Left-Wing Press Gnashes Teeth Over Gay

Claudine Gay’s well-deserved downfall was a bitter blow to left-wing journalists. The Associated Press, America’s most biased “news” organization, angrily termed the plagiarism scandal that undid Gay a “conservative weapon.”

The AP later made a modest adjustment to its headline, explaining that the original headline didn’t “meet its standards.” Some would say it has been a long time since the AP had any standards. The article itself manifests the AP’s unique point of view:

Many [allegations of plagiarism] 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.

This is what passes for news reporting at the AP. The story isn’t about a corrupt and incompetent university president who was forced to resign by her own failings; rather it is about conservatives who put her under “intense scrutiny” in search of a “fatal flaw.” Of which, it turns out, there were several.

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.

Of course she got the job in large part–if not exclusively–because she was a black woman. No one denied it at the time, when hiring of the first-ever black woman as president of Harvard was widely celebrated. That was, moreover, the whole point of Gay’s career, which consisted of imposing racist DEI principles wherever she went, and it was the subject of 100% of her thin scholarly output.

This is priceless:

Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist who helped orchestrate…

Orchestrate! Not something the AP would ever say about liberals. And in this case, entirely false.

…the effort against Gay, 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 and also used by some tribes against their enemies.

The AP can’t resist trotting out the ancient canard that it was really the whites who invented scalping and taught it to the Indians–“some tribes,” anyway. In fact, the Indians were scalping merrily away long before white men appeared, and of all the scalps taken in North America, approximately 100% were taken by Indians. And the assertion that “white colonists…sought to eradicate Native Americans” is libelous and false. All of this was just a throw-in by the AP, having nothing to do with the news story at hand. These people are incorrigible.

In Gay’s case, many academics were troubled with how the plagiarism came to light: as part of a coordinated campaign to discredit Gay and force her from office, in part because of her involvement in efforts for racial justice on campus.

Really? The AP cites no evidence whatsoever for that statement. And it adopts uncritically the left-wing claim, wholly false, that DEI is all about “racial justice.” In fact, it is all about a racist spoils system in which there are winners and losers, based on skin color.

From here, the AP goes off the rails in its hatred for conservatives:

The campaign against Gay and other Ivy League presidents has become part of a broader right-wing effort to remake higher education, which has often been seen as a bastion of liberalism. Republican detractors have sought to gut funding for public universities, roll back tenure and banish initiatives that make colleges more welcoming to students of color, disabled students and the LGBTQ+ community. They also have aimed to limit how race and gender are discussed in classrooms.

Yes, that is a totally objective and unbiased summary of the conservative critique of the rot that has overtaken higher education.

Beating up on the AP is almost pointless because its reporters are so incompetent and so transparent. It is almost too easy, like drowning a puppy. So let’s turn to Britain’s BBC, an equally left-wing but somehow more respectable mouthpiece. The BBC gnashed its teeth over Gay’s resignation in similar style:

The BBC drew scorn after a headline about the resignation of Harvard president Claudine Gay declared she was a “casualty of campus culture wars” on social media.

Implying that only conservatives are opposed to plagiarism. Which, by the way, might be true.

It linked to an article by Anthony Zurcher, a North America-based correspondent for the BBC, who wrote that Gay’s resignation “is being celebrated as a high-profile victory by conservatives who have objected to her on ideological grounds since shortly after she took the job in July 2023.”

The British outlet — which has also come under fire over its policy of labeling Hamas killers as militants instead of terrorists — quickly deleted the post after the backlash.

Zucker’s article was slammed by readers online who took to X and added a Community Notes reference that cited “several incidences of plagiarism being discovered in her academic work.”

The BBC backed off, but not meaningfully:

The BBC later posted an item on X announcing that it had deleted the original message “because the article’s original headline has been amended.”

The altered headline read: “Departure of Harvard’s Claudine Gay plays into campus culture wars.”

Got that? “Plays into” rather than a “casualty of campus culture wars.”

There were at least three very good reasons to replace Claudine Gay as President of Harvard:

1) She was woefully unqualified for the job. No one thought she was a serious scholar, and she had no experience that would enable her to administer the vast enterprise that is Harvard University. Lacking either intellectual or management distinction, she was likely doomed from the start.

2) Her incompetent performance before the House committee, where she couldn’t bring herself to condemn anti-Semitism, or to say that it violated Harvard’s standards–two distinct questions–exposed the left-wing, anti-Semitic rot that has overtaken Harvard and many other campuses. After that performance, which shocked the portion of America that paid attention, her days should have been, and probably were, numbered.

3) Gay was never a serious academic. She published a tiny number of articles that no one claimed exhibited any significant, original thought. So it wasn’t a shock when it turned out that her handful of articles were largely copied (plagiarized) from the work of more important scholars. Harvard’s Corporation tried to fend off the plagiarism scandal by threatening the New York Post with a lawsuit and commissioning an off-the-books “investigation” that cleared Gay before it began. So Harvard doesn’t actually care about intellectual integrity. But, to the Harvard Corporation’s dismay, the plagiarism scandal rapidly spread, so that observers wondered whether Gay had written a single truly original word in her meagre published articles. Gay’s many instances of plagiarism (“duplicative language” in Harvard’s official euphemism) obviously were grounds for termination, as the corrupt Corporation finally had to concede.

So the best the left-wing press can do is blame conservatives for Gay’s self-inflicted downfall, twist the facts, and try to use the episode to fire up their left-wing base.