Embattled Harvard president Claudine Gay is facing a new onslaught: Now the kids are coming for her.
A student member of Harvard’s Honor Council — the school body tasked with reviewing and sanctioning plagiarism and other cheating — blasted Gay and demanded her resignation.
“Gay’s getting off easy,” the student thundered in a letter to the Crimson.
After all, even first-time plagiarism offenses can wreck students’ lives via academic probation, the loss of “good standing” and the inability to graduate.
Gay’s been nailed for “routine and pervasive” plagiarism, per the letter, with 40 instances in her 11 published works and her dissertation, incidents stretching over her entire career (including plagiarizing an acknowledgements section).
All she’s had to do was issue corrections to the papers containing the plagiarized material — something students can’t do to get off the hook.
Claudine Gay has previously been accused of plagiarizing others’ work more than 40 times, with the fresh allegations bringing the instances near 50. David McGlynn
The Honor Council member’s exactly right.
Gay needs at least to meet the bare-minimum standards she oversees for students. (Ideally, her work would stand above reproach.)
Keep in mind that letter comes on the heels of an open attack in the Crimson demanding her resignation.
Specifically, the paper’s editorial board said she’d clearly plagiarized multiple times, but let her off the hook by claiming she didn’t mean to do it and arguing that her critics are “conservative activists” out to defame higher education — a defense so lame that two members of the board wrote a dissent calling for her ouster.
Proof positive that all it takes is a little courage to stand up to the woke and open the floodgates.
In other words, Gay has lost the confidence of the donor class, affluent parents and the kids whose education she’s supposed to be superintending.
Who still backs her?
Radical academics (and the sheep who follow them) and pro-Hamas thugs.
Not the kind of coalition the head of the world’s most prestigious university should have at her back.
That last, by the way, is a welcome sign that although morally vacuous zoomer nonsense may dominate X, TikTok and Instagram, huge swaths of the kids are clearly all right.
It’s time we listen to the children: Gay. Must. Go.
Source link: https://nypost.com/2024/01/02/opinion/harvard-kids-get-it-claudine-gay-plagiarism-means-she-must-go/