CV NEWS FEED // The Associated Press (AP) admitted it was in the wrong to publish a headline and article blasting “conservatives” and downplaying former Harvard President Claudine Gay’s responsibility in the plagiarism scandal that led to her resignation.
Critics panned AP on Wednesday after its article appeared to defend Gay. “The story doesn’t meet our standards,” said Lauren Easton, AP’s vice president of corporate communications, on Wednesday evening.
“Harvard president’s resignation highlights new conservative weapon against colleges: plagiarism,” AP had posted on X (formerly Twitter) accompanied by a link to its controversial piece.
“American higher education has long viewed plagiarism as a cardinal sin,” wrote authors Collin Binkley and Moriah Balingit. “Accusations of academic dishonesty have ruined the careers of faculty and undergraduates alike.”
FOX News reported Wednesday evening:
“Plagiarism charges downed Harvard’s president. A conservative attack helped to fan the outrage,” the AP’s new headline reads.
“American higher education has long viewed plagiarism as among the most serious of offenses. Accusations of plagiarism have ruined the careers of academics and undergraduates alike,” the AP’s updated lede reads.
“The latest target is Harvard President Claudine Gay, who resigned Tuesday,” Binkley and Balingit wrote in the article. “In her case, the outrage came not from her academic peers but her political foes, led by conservatives who put her career under intense scrutiny.”
The authors continued:
Reviews by Harvard found multiple shortcomings in Gay’s academic citations, including several instances of “duplicative language.” The university concluded the errors “were not considered intentional or reckless” and didn’t rise to misconduct. But the allegations continued, with new ones as recently as Monday.
Binkley and Balingit also seemed to frame Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Christopher Rufo as a nefarious actor. Rufo helped expose Gay’s numerous plagiarism allegations.
“Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist who helped orchestrate the effort, celebrated her departure as a win in his campaign against elite institutions of higher education,” they stated.
“On X, formerly Twitter, [Rufo] wrote ‘SCALPED,’ as if Gay was a trophy of violence, invoking a gruesome practice taken up by white colonists who sought to eradicate Native Americans,” the two authors continued in their original piece.
The AP Gets Community-Noted
Community Notes, X’s user-driven fact-check feature, was quick to flag AP’s post.
“Plagiarism is a breach of rules for Harvard University,” Community Notes stated, citing Harvard University’s Plagiarism Policy.
The notes continued:
Claudine Gay was ultimately forced to resign for a series of breaches of this policy.
Plagiarism – or application of the rules around plagiarism – therefore cannot be considered a “weapon”.
“And, once again, [Community Notes] for the win,” X owner Elon Musk wrote in reply to AP.
“Gay repeatedly violated Harvard’s rules against plagiarism,” Musk added. “Source: Harvard.”
Rufo Responds
“Associated Progressives (AP) is trying to run the false narrative that ‘white colonists’ invented scalping ‘to eradicate Native Americans,’” Rufo wrote in response to the AP piece.
“In fact,” he continued, “the Indians originated the practice in North America and, in modern times, [scalping] is a common journalistic phrase.”
“Left-wing journalists have no conception of the world other than ‘white man bad,’” added the well-known critic of Critical Race Theory (CRT). “It’s pathetic.”
Less than a half hour later, Rufo dug up a 2012 post in which AP also used the word “scalp” in its common colloquial journalistic meaning.
“Oh no, the AP is a genocidal institution that wants to ‘eradicate Native Americans’ now,” he chided.
A few hours later, Rufo pointed out that AP edited the sentence in its article on Gay that discussed the wartime practice of scalping to include the phrase “and also used by some tribes against their enemies.”
“WINNING,” Rufo wrote. “After mass ridicule on X, the AP has stealth-edited its story to note that Native Americans were big-time scalpers in the colonial era.”
Is Plagiarism Really That Bad?
Later on in their piece, Binkley and Balingit cited Gay’s “defenders” who argued that her alleged plagiarism was not “clear-cut.”
In highly specialized fields, scholars often use similar language to describe the same concepts, said Davarian Baldwin, a historian at Trinity College who writes about race and higher education. Gay clearly made mistakes, he said, but with the spread of software designed to detect plagiarism, it wouldn’t be hard to find similar overlap in works by other presidents and professors.
The tool becomes dangerous, he added, when it “falls into the hands of those who argue that academia in general is a cesspool of incompetence and bad actors.”
They compared and contrasted this argument with that of “conservatives” like Rufo who held that “the findings are clear evidence that Gay, as the top academic at the pinnacle of U.S. higher education, is unfit to serve.”
“First, Gay lifts an entire paragraph nearly verbatim from a paper by Lawrence Bobo and Franklin Gilliam’s, while passing it off as her own paraphrase and language,” Rufo wrote on X last month.
He provided side-by-side photographs of Gay’s doctoral thesis and the source material from which she allegedly plagiarized:
Gay repeats this violation of Harvard’s policy throughout the document, again using work from Bobo and Gilliam, as well as passages from Richard Shingles, Susan Howell, and Deborah Fagan, which she reproduces nearly verbatim, without quotation marks
>> GAY OUT AT HARVARD FOLLOWING PLAGIARISM SCANDAL <<
It Depends on the Context
Furthermore, the AP authors only made passing mention of the other controversy in which Gay was embroiled: her heavily criticized response to anti-Semitic incidents on campus.
During a December 5 House Committee hearing, Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-NY, asked Gay multiple times if “calling for the genocide of Jews violates Harvard code of conduct?”
“It depends on the context,” the then-president answered.
“It does not depend on the context,” the lawmaker replied. “The answer is yes and this is why you should resign.”
