HAMMER HITS NAIL ON HEAD: The Real Scandal of Claudine Gay Affair.

Bates College Professor Tyler Austin Harper hit the nail on the head in his essay on the Claudine Gay affair in The Atlantic.

Harper states what should have been obvious to the meanest intelligence: the biggest and most revealing part of the scandal is the lengths to which Gay’s defenders chose to go in order to defend a person manifestly guilty of the charges of which she had been accused. And her defenders did so not because of any particular allegiance to Gay, but because her accusors were conservatives whom the defenders despised.

The true scandal of the Claudine Gay affair is not a Harvard president and her plagiarism. The true scandal is that so many journalists and academics were willing, are still willing, to redefine plagiarism to suit their politics. Gay’s boosters have consistently resorted to Orwellian doublespeak—“duplicative language” and academic “sloppiness” and “technical attribution issues”—in a desperate effort to insist that lifting entire paragraphs of another scholar’s work, nearly word for word, without quotation or citation, isn’t plagiarism. Or that if it is plagiarism, it’s merely a technicality. Or that we all do it. (Soon after Rufo and Brunet made their initial accusations last month, Gay issued a statement saying, “I stand by the integrity of my scholarship.” She did not address those or subsequent plagiarism allegations in her resignation letter.)

Rufo won this round of the academic culture war because he exposed so many progressive scholars and journalists to be hypocrites and political actors who were willing to throw their ideals overboard. I suspect that, not the tenure of a Harvard president, was the prize he sought all along. The tragedy is that we didn’t have to give it to him.

Harper is not a conservative nor a fan of Rufo, but he recognizes that all these media and academic defenders of Gay essentially proved Rufo’s key point: academia and the media are politicized and corrupt.

Or as Rufo tweeted on Tuesday:

To all of my critics who snidely dismissed me as a "bad-faith actor" and a "cartoon villain": I was right. You were wrong. Gay is gone.

The world of politics cannot be divided neatly between "good actors" and "bad actors." Reality is not a Marvel movie; politics is not a child's…

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) January 2, 2024

“Bad-faith” in this meaning, not sharing our ideology and cocktail party invitations. When Kevin Williamson was hired and then nearly-immediately fired in 2018 by the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg after his crybully staffers melted down, Williamson reminded Goldberg that the Atlantic had always welcomed controversial authors, and specifically mentioned the late polemicist Christopher Hitchens. To which Goldberg replied, Godfather-style, “Yes. But Hitchens was in the family. You are not.”

Rufo, et al, aren’t in the family, and therefore the DNC-MSM have been doing everything they can to salvage what remains of Gay’s reputation, instead of (okay, don’t laugh) objectively reporting news about her.

Related: From VDH: Harvard — Out the Frying Pan Into the Fire.

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 antisemitism?

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.

As Jim Geraghty wrote on Wednesday, “An institution as powerful as Harvard can withstand a certain amount of embarrassing hypocrisy, but not that much. With each day that she remained, Gay further damaged the ‘brand’ of an institution that not only takes great pride in its prestige — some would say insufferable pride in its prestige — but needs to convince families that nearly $80,000 per year in tuition, housing, and food is worthwhile.”

“*Up until about a week ago, everybody called it Harvard University, but if Harvard is going to call itself a corporation despite its tax-exempt status, perhaps the rest of us ought to do the same,” Geraghty adds.