Is it mental illness or immaturity on their part? Whenever conservatives clinch what liberals perceive to be a win, the left will sacrifice everything to push back. Right now, there's a fledgling consensus among liberals that plagiarism in academia is okay because they do it. It's all part of the fallout from Claudine Gay's Harvard presidency that's collapsed.
Gay was forced to resign after 50 examples of plagiarism were discovered during her academic career, with her "work" being relatively scant for someone taking the helm at one of our nation's most iconic and prestigious institutions of learning. If it wasn't plagiarism, it was questionable research, like her 2001 paper that got her tenure tracked at Stanford. All told, Harvard could have avoided this public relations nightmare if it found someone qualified to do the job.
Ultimately, I couldn't care less about Gay herself since she's going to receive a near-$900,000 salary with her new gig. These people don't get genuinely terminated from their positions. Gay wrote the first chapter of her epic downfall when she failed to condemn or even say that chants for Jewish genocide constituted harassment before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce in December. She sounded like an academic (which was the wrong route) and was exposed as an academic fraud days later.
maybe if they don’t commit serial academic fraud and badly mishandle their jobs, they’ll be ok https://t.co/FAr76ig4Hk
— Guy Benson (@guypbenson) January 5, 2024
A half dozen incidents are terrible enough, and Harvard even admitted in an internal review that Gay violated typical academic standards in her research papers. Yet, they used "liberalspeak" to announce this before Christmas: Gay didn't plagiarize, but we did find instances of "duplicative language." It's almost as bad at CNN, which said that the beleaguered college president didn't steal anyone's ideas, just passed them off as her own without attribution.
Forget her terrorist-sympathizing, antisemitism-enabling remarks before Congress; Gay was forced out because she was black. That's the left's line, with Reverend Al Sharpton leading the charge. It accompanied a flurry of social media posts about how Gay's ouster is a reminder of how women of color are undermined and how plagiarism isn't a big deal; we all do it.
That's patently false, and everyone and their mother knows it. Not plagiarizing is one of the things drilled into you in grade school; at least, it was in my school days when teachers weren't non-binary freaks who decorated their classrooms with Hamas and BLM paraphernalia. They were normal back then. CNN's Abby Phillips tried to force the racism point with guest Coleman Hughes, who is black, who slapped down the insinuation that Gay was forced out due to race. He also said that even if that was the case, it's irrelevant because it doesn't justify committing wanton acts of plagiarism. Anyone with 50 examples of plagiarism in academia would be finished in this field—that's the point. When you choose this line of work, plagiarism is the one thing you cannot do—obviously—and her position was untenable once all these infractions were exposed.
CNN's Abby Phillips tried to get her guest to say Claudine Gay was fired because of racism but her plan blows up in her face as he refuses to bite. pic.twitter.com/TgXB1raAzy
— MRCTV (@mrctv) January 3, 2024
Plagiarism is the new "scalping" in the right-wing arsenal—a genocidal practice used by colonists posting bounties for Indigenous people. Using violent trophy imagery against a Black woman tells you this was never about plagiarism but reestablishing white supremacy in academia. https://t.co/qlNuzNwU6v
— Lisa for Denver (@LisaforDenver) January 3, 2024
The other talking point that plagiarism has become weaponized by conservatives is also a clown show point because it already was a death sentence justifiably handed down to weed out bad academics. Conservatives didn't do this—Gay did it to herself. It's called accountability and responsibility, two things lacking in American liberalism. They can't police themselves, and their reaction to Gay's resignation indicates that.
Liberalism wasn't always this puerile. They were usually wrong, but knee-jerk reactions defending socially unacceptable or outright degeneracy were never a thing until the left underwent its "woke" makeover. Defending plagiarism to save someone who isn't worth it is typical lefty thinking nowadays. And it shows how the left's mindset, its ethos, has eroded all aspects of critical thinking and logic. They felt an academic fraud could remain president of Harvard. Forget Gay, the situation alone is absurd.