ROGER KIMBALL: When will Harvard give Claudine Gay the boot?

First, there were the allegations of plagiarism. The charges began in a halting, tentative fashion. Harvard tried to circle its wagons, too, insisting that it was merely a matter of “duplicative language” (I hope they give the genius who dreamed up that euphemism a PhD). But the jackals were on the case now, and it was soon revealed that, paltry though Gay’s publication history was, it was shot through with gobbets of unacknowledged borrowings.

Then came Christopher Brunet and Francis Menton, who showed that Gay was not simply guilty of plagiarism, but of data falsification to boot. There are wheels with wheels to this story, perhaps the choicest being Harvard’s heavy-handed attempt to silence the New York Post, which had begun investigating the charges of plagiarism back in October. “Then it emerged,” Menton explains, “that… the Post had sent [the allegations] to Harvard for confirmation — only to get in return a threatening letter from the Clare Locke law firm (the same firm that had recovered over $700 million from Fox in the Dominion Voting case) asserting that the accusations of plagiarism were ‘demonstrably false.’”  That was right before the Washington Free Beacon) another cache of “duplicative language” — some forty instances, “almost four,” Menton notes, “for each of Ms. Gay’s eleven academic articles.”

Many of my friends are demanding that Claudine Gay be given the push. Probably, she will eventually have to go. The billionaire Harvard donor — make that “former Harvard donor” — Bill Ackman recently tweeted that he had heard that the Harvard Corporation had asked for Gay’s resignation but “she has refused.” Delicious if true. My own feeling is that the longer Gay stays at Harvard, the more she calls attention to the Hindenburg-like flatulence of that morally and intellectually bankrupt institution. Claudine Gay is bad for Harvard, but Harvard is bad for the country, so her continued presence is a net positive.

So is Harvard simply crossing its legal t’s and dotting its contractual i’s before showing Gay to the exit door, or will she survive? Regarding the latter possibility: The DEI cosa nostra: Why Claudine Gay will survive Harvard’s antisemitism scandal.