21 December—Harvard University President Claudine Gay is one of the three presidents of overrated—whoops! make that highly regarded—universities who made utter fools of themselves by equivocating with progressively correct, offensively evasive, totally stupid answers at a congressional hearing last week on campus antisemitism. The University of Pennsylvania’s Liz Magill did the honorable thing after her embarrassing performance and resigned—before she expected to be sacked.

For whatever reasons, however, Dr. Gay and MIT’s Sally Kornbluth have managed to keep their prestigious jobs and lucrative salaries, with Claudine’s not quite as lucrative as Sally’s. Poor Liz’s million-plus pay package was significantly reduced by her resignation, of course, although she keeps her job professing law at $200,000-plus; and it’s anybody’s guess about her severance package.

Back to Claudine Gay, then, a little before the time of her shameful congressional performance she was in the cross-hairs of nasty non-progressive, unwoke advocates of academic probity for some plagiarism she had perpetrated in her 1997 Harvard doctoral dissertation, “Taking Charge: Black Electoral Success and the Redefinition of American Policies,” and various academic works on related subjects. Of course.

And there’s no allegedly about Claudine’s plagiarism. She insisted in the New York Post, “I stand by the integrity of my scholarship. Throughout my career, I have worked to ensure my scholarship adheres to the highest academic standards.” And no doubt it does.

But she didn’t—because she couldn’t—deny that she had neglected to adhere to Harvard’s own specific guidelines against plagiarism, to wit, that verbatim text must always be unambiguously cited and either paraphrased or placed in quotation marks: “It’s not enough to change a few words here and there and leave the rest; instead, you must completely restate the ideas in the passage in your own words.”

The content of the preceding paragraph, incidentally, was taken (but not exactly plagiarized) from The Harvard Crimson, the university’s undergraduate newspaper, which provides the best coverage of the Gay plagiarism affair.

Affair but evidently not scandal because, notwithstanding the university’s own rule book that would be summarily thrown at just plain students or faculty members, the Harvard Corporation—the university’s august governing body—circled its corporate wagons around its woke president and “found no violation of Harvard’s standards for research misconduct.”

A Corporation statement added, “President Gay is proactively requesting four corrections in two articles to insert citations and quotation marks that were omitted from the original publications.” Proactively after Claudine was caught red-handed with a smoking word processor, to be sure. Then again, the Corporation maintains that what the rest of us call plagiarism is merely “a few instances of inadequate citation.” In all events, isn’t that an implicit admission that she done wrong?

On the other hand and not so fast. Did Claudine Gay actually and intentionally plagiarize several sources in several works? Probably not. It’s more likely that she was just careless—rather than lazy—in failing to use quotation marks and proper citation. And, frankly, that’s entirely understandable.

Because virtually all academic literature—including but not limited to theses, dissertations, monographs, exegeses, reviews, and disquisitions—comprises tedious exercises in diligence, patience, and endurance that by their very nature incorporate thoughts and writings of others. In other words, virtually all academic writing is derivative and synthetic to some extent. And it’s uncomfortably easy—and not all that uncommon—for a well-intentioned, otherwise innocent scholar, researcher, or other writer to lose track of every source quote and thus neglect to use quotation marks appropriately.

It’s highly unlikely that Claudine Gay (or any intelligent, serious, competent scholar) would have been so stupid as to try to put one over on academics who knew what she was writing about every bit as well as she—including her sources. Moreover, her dissertation advisors and faculty examiners, as well as the peers who were supposed to have reviewed her other writings, must have—or should have—caught at least most of the instances of her “inadequate citation.”

So while Claudine Gay deserves without question to be called on the carpet for her unacceptable equivocation on campus antisemitism, she probably deserves a pass on plagiarism . . .