After making headlines when she refused to condemn antisemitism at a December 5 congressional hearing, Gay announced Tuesday she was stepping down as president of the famous Ivy League school in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
After rising through the ranks at Harvard to become a top dean, Gay was hired as university president just six months ago with much fanfare as the first-ever black university president. After the shortest presidential search in Harvard history, Gay was also plagued with accusations of a “diversity hire,” meaning she was ultimately chosen because she checks off two boxes as black and female.
Bill D'Agostino, who is monitoring the media’s reaction at the Media Research Center, says liberal media outlets are failing to report the basic facts about Gay and her failures. The very simple reason for that, he says, is doing so would be criticizing a black woman who is considered by the Far Left to be marginalized victim of white-dominated society.
“There's a discomfort,” he says, “with even admitting that the plagiarism thing is true.”
D’Agostino and MRC documented just such an example on CNN, where anchor Matt Egan tried a feat of mental gymnastics to describe Gay’s plagiarism.
“Claudine Gay has not been accused of stealing anyone's ideas in any of her writings,” Egan assured the CNN audience. “She's been accused of, sort of more like, copying other people's writing.”
New York Post vs. Harvard
When the first accusations of plagiarism first came to light months ago, Harvard’s governing board rallied behind its university president and downplayed a “few instances of inadequate citation.”
The plagiarism controversy dates back to October. That is when Harvard threatened to sue The New York Post after it learned the newspaper was pursuing a story accusing Gay of 27 allegations of plagiarism.
The examples kept piling up, higher and higher, until they numbered nearly 50 by the time Gay stepped down earlier this week.
Matt Lamb, associate editor of The College Fix, tells AFN there was no way a president of Harvard University could remain in that position after 50 examples of blatant plagiarism were revealed.
“She was hired on the basis of the strength of her thesis,” he says of Gay, “and that included plagiarism. There were multiple footnotes that were copied.”
Racism and a ‘well-executed plan’
The hot-button issues of race and racism was a predictable card for the Far Left to play, too. On social media, race-obsessed academics such as Nicole Hannah Jones and Ibram X. Kendi said Gay was targeted by the Right because she is black.
“Well, they got what they wanted from their well-executed plan,” Jones, a New York Times reporter most famous for her controversial 1619 Project, complained on X, formerly Twitter.
“Correct,” replied Christopher Rufo, the conservative scholar credited for first exposing Gay’s plagiarism. “We exposed corruption at Harvard and worked to restore truth, rather than racialist ideology, as the guiding principle of American academic life.”
In the same post, Rufo twisted the knife and thanked Jones for acknowledging his “well-executed plan.”
In an appearance on MSNBC, a black New York Times editor angrily insisted the Harvard leader is the victim.
"This is an attack on diversity. This is an attack on multiculturalism," said Maya Gay, no relation to the former Harvard president. "I don’t have to say that they’re racist, because you can hear and see the racism in the attacks."
In Harvard’s home state of Massachusetts, conservative activist Brian Camenker of MassResistance is no stranger to the Far Left’s obsession about race and sexuality. So he predicts Harvard’s liberal leaders, held captive by their ideology, will feel forced to replace a black woman with another black woman.
“When you pick people by those standards, you’re going to get people who are less capable and who are often incompetent,” he says. “That’s what’s going to happen. It’s going to be more of the same.”
