Claudine Gay is no longer the President of Harvard. The disgraced now former president had a resume as thin as tissue paper, but she checked all the right boxes and was quick to declare everything racist, which made her the perfect self-flagellating hire for the progressive Harvard board. But the funny thing about having low standards for hiring is whoever you hire based on them will have difficulty meeting them. When you lower the bar you inevitably end up with a candidate who needed the bar lowered, and someone like that will never exceed expectations.
Gay is that person. Her “academic” writings, when not ripping off the work of others, were few and far between. In other words, she didn’t do much work, and a large chunk of the work she did was stolen from others. She continuously failed up.
Even after being disgraced and exposed as a serial plagiarist, Gay plays the victim. Showing a shocking level of shamelessness for someone caught violating the basics of academic and professional standards, she blames racism for her troubles. She’s just this side of a Scooby Doo villain, declaring she “would’ve gotten away with it, too, were it not for those meddling racists.”
That’s the real catch with Gay here – no one is claiming she didn’t do it, they’re just mad she’s being held to any standards at all.
Jemele Hill, a pretty big racist in her own right, whined, “When white people are hired in any position, the automatic assumption is they were the best person. When Black people are hired, it’s assumed we got there because of affirmative action — which by the way doesn’t mean under-qualified. If affirmative action never existed, a lot of white people would still believe deeply in their own superiority because that is what they’ve been taught. Considering there have been 30 presidents at Harvard and Claudine Gay was the only Black one in history, she had to be extremely qualified to even be in that position. But don’t let me interfere with your racism. Go off.”
A lot of generalizations about white people in there, but putting aside her racism (one-trick-ponies can only do their one trick), she doesn’t make an attempt to demonstrate that Gay wasn’t guilty of plagiarism. Hill just declared Gay “to be extremely qualified” for the job because she had the job, which is, quite frankly, stupid. Hill only defends Gay because they share skin color, which is really the only racist thing in this.
Marc Lamont Hill, who might be the most propped up pundit in all of cable news history, with the possible exception of Dick Morris, demanded “The next president of Harvard University MUST be a Black woman.” Why? The racist college professor doesn’t say. When asked if he would accept a conservative black woman for the job, Hill shows his cards by responding, “This is the problem. Y’all really think Black people are interchangeable.”
It was never about Gay, it was about the Democratic Party’s agenda. And the party can’t defend Gay against the allegations, so they make it about race.
They’ve gone even further, actually, because they’ve so over-played crying racism that no one cares anymore. Now the very idea of standards, at least for progressives, is the problem.
The Associated Press declared, “Harvard president's resignation highlights new conservative weapon against colleges: plagiarism.”
The idea of plagiarism should be of concern to anyone who works in the written word, and it used to be. People were fired for ripping off others in the past. Then, with Mike Barnicle’s rehabilitation at MSNBC and the relative indifference of CNN to Fareed Zakaria’s transgressions, it’s not a big deal anymore. How can you blame anyone in the hive mind for thinking the thoughts of someone else were theirs?
Now that leftists are continually being exposed as academically lazy thieves, the concept is what’s problematic, not the act.
As Politico put it, “Nightly reports on the right's coordinated campaign that helped engineer the departure of the head of the most influential university in the world.” And that’s true, though not in how these leftists mean it.
There was no investigation of the charges of plagiarism in the Democrat media, aside from casually mentioning that the allegations existed, they largely ignored them. This might be the greatest example of why the establishment media needs to die, why you should shed zero tears over each new round of media layoffs. They have declared their profession to be a tool of the left, treating them accordingly.
Claudine Gay made her career by crying about systemic racism (while weirdly marrying a white guy – why marry someone you view as an oppressor, unless you’re simply declaring that for professional advancement), and coasted on the concept as far as she could. And she coasted pretty far, having published in her whole career what previous presidents published in a year or two. Since people on the left are never truly held accountable for their transgressions, Gay will now suffer under the oppression of the very same systemic racism that led her to a $900,000 per year job at Harvard that she gets to keep. If only we were all so “systemically oppressed.”
Derek Hunter is the host of a free daily podcast (subscribe!) and author of the book, Outrage, INC., which exposes how liberals use fear and hatred to manipulate the masses, and host of the weekly “Week in F*cking Review” podcast where the news is spoken about the way it deserves to be. Follow him on Twitter at @DerekAHunter.