Bates College Professor Tyler Austin Harper hit the nail on the head in his essay on the Claudine Gay affair in The Atlantic.
Harper states what should have been obvious to the meanest intelligence: the biggest and most revealing part of the scandal is the lengths to which Gay’s defenders chose to go in order to defend a person manifestly guilty of the charges of which she had been accused. And her defenders did so not because of any particular allegiance to Gay, but because her accusors were conservatives whom the defenders despised.
The true scandal of the Claudine Gay affair is not a Harvard president and her plagiarism. The true scandal is that so many journalists and academics were willing, are still willing, to redefine plagiarism to suit their politics. Gay’s boosters have consistently resorted to Orwellian doublespeak—“duplicative language” and academic…
