The downfall of Harvard’s president has elevated the threat of unearthing plagiarism, a cardinal sin in academia, as a possible new weapon in conservative attacks on higher education.
Claudine Gay’s resignation Tuesday followed weeks of mounting accusations that she lifted language from other scholars in her doctoral dissertation and journal articles. The allegations surfaced amid backlash over her congressional testimony about antisemitism on campus.
The plagiarism allegations came not from her academic peers but her political foes, led by conservatives who sought to oust Gay and put her career under intense scrutiny in hopes of finding a fatal flaw. Her detractors charged that Gay — who has a Ph.D. in government, was a professor at Harvard and Stanford and headed Harvard’s largest division before being promoted — got the top job in large part because she is a Black woman.
Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist who helped orchestrate the effort, celebrated her departure as a win in his campaign against elite institutions of higher education. 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.
“Tomorrow, we get back to the fight,” he said on X, describing a “playbook” against institutions deemed too liberal by conservatives. His latest target: efforts to promote diversity, equity and inclusion in education and business.
I think that’s what people dislike the most. That Stefanik used her massive amount of bullshit to false dilemma Gay into a bad PR light. But Stefanik is also alumni of Harvard, in fact she was at one point VP of Harvard’s Institute of Politics. She’s got skills to pay the bills, especially when it comes to the way faculty speaks at Harvard. Gay walked right into it and that’s something she should have seen coming. That’s part and parcel, as much as we like to bemoan it, of politics. Perhaps one day we will reach a political climate where we frankly and openly discuss the woes of society and address them outright. But boy oh boy is someone fooling themselves thinking that day is today. Which as an aside is why I’ve always had issues with the mantra of “when they go low, we go high”. No call their bullshit out and stone their ass for going low, damn it!
People like Rufo will read into this as “it’s a win against DEI” but the reality is, this event is just one of many in a complex string of things that play into an over arching attempt by some to maintain the “good old boys” way of life. There’s multiple aspects of “good old boys” like “Make America Great Again”, “the war on Woke”, and what not. But there’s a need to remember that as much as these folks like to talk about meritocracy, that’s not actually what they want. Or at least they do a lot of things to demonstrate that, that is not what they want. And this whole episode of these President’s falling to the traps of Stefanik are just yet another demonstration that they aren’t after quality or work ethic, they are after preserving a way of life they feel is under threat.
— Christopher Rufo (via X formerly Twitter)
That’s what this ultimately plays out as. They’re under the impression that asking folks to equally weigh all factors in a position without undue passion is some form of racialist ideology. When in fact it’s just Rufo’s lack of knowledge at real world inequality. They’re not exposing rot, they’re just going after folks they have a grudge with. Stefanik wasn’t asking genuine questions to further testimony in collegiate response to a world event, she was just hawking got’chas and she’s insanely good at doing that.
Out of all of this, I think that’s the important aspects to see in this. It’s folks trying to preserve something that we should have in my opinion done off with already. But unfortunately the Associated Press has decided to write an article on the “munitions of the right” which is just more code for “let’s make left/right politics even more polar.” Stefanik is a demonstration of how Congress is becoming worse. She’s very smart and only really foolish people sell her short of that, but bullshit is selling like hotcakes in Congress right now. And to me the “why does bullshit and Dark Brandon sell” is a better question. Because if the goal is to actually reach that day where we talk frank about social ills and address them, we have gone into hyper reverse on reaching that goal. And this piece from the AP really smacks of the drivel that fuels that vehicle. I don’t think that should be our goal (or at least not the primary one, politics isn’t black and white for a reason), but for those who want that as a goal, this piece is classic anti-that goal with it’s quips that exist to only further polar opinion on the matter. When in reality, Gay likely going back to work in a position that she can sow seeds that may one day change the calculus of the traditionalist alumni that she faced as President. Yes, it is sad that it has taken Harvard this long to have a black person as President. Clearly the alumni of Harvard are having a hard time with it to the point that they are feeling fine to overtly suppress such. But the kids today are tomorrow’s alumni and sometimes taking the longer approach is better. Yes, it is shit. But the more I see the younger generation, the more I see a very clear change for the what I would consider better. And there is a lot of very unhappy people about that trend.