The College Fix

‘The right has found a perfect weapon’

In yet another ridiculous editorial, the Harvard Crimson this past week demanded “we” must stop conservatives’ efforts at “weaponizing” plagiarism.

This is because Claudine Gay ultimately had to step down as Harvard president due to plagiarism, and the same charge was leveled at Harvard Diversity and Inclusion Officer Sherri Ann Charleston.

“As the culture wars lurch on,” the editorial board writes, “the right has found a perfect weapon with which to hit the university — taken straight from the academy’s arsenal itself: claims of plagiarism.”

It goes on to (hilariously) state that it has “harshly and unconditionally condemned plagiarism,” yet links to a New Year’s Eve editorial titled “President Gay Plagiarized, but She Should Stay. For Now” (emphasis added).

In it, the editors say “All plagiarism is wrong and antithetical to our University’s academic mission. But not all plagiarism is equal […] Plagiarism offenses lie on a spectrum.” And, of course, now-former President Gay’s offenses weren’t all that bad, they say.

“We also oppose President Gay’s resignation because we are not blind to what has driven this news cycle — a national outrage manufactured by conservative activists intent on discrediting higher education.”

Specifically, that’d be DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) initiatives. In other words, it’s the ‘ol conservatives pounce! complaint, and it’s quite laughable at this point.

Keep in mind this is the same Ivy League student paper which recently argued Riley Gaines shouldn’t get an audience because of her “bad faith” views, yet wrote nary a word about Hamas’ slaughter of over 1,000 innocent Israelis on Oct. 7.

MORE: ‘We despair’: Harvard Crimson editors decry Supreme Court decision

In 2020, it urged students to break the law because they’ll only get a “slap on the wrist” anyway, and in 2013 told conservatives to just skip Harvard altogether.

The current Crimson employees soon will be out there vying for journalism opportunities, essentially joining their mainstream media brethren in shaping narratives against conservatives — as The New York Times did after the eye-opening Hur report came out:

That report essentially noted President Biden is too old to remember basic details of what he’s said or did. Such a topic used to be of great import (i.e. worry), especially during the last administration. Remember Yale’s Bandy Lee and her crusade against Donald Trump and his mental state?

And what about the letter circulated by college professors after Jan. 6, 2021, requesting the 25th Amendment be invoked against Trump? Or the Harvard Medical School doctor who said Trump had “failed every criterion for rational and reality-based decision making capacity”?

This past week alone, our current chief exec said he had met with German President Francois Mitterand and Chancellor Helmut Kohl at a 2021 G7 meeting (Mitterand was the French president from 1981-1995 and died in 1996, while Kohl died in 2017), and called Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi the “president of Mexico.”

Don’t expect to see anything about this in the Crimson … or the mainstream media, for that matter. We’re long past the point of journalists doing actual journalism … it’s all about the “proper” politics and the “correct” view.

MORE: Former and current Harvard Crimson editors protest their own paper – for practicing journalism

IMAGES: The Crimson; Stephen L. Miller/X

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