Harvard University President Claudine Gay is a plagiarist. Her “1997 dissertation contains three clear-cut examples of plagiarism defined by Harvard’s own policy,” reports Campus Reform. Scholars and journalists “are calling out the university for allegedly hiring her because of identity politics” rather than merit. The revelations of Gay’s plagiarism came “to light days after Gay made national headlines for testifying before Congress that the acceptability of ‘calling for the genocide of Jews’ at Harvard ‘depends on context.’”
A report by two journalists “reveals that Gay’s 1997 dissertation, ‘Taking Charge: Black Electoral Success and the Redefinition of American Policies,’ contains three examples of clear-cut plagiarism.” That includes a “paragraph that is lifted ‘nearly verbatim’ from a paper titled ‘Race, Sociopolitical Participation, and Black Empowerment’ by Lawrence Bobo and Franklin Gilliam.”
And “Gay appears to lift material from scholar Carol Swain in at least two instances.” Moreover, she includes “an entire appendix in the dissertation directly taken from Gary King’s book, A Solution to the Ecological Inference Problem.”
Gay seems to have escaped scrutiny because of her obsession with diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), which made her untouchable at Harvard. Another journalist says that Claudine Gay “was a DEI hire. Affirmative action hires are merely incompetent. DEI hires are malevolent mouthpieces for the ideology that breeds anti-Semitism & hatred toward ‘non-favored groups’ including whites & Asians.”
As Campus Reform observes,
In the days since Gay’s testimony, scholars have pointed out that she lacks the intellectual credentials normally expected of a university president. New Mexico Associate Psychology Professor Geoffrey Miller noted on X that Gay has only written 11 peer-reviewed journal papers. “Well, that’s about the number you’d normally need to get hired as a first-year tenure-track assistant professor at a decent state university,” wrote Miller.
Miller went on to acknowledge that today’s university “administrators function more like party political officers in communist Russian or Chinese universities.” He added, “I mean ‘party’ quite literally: the Democratic party.”
”And an increasing proportion of them are fully woke identitarian Leftists: they often launched their careers with a short series of papers on woke topics, using woke ideological frameworks, published in woke journals – before turning to the administrative track that offers much more political power to propagandize, indoctrinate, and control,” Miller asserted.
Under Gay’s leadership, Harvard has turned a blind eye to rules violations and disruptive conduct by pro-Hamas demonstrators, conduct it would have punished had such conduct been committed by conservatives.
As law professor David Bernstein observes, “the biggest problem with how many campuses” such as Harvard “are handling pro-Hamas protests right now is not a failure to prohibit ‘hate speech,'” — which should not be banned on college campuses — “but a failure to enforce existing, content-neutral rules” against misbehavior like going into classrooms to disrupt class with noisy protests that make it impossible to hear what the professor is saying. As history professor KC Johnson notes, “recent disruptive anti-Israel protests [at Harvard] –students with bullhorns interrepting classes, etc)–were organized by unrecognized student groups. They’re ‘technically not permitted to stage on-campus demonstrations,'” because of their unrecognized status. So “Why hasn’t Harvard enforced its rules?”
Colleges have allowed masked pro-Hamas rallies in states like Virginia, which ban public mask-wearing except for Halloween and health reasons, even though colleges would never tolerate mask-wearing right-wing protesters. This ideological favoritism based on the viewpoint of protesters violates Supreme Court rulings such as Police Department v. Mosley (1972), which said pro-union protesters couldn’t be allowed to picket if other groups weren’t allowed to picket. The Virginia Court of Appeals has upheld Virginia’s mask ban, but left-wing prosecutors like Steve Descano won’t enforce it against pro-Hamas protesters. Even though Code of Virginia § 18.2-422 clearly states, “It shall be unlawful for any person over 16 years of age to, with the intent to conceal his identity, wear any mask, hood or other device whereby a substantial portion of the face is hidden or covered so as to conceal the identity of the wearer, to be or appear in any public place…However, the provisions of this section shall not apply to persons (i) wearing traditional holiday costumes….”
Colleges are applying campus rules against inappropriate remarks in a selective fashion. The University of Southern California and Washington University in St. Louis investigated professors for anti-Hamas remarks that some people viewed as dehumanizing toward Palestinians. But at Cornell University, there was no investigation of a professor who called the Hamas terror attacks “exhilarating” and “exciting.”
A diversity and inclusion director at Cornell University supported the Hamas terror attack, writing that Hamas was “fighting for life, dignity, and freedom…against settler colonization, imperialism, capitalism, white supremacy, which the United States is the model.”
Universities that routinely speak out against microaggressions, Supreme Court decisions, Republican legislation, and things like students wearing sombreros to Halloween parties could not bring themselves to condemn either the Hamas terror attacks that killed at least 1400 people, or campus protests that explicitly praised the terror attacks. One university claimed it must remain neutral about “geopolitical issues and news events.” Such universities have often taken sides on political issues, such as climate change policy, and spoken out about news events, such as the death of George Floyd.
Northwestern University, which publicly criticized the Supreme Court for ruling against race-based college admissions, refused to “make an institutional statement” about the terror attacks by Hamas that killed relatives of some of its students.
Hamas kidnapped many civilians, including small children, from neighboring Israel, seizing them as hostages. Some of these hostages are American citizens. This hostage-taking came after the Biden administration agreed to pay a $6 billion ransom to Iran in exchange for the release of five American hostages. Hamas admits Iran gave it weapons it used in its attack on Israel. The Biden administration released millions of dollars to the Hamas-controlled government of the Gaza strip.
