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.
The same reason they latched onto the term “virtue signaling”. They can’t comprehend doing something that doesn’t provide them with a benefit, therefore the people who are being altruistic must be doing it to get recognition and gain “points”.
They call it that, because when they do it, that is why they are doing it. They just assume the other side is doing it even more, not realizing how exausting it would be to keep it up if it was fake. If it was possible to fake it as much as they think dems are, wouldn’t at least one conservative be doing it? They love “points”, if they could earn as many “points” as they see democrats earning, they would be all over that. But because it is an act to them, they can’t keep up.
It’s exhausting when it’s real. The amount of effort required to tell people they are being shit heads everyday is staggering. So of course they don’t get it. They barely put in that much effort when it benefits them. They couldn’t comprehend doing it for no personal benefit.