Leftists and their corporate media allies are blaming conservatives for the ouster of former Harvard president and apparent plagiarist Claudine Gay, who formally resigned from her job Tuesday after being accused of nearly 50 instances of plagiarism.
The Associated Press ran an op-ed Wednesday complaining that Gay’s “resignation highlights [a] new conservative weapon against colleges: plagiarism.” The problem, according to AP authors Collin Binkley and Moriah Balingit, isn’t that Gay pirated the work of other educators to climb the academic ladder, but that conservatives “zeroed in” on Gay in a “coordinated campaign.”
Binkley and Balingit go on to cite Trinity College historian Davarian Baldwin, who makes the argument that plagiarism in certain fields of study is somehow not plagiarism. “In highly specialized fields, scholars often use similar language to describe the same concepts,” write Binkley and Balingit, paraphrasing Baldwin. “Gay clearly made mistakes, [Baldwin] 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.”
Citing Baldwin, Binkley and Balingit add that this plagiarism “tool” can become “dangerous” if it “falls into the hands of those who argue that academia in general is a cesspool of incompetence and bad actors.”
It’s not just the AP. Politico ran a similar article about “the right’s coordinated campaign that helped engineer the departure of the head of the most influential university in the world.”
During an MSNBC interview, The New York Times’ Mara Gay claimed the disgraced Harvard president’s downfall
