The Patriot Post® · AP Scalps the Truth About Gay and Harvard

Claudine Gay resigned as president of Harvard University on Tuesday, and yes, conservatives cheered that result after leading the charge to put pressure on the university. But conservatives are not the story … unless you’re the Associated Press.

The “news” organization posted this headline on X: “Harvard president’s resignation highlights new conservative weapon against colleges: plagiarism.” It accompanied a story explaining how that happened.

Gay allegedly plagiarized perhaps 50 instances in her academic work over the years, including in her doctoral dissertation. Conservative firebrand Christopher Rufo brought that to light on December 10, just a few days after Gay’s disgraceful congressional testimony in which she refused to say calling for the genocide of Jews violated Harvard’s code of conduct.

The Washington Free Beacon and others also found instances of plagiarism in Gay’s relatively small sampling of scholarly work.

Though Harvard’s board initially circled the wagons, the pressure was eventually too much.

Naturally, Rufo was proud that his work brought down Gay. Here’s how the AP covered that:

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.

After being fact-checked and mocked for that ridiculous smear and historical inaccuracy, the AP stealth-edited the sentence to add “and also used by some tribes against their enemies.”

That’s still grossly inaccurate, not to mention completely irrelevant.

Anyway, that wasn’t the AP’s worst offense. The entire point of the AP’s article is to lament that conservatives are “weaponizing” plagiarism to oust academics viewed as too woke.

“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 AP began. But because few academics (other than Dr. Carol Swain, whom the AP doesn’t mention) raised much in the way of objection to Gay’s plagiarism, it fell to conservatives to uphold academic standards. The AP finds that — not academia’s silence — problematically political.

To the AP, Gay’s resignation is actually terrible because of Rufo’s particular stated motive: “We must not stop until we have abolished DEI ideology from every institution in America.” As part of the effort to do that, he’s establishing a new “plagiarism hunting fund,” which is necessary to “expose the rot in the Ivy League and restore truth, rather than racialist ideology, as the highest principle in academic life.”

If the Left won’t steward its own institutions, the Right must do it.

As for Gay, her resignation letter didn’t say much of substance beyond insinuating that racial animus was the real driving factor forcing her out. She then followed up with a pompous New York Times op-ed (which she claims to have written herself) expanding on those claims.

“I’ve been called the N-word more times than I care to count,” she asserted without evidence. She also practically plagiarized the AP by using the word “weaponize.”

My hope is that by stepping down I will deny demagogues the opportunity to further weaponize my presidency in their campaign to undermine the ideals animating Harvard since its founding: excellence, openness, independence, truth.

She does eventually admit that she “made mistakes,” but even then she deflects blame to others. In Congress, you see, she “fell into a well-laid trap.” Yes, her academic work contained “some material duplicated other scholars’ language, without proper attribution,” but that too is really conservatives’ fault. “I have never misrepresented my research findings, nor have I ever claimed credit for the research of others,” she said, and when the errors were discovered, “I promptly requested corrections.” And, doggone it, her work was super important because it “strengthens our democracy.”

Moreover, “This was merely a single skirmish in a broader war to unravel public faith in pillars of American society.”

Claudine Gay is like a “Scooby Doo” villain in real life: I would’ve gotten away with it — and been respected while doing it — if it hadn’t been for you lousy kids.

But why wouldn’t she behave as a glorified martyr? She was a diversity hire whose scholarship is thin and improperly done, which made her feel entitled, as does her continued $900,000 salary post-resignation. And the entire Leftmedia and left-wing academia apparatus stands behind her — very powerful allies in her side’s battle to politicize everything and make her the “real” victim.

She won’t change. Nor will Harvard or the Leftmedia. Conservatives are the villains in their story, and no shortcoming, sin, or crime on their part will ever be their own responsibility. It never seems to dawn on leftists that they are the ones undermining trust in the institutions they control. Until it does, expect the insanity to continue.