Harvard goes full ‘Alice in Wonderland,’ clearing Claudine Gay before investigating her

In Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, the Red Queen famously prepares to convict the Knave of Hearts before ruling on the evidence. (“Sentence first—verdict afterwards.”) It turns out that Harvard is run the same way. Its president, Claudine Gay, is an admitted plagiarist, along with embarrassing Harvard with her disgraceful passive support for genocidal antisemitism. Nevertheless, long before Gay’s disastrous House testimony, when allegations about her plagiarism first appeared, Harvard determined before any investigation that she was innocent and threatened to use lawfare against anyone who said otherwise. And now, with her sins revealed, it seems Barack Obama stepped in to save her.

Claudine Gay has been making her mark at Harvard for some time, as she’s pushed a hard-left, racially divisive agenda that is aimed at making Harvard less white and more communist. This meme (here’s a permalink if the image doesn’t show) sums up the fact that her real qualification wasn’t her academic credentials, meaning she was valued for her “diversity” and hard-left agenda:

(Internet meme; creator unknown)

One would think that, now that Gay’s shoddy scholarship and overt (albeit currently still passive) antisemitism are on display, Harvard would be anxious to disassociate itself from her. She ought to be toxic. But of course, she’s not because she’s everything that an institution once revered for its scholarship now values: race and gender as determiners of worth, anti-Americanism, antisemitism, and all the other leftist shibboleths.

That’s why, when evidence emerged before Gay’s disastrous House hearing that Gay routinely copied other writers without attribution—something that can get students and unimportant academics expelled—Harvard decided in advance of an investigation that Gay had done nothing wrong:

Harvard cleared its president Claudine Gay of plagiarism before it even investigated whether her academic work was copied, The Post reveals today.

In a threatening legal letter to The Post in late October, the college called allegations that she lifted other academics’ work “demonstrably false,” and said all her works were “cited and properly credited.”

Days later Gay herself asked for an investigation and Harvard tore up its own rules to ask outside experts to review her work, saying it had to avoid a conflict of interest.

And the experts then found she did need to make multiple corrections to her academic record.

The bare-knuckled law firm Harvard employed to try to keep the plagiarism allegations from ever coming to light told The Post it would sue for “immense” damages.

Harvard never revealed an investigation had been launched as the lawyers put pressure on The Post to kill its reporting.

But more than a month later, on December 12 Harvard said Gay had been investigated by its top governing body and was correcting two academic journals, to acknowledge where her work had really come from — meaning the claim it was “properly credited” was false.

(That’s the gist; there’s much more detail here.)

In other words, in late October, Harvard was threatening any outlet challenging the quality of works because such claims were “demonstrably false.” However, less than two months later, Harvard’s investigation announced that the charges were accurate. Nevertheless, Gay gets to keep her job.

I have to wonder whether Harvard’s loyalty to an unqualified, race-obsessed, low-key-antisemitic black person has some of its genesis in the fact that like calls to like…and the left’s revered former president, Barack Obama, apparently lobbied to keep Gay in place despite her infamous House testimony and shoddy scholarship:

Former President Barack Obama has secretly lobbied Harvard University officials to stick by embattled President Claudine Gay as she faces pressure to resign for giving cover to antisemitism on campus and for committing plagiarism.

[snip]

“It sounded like people were being asked to close ranks to keep the broader administration stable — including its composition,” a source told Jewish Insider of the former president’s clandestine effort.

Former President Barack Obama has quietly pushed Harvard University to keep embattled President Claudine Gay as she faces pressure to resign for giving cover to antisemitism.

Obama, 62, who is a graduate of Harvard, privately urged the university to let Gay remain as president after she said calls for the genocide of Jews may be permissible, depending on “context.”

The report did not say whether that effort had continued after Gay’s scholarship was called into question following her testimony for dozens of instances of alleged plagiarism.

Academia in America has outlived its usefulness. The hard science departments might be salvageable, but everything else in America’s colleges and universities does nothing to contribute to morals and “universal” knowledge, which were the universities’ original purposes. Conservatives need to work hard to elect officials who will use all legal means available to crush these institutions.

And this marvelous meme pretty much sums it all up:

Who did this? ???? https://t.co/LfeNMm6Cbo pic.twitter.com/BFC7WL2lXz

— Ron M. (@Jewtastic) December 23, 2023

Image: Claudine Gay (edited). YouTube screen grab.