Inauguration of Claudine Gay by Office of Governor Healey, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0, via Flickr
CV NEWS FEED // The day following her resignation, former Harvard president and accused plagiarist Claudine Gay penned an op-ed in the New York Times accusing “demagogues” of “weaponiz[ing]” her presidency.
“As I depart, I must offer a few words of warning,” Gay wrote. “The campaign against me was about more than one university and one leader.”
“This was merely a single skirmish in a broader war to unravel public faith in pillars of American society,” she claimed:
Campaigns of this kind often start with attacks on education and expertise, because these are the tools that best equip communities to see through propaganda. But such campaigns don’t end there. Trusted institutions of all types — from public health agencies to news organizations — will continue to fall victim to coordinated attempts to undermine their legitimacy and ruin their leaders’ credibility.
For the opportunists driving cynicism about our institutions, no single victory or toppled leader exhausts their zeal.
“Yes, I made mistakes,” Gay noted:
At a congressional hearing last month, I fell into a well-laid trap. I neglected to clearly articulate that calls for the genocide of Jewish people are abhorrent and unacceptable and that I would use every tool at my disposal to protect students from that kind of hate.
>> CRITICS PAN AP’S BIZARRE PIECE ABOUT GAY’S RESIGNATION <<
Of her plagiarism allegations, she stated: “My critics found instances in my academic writings where some material duplicated other scholars’ language, without proper attribution.”
“I have never misrepresented my research findings, nor have I ever claimed credit for the research of others,” Gay claimed.
The Daily Signal Managing Editor Tyler O’Neil commented on Gay’s “warning,” saying that it is “symptomatic of an establishment embracing radical ideas that undermine their original goals, then acting impudent when those ideas blow up in their faces.”
“Her public health comment is telling,” O’Neil added on X (formerly Twitter), noting that “institutions abused power during COVID.”
Former National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Francis Collins effectively admitted this last summer in a video that went viral a week ago.
“If you’re a public health person, and you’re trying to make a decision, you have this very narrow view of what the right decision is, and that is something that will save a life,” Collins said:
You attach zero value to whether this actually totally disrupts people’s lives, ruins the economy, and has many kids kept out of school in a way that they never might quite recover from. Collateral damage. This is a public health mindset.
O’Neil also slammed Gay’s repeated attempts to dismiss her critics as being “racially motivated,” a strategy she used in both her op-ed and her resignation letter.
“It’s not that she’s a black woman,” O’Neil pointed out. “It’s the fact that her academic record is light compared to other profs, let alone college presidents.”
“It’s that she worked to undermine black professors with greater accomplishments than hers,” he continued, likely referring to Carol Swain.
“Fundamentally, the problem is that any student caught engaging in the kind of plagiarism Gay routinely used would immediately be expelled, but Harvard went into overdrive to defend her,” O’Neil explained.
“THIS is why her scandal undermines the institution,” he stressed. “And it SHOULD.”
