The Associated Press published an article on Wednesday blaming former Harvard president Claudine Gay’s resignation on Tuesday on “conservative attacks” using the “new weapon” of plagiarism accusations and also insinuated that she came under attack due to her racial identity. The article, entitled Harvard President’s Resignation Highlights New Conservative Weapon Against Colleges: Plagiarism, almost completely ignores Gay’s lack of response to the soaring antisemitism on campus since October 7th and her outrageous comments at the Congressional hearing, with only one sentence in the entire article referring to it. It also quotes a professor who attributes Gay’s resignation to “right-wing political attacks on higher education.” The professor makes no mention of the antisemitism on campus and the fear of Jewish students to speak out in support of Israel and instead ironically claims that Gay’s resignation will “chill the climate for academic freedom.” Read the article below: The downfall of Harvard’s president has elevated the threat of unearthing plagiarism, a cardinal sin in academia, as a possible new weapon in conservative attacks on higher education. Claudine Gay’s resignation Tuesday followed weeks of mounting accusations that she lifted language from other scholars in her doctoral dissertation and journal articles. The allegations surfaced amid backlash over her congressional testimony about antisemitism on campus. The plagiarism allegations came not from her academic peers but her political foes, led by conservatives who sought to oust Gay and put her career under intense scrutiny in hopes of finding a fatal flaw. Her detractors charged that Gay — who has a Ph.D. in government, was a professor at Harvard and Stanford and headed Harvard’s largest division before being promoted — got the top job in large part because she is a Black woman. 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. On X, formerly Twitter, he 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. “Tomorrow, we get back to the fight,” he said on X, describing a “playbook” against institutions deemed too liberal by conservatives. His latest target: efforts to promote diversity, equity and inclusion in education and business. “We must not stop until we have abolished DEI ideology from every institution in America,” he said. In another post, he announced a new “plagiarism hunting fund,” vowing to “expose the rot in the Ivy League and restore truth, rather than racialist ideology, as the highest principle in academic life.” Gay didn’t directly address the plagiarism accusations in a campus letter announcing her resignation, but she noted she was troubled to see doubt cast on her commitment “to upholding scholarly rigor.” She also indirectly nodded to the December congressional hearing that started the onslaught of criticism, where she did not say unequivocally that calls for the genocide of Jews would violate Harvard policy. Her departure comes just six months after becoming Harvard’s first Black president. As the figureheads of their universities, presidents often face heightened scrutiny, and numerous leaders have been felled by plagiarism scandals. Stanford University’s president resigned last year amid findings that he manipulated scientific data in his research. A president of the University of South Carolina resigned in 2021 after he lifted parts of […]