Plagiarism is considered a capital offense in the fields of journalism and education, but a campaign is afoot in both arenas to downgrade Claudine Gay’s offenses to misdemeanors.
Ms. Gay resigned as Harvard University president last week under a plagiarism cloud. She was accused of copying or closely paraphrasing nearly 50 passages from other sources without adequate attribution.
Yet the narrative pushed on the left was that conservative villains demonized her.
The Associated Press provided the most glaring example. The news agency announced Ms. Gay’s resignation with the headline “Harvard president’s resignation highlights new conservative weapon against colleges: plagiarism.”
AP backpedaled after being roundly mocked for casting academic integrity as a conservative plot. It changed the headline to “Plagiarism charges downed Harvard’s president. A conservative attack helped to fan the outrage.”
Lauren Easton, AP vice president for corporate communications, told The Washington Times that the “initial story didn’t meet our standards, so we updated it.”
AP was hardly alone. In a New York Times article, Harvard Law School professor Charles Fried called the plagiarism charges “part of this extreme right-wing attack on elite institutions.”
CNN reporter Matt Egan was ridiculed for trying to distinguish between stealing other people’s ideas and borrowing their words.
“We should note that Claudine Gay has not been accused of stealing anyone’s ideas in any of her writings. She has been accused of, sort of, more like copying other people’s writings without attribution,” Mr. Egan said. “So, it’s been more sloppy attribution than stealing anyone’s ideas.”
Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, insisted that Ms. Gay’s work was “not sloppiness.”
“Gay, when she took material, would sometimes modify it slightly. She would change the order of the phrase, replace one adjective with a different adjective,” he told The Times. “As someone who’s done a lot of work on plagiarism over the years, it’s the signature of a plagiarist. It’s someone who’s carefully trying to trick people. It’s out-and-out impossible to treat as sloppiness.”
The Washington Free Beacon has run numerous examples of Ms. Gay’s work compared with other sources, including here and here.
The alleged violations would violate Harvard’s policy, which bans verbatim copying and replicating “bits and pieces” from sources and “changing a few words here and there without either adequately paraphrasing or quoting directly.”
Some of Ms. Gay’s defenders have sought to reframe the focus.
Ibram X. Kendi, director of the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University, called the academic misconduct charges part of a “racist attack.” He argued on X that Ms. Gay wouldn’t have been investigated with the same vigor if she were White.
Mara Gay, a member of The New York Times editorial board, denounced the “unrelenting campaign on the right” for the Harvard president to resign as an “attack on academic freedom.”
“This is an attack on diversity, this is an attack on multiculturalism and on many of the values that a lot of us hold dear,” Ms. Gay said in an interview on MSNBC.
Philosopher Peter Boghossian, a co-founder of the University of Austin, responded by quipping on X: “Plagiarism is now considered academic freedom.”
People on the left are not angry about her acts of plagiarism or her horrible testimony about anti-Semitism on Harvard’s campus, they’re just angry that conservatives got a ‘win’ here.https://t.co/m2C2AdqEDQ
— Legal Insurrection (@LegInsurrection) January 4, 2024
The Washington Post editorial board, while dinging Ms. Gay’s detractors on the right, suggested Wednesday that her attribution shortcomings may have been a “foot fault.”
“There is legitimate debate as to whether her failure to cite various passages from the work of other scholars was a relative foot fault or serious academic misconduct, as the conservative critics who seized upon this as a proxy for their political disagreements with Ms. Gay and Harvard maintained,” the opinion piece said. “Still, consistency required that Ms. Gay be held to the same standard as students over whom she presides.”
The downplaying of allegations raised by conservative media figures and outlets is meeting pushback.
“The true scandal of the Claudine Gay affair is not a Harvard president and her plagiarism,” Tyler Austin Harper, a Bates College assistant professor, said in The Atlantic. “The true scandal is that so many journalists and academics were willing, are still willing, to redefine plagiarism to suit their politics.”
Nobody fought the plagiarism narrative harder than the Harvard Corp., which defended Ms. Gay and minimized the allegations against her every step of the way.
In October, Harvard sent a letter threatening to sue the New York Post if it published the plagiarism allegations, the newspaper reported. It insisted the examples cited were “not plagiarism.”
The corporation declared in its Dec. 12 statement that an independent review found “no violation of Harvard’s standards for research misconduct.” Even so, the board said Ms. Gay had voluntarily agreed to submit four corrections to two articles.
After Ms. Gay resigned, the Harvard Corp. praised her effusively and condemned what it described as the “repugnant attacks” and “racist vitriol” directed at her without using the p-word.
“While President Gay has acknowledged missteps and has taken responsibility for them, it is also true that she has shown remarkable resilience in the face of deeply personal and sustained attacks,” the corporation said.
Manhattan Institute senior fellow Christopher F. Rufo, who first broached the allegations in a Dec. 11 article in City Journal with journalist Christopher Brunet, ridiculed the specter of media and academia figures opting to soft-pedal plagiarism claims rather than side with conservatives.
“It’s glorious: Academics defending plagiarism. Journalists opposing journalism. Newswires attributing scalping to ‘white colonists.’ Everyone focusing on the frame we set,” Mr. Rufo said on X. “That is how the game is won.”
• Valerie Richardson can be reached at vrichardson@washingtontimes.com.
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