Usual Suspects to slam former Harvard University President Claudine Gay’s resignation as the result of a vicious campaign by wicked Far-Right Extremists. Nikole Hannah-Jones, whose claim to fame is the creation of the 1619 Project on the history of slavery in the United States, tweeting about Dr Gay’s resignation:

Let’s be real. This is an extension of what happened to me at UNC, and it is a glimpse into the future to come. Academic freedom is under attack. Racial justice programs are under attack. Black women will be made to pay. Our so-called allies too often lack any real courage. They will be aided and abetted by mainstream media and “very reasonable people.”^[1]This was actually two tweets, which I have edited together as one, from here and here. This type of footnote is the kind of thing on which Dr Gay failed.

It’s interesting how Dr Hannah-Jones claims that the “mainstream media” are supposed to be ‘their’ allies, rather than impartial gatherers and reporters of facts.

Of course, a white woman was “made to pay” for almost exactly the same words Dr Gay used in her mindless testimony before Congress, weeks before Dr Gay resigned. And it’s difficult to feel too sorry for Dr Gay, as the New York Post has reported that she will remain on the faculty and be paid nearly $900,000 a year.

Some ‘academicians’ are appalled!

A Yale professor is slamming Bill Ackman’s campaign against Harvard, calling the billionaire investor an ‘odious’ oligarch

Kwan Wei Kevin Tan | Tuesday, January 2, 2024 | 9:47 PM EST

A Yale faculty member is engaging Bill Ackman in a public tiff on X, slamming the billionaire investor for his intense campaign against Harvard President Claudine Gay.

“Bill Ackman is a pernicious influence on American education. He thinks his money equals wisdom and even if it doesn’t, he thinks it gives him the right to bully at will,” Yale public health professor Gregg Gonsalves wrote on X on Tuesday.

“Time to stand up to people like him. He’s odious,” Gonsalves wrote.

Ackman responded to the post, which kicked off a lengthy exchange between himself and Gonsalves on X. During the back-and-forth, Gonsalves repeatedly accused Ackman of using his wealth and influence to push for Gay’s removal.

“What did I say about Harvard President Gay that has to do with money? President Gay resigned because she lost the confidence of the University at large due to her actions and inactions and other failures of leadership,” Ackman wrote.

Apparently the good public health professor doesn’t understand the Golden Rule: “He who has the gold makes the rules!” Of course, he could demand that universities no longer accept donations from billionaires, but I suspect that such wouldn’t go over all that well.

The Associated Press also weighed in:

Harvard president’s resignation highlights new conservative weapon against colleges: plagiarism

Story by Collin Binkley and Moriah Balingit, AP Education Writers • Wednesday, January 3, 2023

WASHINGTON (AP) — The downfall of Harvard’s president has elevated the threat of unearthing plagiarism, a cardinal sin in academia, as a possible new weapon in conservative attacks on higher education.

Claudine Gay’s resignation Tuesday followed weeks of mounting accusations that she lifted language from other scholars in her doctoral dissertation and journal articles. The allegations surfaced amid backlash over her congressional testimony about antisemitism on campus.

The plagiarism allegations came not from her academic peers but her political foes, led by conservatives who sought to oust Gay and put her career under intense scrutiny in hopes of finding a fatal flaw. 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.

No, conservatives sought to oust her due to her statement that calls for “death to Jews” might not always violate Harvard’s codes of conduct or rules, depending upon the context. It was the same thing that forced University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill to resign; Dr Magill is not black. How much influence Dr Gay’s ‘demographics’ weighed in her appointment as university president I do not know; I only know that, at the most critical juncture of her presidency, she failed.

Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist who helped orchestrate the effort, 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 here we see the prejudice of the Associated Press’ “Education Writers”. Scalping was practiced by the Indians before the “white colonists” arrived in America, but Collin Binkley and Moriah Balingit wrote it as though this was something the “white colonists” on their own.

Among her critics in conservative circles and academia, the findings are clear evidence that Gay, as the top academic at the pinnacle of U.S. higher education, is unfit to serve. Her defenders say it isn’t so clear-cut.

In highly specialized fields, scholars often use similar language to describe the same concepts, said Davarian Baldwin, a historian at Trinity College who writes about race and higher education. Gay clearly made mistakes, he said, but with the spread of software designed to detect plagiarism, it wouldn’t be hard to find similar overlap in works by other presidents and professors.

The tool becomes dangerous, he added, when it “falls into the hands of those who argue that academia in general is a cesspool of incompetence and bad actors.”

This is an interesting way to put it. Dr Baldwin is correct: there are only so many ways to state things, and even with my sometimes-convoluted way of expressing myself, there are doubtlessly other people out there who have written things using very similar or even the exact words I have used . . . and vice versa. But, he further argues that “software designed to detect plagiarism” becomes a ‘dangerous tool’ when it “falls into the hands of those who argue that academia in general is a cesspool of incompetence and bad actors,” or, more precisely, into the hands of people he does not like. Does Dr Baldwin somehow believe that academicians should not be held accountable for their work?

Now comes Robert Stacy McCain, a former professional journalist who understands very well the concepts of copyright and plagiarism:

Pouncing? Yes, But Also Seizing: GOP Gets Credit for Resignation of Harvard University’s Plagiarist President

by Robert Stacy McCain | Wednesday, January 3, 2024

Speaking on behalf of the “far right,” I must express our collective gratitude to the media for recognizing our work. Strange as it might seem, some journalists apparently believe it’s a bad thing to force the president of Harvard University to resign amid a plagiarism scandal, which followed close on the heels of Claudine Gay’s failure to condemn anti-Semitism. It was not anything that Gay did wrong, they tell us, but rather “a conservative-stoked firestorm” that brought her down:

Gay served a total of just six months as university president, the shortest tenure in the school’s nearly four-century-long history. She was the first Black person and just the second woman to lead Harvard. . . .

Gay received national scrutiny in December when she, MIT president Sally Kornbluth, and University of Pennsylvania president Elizabeth Magill testified before the House Education and Workforce Committee about their responses to incidents of antisemitism on their campuses.

Committee Chair Elise Stefanik asked the university presidents whether students chanting “intifada” violated the schools’ codes of conduct. Each president said it would depend on the context, with Gay pointing out that chants she finds “personally abhorrent” could still be protected under freedom of speech.

But the video clip that went viral — thanks to the right — showed the university presidents stumbling after Stefanik asked whether calls for genocide against the Jewish people should be forbidden, leaving out the longer disingenuous line of questioning.

See? It was a “disingenuous line of questioning” that provoked the Harvard president to defend the right of students to call for the genocide of Jews, and “thanks to the right,” the video went viral.

Note that Mr McCain cited his source, which happens to be The New Republic, via hyperlink, as I cited my source, his work, the same way.

You’re welcome, America. To quote Treacher’s Law: “When a Republican screws up, that’s the story. When a Democrat screws up, the Republicans’ reaction is the story.” When the media tries to make the story about Republicans “seizing” and “pouncing” on a controversy, you know it’s about maintaining a narrative in which the GOP is always the villain, no matter how egregious the Democrat behavior in question may be. Hunter Biden makes millions of dollars peddling his father’s influence to shady foreigners, but if you watch CNN, the story is about how those mean Republicans are taking advantage of Hunter’s “struggles” with addiction.

A point that Mr McCain did not make: the subtitle of the New Republic article is, “Harvard University President Claudine Gay has resigned, thanks to a controversy manufactured by the right and elevated by the media.” Manufactured by the right, readers are told, as though we evil reich-wing extremists somehow gathered all copies of Dr Gay’s work and changed things, rather than having done research and made discoveries, in a manner not terribly dissimilar to the way the left and what Mr McCain frequently calls “Democrats with bylines” do when it comes to parsing every word which proceeds from the mouths of Republicans. The left are simply aghast when conservatives use the same weapons liberals use.

The New Republic’s Tori Otten wrote:

Media coverage of Gay’s alleged plagiarism reached a height not typically seen for academia. As Paul Waldman wrote for The New Republic in December, “There’s no question that the accusations against Gay are being offered in utter bad faith, and the charges are inseparable from the political context in which they’re being made.”

He argued that the examples of Gay’s supposed plagiarism “amount to academic misdemeanors—real, but evidence of occasional sloppiness rather than malicious theft.”

“But you can’t separate this controversy from its context, which is that nobody proclaiming their outrage actually cares about the proper application of academic citation protocols any more than your average Republican members of Congress sincerely worry about antisemitism as something other than a bludgeon they can use against those they perceive as their enemies,” Waldman wrote.

As is common among the left, Miss Otten accuses conservatives of that of which she is guilty: utter bad faith. She admitted that the charges against Dr Gay are valid, but pooh-poohs them, using someone else’s words, as “occasional sloppiness rather than malicious theft,” while then claiming that Republican members don’t really care about anti-Semitism unless they can somehow use it as a weapon against others. Yet it is the #woke^[2]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading left who are out there, rallying in support of Hamas and the Palestinians, and advocating that Israel pre-emptively quit the war against Hamas before Hamas are completely defeated. It is today’s left who have women prominently featured in demonstrations in support of Hamas, who deliberately used rape as a terror tactic, chanting “Shame on you!” at the people who defend against the rapists!

While I reported that The Philadelphia Inquirer tried to defend the now-resigned University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill, if there was as much national news angst that Dr Magill lost her job as there has been for Dr Gay’s resignation, I have missed it. Why, it’s almost as though the left have been more diligent in their defense of Dr Gay than they were concerning Dr Magill because Dr Gay is black, but, then again, perhaps I’m projecting here. Then again, there have been no allegations of plagiarism against Dr Magill.

Well, we Right-Wing Extremists — and yes, I copied that logo at the beginning of this article from William Teach’s The Pirate’s Cove; please consider this as my source citation — are going to use the weapons that the left have used against us, and we will enjoy seeing the apoplexy that such will raise in them!
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Related Articles:

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• Toni Williams on The Victory Girls: Harvard’s Claudine Gay Out As President – Win For Sanity
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• Jennifer Kabbany on The College Fix: Harvard Corporation members should resign in wake of Gay fiasco, watchdogs say
• David Mastio on The College Fix: Plagued by plagiarism scandal, Harvard’s political donations flood to Democrats