A number of things happened when Hamas terrorists launched a barbaric invasion of southern Israel on Oct. 7 that involved killing swathes of women and children in the process.
First and foremost, there was the clear and devastating loss of innocent life. There were then the horrific images that began circulating shortly thereafter. The invasions also sparked a counteroffensive from Israel, starting a war that could be slowly inching to its bloody conclusion months after the fact.
The entire ordeal has also, sadly, unmasked a startling level of anti-Semitism in America, particularly in the country’s institutions of higher learning.
That was never more apparent than when a trio of school presidents were grilled last Tuesday by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce over that sudden rise in anti-Semitism.
In short, that hearing was disastrous.
Not only did the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology each fail to really address the issues on their campuses, none of them could even properly denounce calls for Jewish genocide out of some misguided sense of “free speech.”
That has put Penn President Liz Magill, Harvard President Claudine Gay, and MIT President Sally Kornbluth — understandably — under a searing public microscope.
For Gay, that microscope was peered through by conservative journalist Christopher Rufo… and it appears the journalist found quite the skeleton in the closet.
Should Claudine Gay resign?
In his Substack, Rufo (working with fellow journalist Christopher Brunet) documented what certainly appear to be clear-cut cases of plagiarism in Gay’s 1997 Ph.D. dissertation.
The entire piece is worth a read, but here’s just one particularly suspicious example that Rufo presented:
In Gay’s dissertation, titled “Taking Charge: Black Electoral Success and the Redefinition of American Policies,” she wrote:
“Using 1987 survey data, Bobo and Gilliam found that African-Americans in ‘high black-empowerment’ areas — as indicated by control of the mayor’s office — are more active than either African-Americans in low empowerment areas or their white counterparts of comparable socioeconomic status.
“Empowerment, they conclude, influences black participation by contributing to a more trusting and efficacious orientation towards politics and by greatly increasing black attentiveness to political affairs.”
The aforementioned Lawrence Bobo and Franklin Gilliam wrote a paper titled “Race, Sociopolitical Participation, and Black Empowerment,” and here’s how that paper presented the same information:
“Using 1987 national sample survey data . . . the results show that blacks in high-black-empowerment areas — as indicated by control of the mayor’s office — are more active than either blacks living in low-empowerment areas or their white counterparts of comparable socioeconomic status.
“Furthermore, the results show that empowerment influences black participation by contributing to a more trusting and efficacious orientation to politics and by greatly increasing black attentiveness to political affairs.”
KOMO-TV documented the swift outrage and condemnation that Rufo’s and Brunet’s findings elicited from various Harvard alumni, but that’s almost beside the point.
If a person can justify one clear-cut example of plagiarism, they can justify others. That is a significant character flaw, period.
It’s also a clear violation of Harvard’s own Honor Code (emphasis added):
“Cheating on exams or problem sets, plagiarizing or misrepresenting the ideas or language of someone else as one’s own, falsifying data, or any other instance of academic dishonesty violates the standards of our community, as well as the standards of the wider world of learning and affairs.”
That sort of academic dishonesty would be deplorable behavior from any teacher at any school, let alone the president of one of the prestigious schools in the country, and the fact that this alleged plagiarism came from someone who couldn’t even full-throatedly denounce Jewish genocide is particularly worrisome.
And not just worrisome for the general public.
Gay should be worried too. This damning allegation, coupled with her inability to denounce Jewish genocide, is career-killing stuff — literally.
Just look at what happened to Penn’s Magill on Saturday.
The embattled now-former president of UPenn tendered her resignation on Saturday following immense blowback from her disastrous hearing.
And she wasn’t facing any additional accusations about plagiarism.
