Condoleezza Rice, Carol Swain for Next Harvard President?

If I still were a 10th grader, I might feel a little bit sorry for Claudine Gay, Harvard University’s disgraced ex-president. Back then, I thought that rules against plagiarism required that every thought in a book or term paper had to be completely original: Every concept had to be something nobody ever had seen before, much like first splitting the atom in 1932.

As I learned, standards are not that absurdly high. Students, scholars, and journalists may write whatever they wish, quote whomever they like, and then indicate what they think of what they have cited — pro, con, or otherwise.

Even copying and pasting, say, 100 words from a speech or novel is perfectly fine, provided that the writer places quotation marks around that text and identifies the person or source who originally expressed those words.

It’s that simple.

No one expected Claudine Gay necessarily to concoct brand-new concepts, novel theories, or her very own school of thought. If she cited the Gettysburg Address, however, she had to place quotes around the relevant passages and remind her readers that she did not say those words. Abraham Lincoln did.

Thus, it is incredibly easy to avoid plagiarism. Every college student understands this, as do kids at better high schools.

So, it is beyond inexcusable that Claudine Gay — not a Harvard freshman, but its president, for crying out loud — committed plagiarism. Gay did this as early as her doctoral dissertation.

These were not one or two isolated incidents, due to being too exhausted to proofread a paper after an all-nighter. That might be excusable.

No such luck. Gay reportedly plagiarized at least 50 times! No undergrad at Harvard would survive such behavior without getting dunked in the Charles River.

Gay should be ashamed of herself. Had she not quit in humiliation, Gay would have signaled to students at Harvard and other elite universities, “Go ahead. Steal other people’s words and claim them as your own.”

Alas, despite the ankle-high bar required to avoid this problem, the Left has re-imagined plagiarism out of existence, all to let Gay off the hook for her fundamental academic malpractice.

“She sloppily failed to employ correct citations and quotes for her citations,” New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait wrote. “She could have fixed them easily.”

Woulda, coulda, shoulda, she didn’t.

“We should note that Claudine Gay has not been accused of stealing anyone’s ideas in any of her writings,” CNN’s Matt Egan explained with a straight face. “She’s been accused of more like copying other people’s writings without attribution. So, it’s been more sloppy attribution than stealing anyone’s ideas.”

This is like saying, “Claudine Gay didn’t commit arson. She just covered the front porch with gasoline and threw a match on it.” Or “Claudine Gay didn’t kill anybody. She just put a knife in someone’s heart, and then it stopped beating.”

Egan’s words are the very definition of plagiarism. Copying people’s words and not attributing them constitute plagiarism. Egan could have helped Gay by keeping his big mouth shut.

Amazingly, Harvard itself tried to whitewash Gay’s scholastic felonies.

The Harvard Corporation conceded that Gay perpetrated “a few instances of inadequate citation.”

Alas for Gay and her enablers, Harvard’s rules could not be clearer. The 388-year-old university’s Harvard Guide to Using Sources unambiguously states: “When you fail to cite your sources, or when you cite them inadequately, you are plagiarizing, which is taken extremely seriously at Harvard.”

Gay stands accused of some 50 such misdeeds. Consider just one of the 39 such examples detailed in a complaint submitted to Harvard and published in the Washington Free Beacon:

In her 1997 Harvard doctoral dissertation, Taking Charge: Black Electoral Success and the Redefinition of American Politics, Gay wrote, “Since the 1950s, the reelection rate for incumbent House members has rarely dipped below 90%.”

Meanwhile, then-Princeton University professor Carol M. Swain, Ph.D.’s book, Black Faces, Black Interests, reads: “Since the 1950s the reelection rate for House members has rarely dipped below 90 percent.”

As the report notes, “Gay uses no quotation marks around verbatim language and mis-cites Swain in the next sentence.”

After trying to turn plagiarism from an academic mortal sin into scholastic jaywalking, Gay and her apologists played the race card, like a well-worn ace at a game of back-alley blackjack.

Gay herself said that it was “frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus.”

“This is an attack on every Black woman in this country who’s put a crack in the glass ceiling,” declared racial cardsharp Al Sharpton.

“Racial justice programs are under attack,” moaned 1619 Project mouthpiece Nikole Hannah-Jones. “Black women will be made to pay.”

There is nothing racist about this. Gay fired two torpedoes into her own hull. One was plagiarism. The other was her testimony on Capitol Hill regarding college antisemitism.

Gay testified on December 5 before the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce. Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y. a Harvard alumna, grilled her and other top university leaders:

Stefanik: “Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules of bullying and harassment? Yes or no?”

Gay: “It can be depending on the context.”

Stefanik: “What’s the context?”

Gay: “Targeted at an individual targeted, as at an individual?”

University of Pennsylvania President Elizabeth Magill struggled mightily.

Stefanik: “I am asking, specifically calling for the genocide of Jews, does that constitute bullying or harassment?”

Magill: “If it is directed, and severe, pervasive, it is harassment.”

Stefanik: “So the answer is yes.”

Magill: “It is a context dependent decision, Congresswoman.”

MIT President Sally Kornbluth also flopped.

She said: “I’ve heard chants which can be antisemitic depending on the context when calling for the elimination of the Jewish people.” She added, “That would be investigated as harassment if pervasive and severe.”

Imagine that Stefanik had asked: “Is it OK to say, ‘Let’s round up all the black students and lynch them!’ or “Let’s kill all the gays in the library!’?” It is hard to imagine answers other than, “Congresswoman, such hate crimes are verboten at our university.”

But the questions were about Jews. So, handwringing erupted, and “context” was king.

Gay’s first self-imposed wound proved fatal, even before plagiarism revelations devoured the remaining shreds of her reputation.

This softness on genocide also cost Magill her job. And she is white. So, the avalanche of brickbats that buried Gay had nothing to do with race.

Some Leftists insist that Harvard’s next president must be a black woman, as if that post were a racial entitlement. However, that office should be filled on the merits. The Left calls meritocracy racist, presumably because blacks cannot make it without special accommodations, as if being black were a genetic handicap.

Of course, this is unfiltered, David Duke-strength racism.

At least two black women could outshine Claudine Gay as her successor:

Condoleezza Rice, Ph.D. has been Stanford University’s provost, U.S. secretary of state, and is director of Stanford’s Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace. Dr. Rice also has eight books to her name versus the one volume that Gay herself listed on her wafer-thin October 2022 resume.

Carol Swain, Ph.D. was a professor at Duke and Princeton universities before settling in at Vanderbilt. The political scientist has authored, co-authored, or edited 11 books.

These achievements notwithstanding, the Left would attack Rice and Swain as “inauthentically black,” since they are conservatives. But the Left cannot refute the most powerful argument for making Carol Swain Harvard’s next president:

Claudine Gay plagiarized her.