Bad echo in the Harvard president’s office

I have so many reactions to the current plight of anti-Semitic uber-plagiarist Harvard president Claudine Gay.

My heart feels like an alligator.

It would take a heart of stone not to laugh.

After all, it is not enough to succeed, others must fail.

Of course those above three comments aren’t mine. In fact, they are quotes, or paraphrases, from, respectively, Hunter S. Thompson, Oscar Wilde and Gore Vidal.

You see, Dr. Gay, is it really that hard to credit people who do the grunt work?

But for her, it apparently is. And now she is hoist with her own petard (Shakespeare), twisting slowly, slowly in the wind (John Ehrlichman).

Maybe she’ll still be able to ride this out. Probably not, but you’ve heard of the old phrase, “Too Big to Fail.”

Claudine Gay may be Too Black to Fail.

To quote Gore Vidal again, “No talent is not enough.” For Claudine Gay, though, it may indeed be more than enough.

At first Harvard said Gay’s research problems only amounted to a few cases of “inadequate citation.”

Now it’s become “duplicative language without appropriate attribution.”

Why don’t we just call this breathtaking plagiarism what it really is, as far Gay’s comrades and fellow box-checking members of the protected classes think it is?

It’s not plagiarism, it’s reparations. Academic reparations.

State-run media desperately tried to give this scandal a good leaving alone (George V. Higgins). The problem is, plagiarism is like other bad behavior. You very seldom get caught the first time you do it (think, shoplifting, or drunk driving).

And so it becomes a habit.

The only thing the “embattled” Gay has going for her now is that she’s done so little, ahem, scholarly work over her dismal career, such as it is. She didn’t have to do much of anything because… diversity.

The most crushing evidence against her thus far has been compiled by another educator who wishes to remain anonymous, for obvious reasons. I am going to guess that Professor X is someone who has worked a helluva lot harder, and has a helluva lot less to show for it, than Claudine does.

It’s one thing to lift somebody’s research, but Gay seems to have lifted her betters’ acknowledgements as well, which is unusual even in the Poison Ivy League.She can’t even write “thank you” without going all Mike Barnicle.

For example, Professor X found a political scientist named Jennifer L. Hochschild. In 1996 she thanked some of her colleagues, including one who “showed me the importance of getting the data right and of following where they lead without fear or favor.”

The next year, Gay thanked some guy named Gary who “reminded me of the importance of getting the data right and following where they lead without fear or favor.”

Hochschild also expressed appreciation that her colleague “drove me much harder than I sometimes wanted to be driven.”

You won’t believe what Gay’s family did for her:

“(They) drove me harder than I sometimes wanted to be driven.”

Gay really studied the work of two researchers named Matthew Friedman and Emily G. Owens.

First, Friedman and Owens: “We construct a county-level measure that captures the incentives developers have to build or rehabilitate affordable housing.”

Gay: “I construct a county-level measure that captures the financial incentives developers have to build or rehabilitate affordable housing.”

Is there an echo in here?

Friedman and Owens continue: “As QCT coverage increases, however, so does the ability of developers to take advantage of the larger tax credits.”

Or as Gay puts it: “As QCT coverage increases, so does the ability of developers to take advantage of the larger tax credit.”

Of course the Harvard Corporation wants nothing to do with this catastrophe. They convinced themselves that this woman was qualified. Nobody, even if they’re connected to a kakistocracy like Harvard, likes to have to admit they’re idiots, and that they’ve been scammed.

As Mark Twain once said, “How easy it is to make people believe a lie and how hard it is to undo that work again.”

Especially if the people promoting uber-entitled box-checker forward are themselves uber-entitled box checkers. The head of the Harvard Corporation is Penny Pritzker, who inherited her billions from the Hyatt Hotel fortune.

Her brother is the obese governor of Illinois J.B. (the Hut) Pritzker. Like everyone else in this sordid mess, he was born on third and thinks he hit a triple.

During the Panic in 2020, Pritzker totally shut down the state of Illinois. Then he put his family on his private jet and had them flown to the family horse farm in Wellington, Florida, a state that, unlike Illinois, was not under an insane lockdown.

There’s a theory that when a person becomes an addict, his or her emotional development ends. I wonder if the same argument can be made about people like Gay who realize early on that it doesn’t matter what they do, they’re always going to be pushed forward, promoted, above those who actually have to work to get ahead.

You don’t grow, because you don’t have to. You don’t care what you do, because you know that all you have to do is check the right boxes. Leave the grunt work to the… little people.

You know, like Professor X. This isn’t just a racial phenomenon either. You think the Pritzkers ever broke a sweat? And one of the scholars angriest about Gay is a black professor named Carol Swain whose work was lifted by Gay.

Swain didn’t go to Phillips Exeter, she had to get a GED. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, she dismissed Gay as a minority “of high pedigree… in a world where the privilege of diversity is king.”

The Democrat party is full of Claudine Gays of all colors – the fake Indian (and Harvard racial fraudster) Elizabeth Warren, serial plagiarist Joe Biden, Stolen Valor Sen. Danang Dick Blumenthal.

When the New York Post first began inquiring about Gay’s serial plagiarism, how did Harvard respond? They hired a defamation lawyer who sent the newspaper a 15-page letter threatening to sue. Her only credentials were her skin color and her “victimhood,” as preposterous as that might be.

In his letter to Harvard, Professor X brought up all this and then asked:

“I ask whether Dr. Gay’s case was dealt with equitably. This looks like a potentially serious abuse of power… Please keep me informed of the progress of your inquiries.”

Professor X, when the phone don’t ring, you’ll know it’s Harvard.

For the record, that’s a line from Jimmy Buffet. I don’t want to get called on it. Unlike Claudine Gay, I can’t play the victim card.