The Associated Press was mocked on social media Wednesday after publishing an article blaming conservatives for using plagiarism as a new “weapon” after Harvard President Claudine Gay resigned amid extensive plagiarism allegations.
Gay announced her resignation Tuesday in the wake of mounting plagiarism accusations and criticism over her Congressional testimony on Harvard’s actions to combat anti-Semitism following the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel. Many people celebrated Gay’s resignation as a victory for educational and moral standards, but according to the AP, the Harvard president’s departure is proof that conservatives will use plagiarism to attack higher education.
“The downfall of Harvard’s president has elevated the threat of unearthing plagiarism, a cardinal sin in academia, as a possible new weapon in conservative attacks on higher education,” AP reporters Collin Binkley and Moriah Balingit wrote.
“The plagiarism allegations came not from her academic peers but her political foes, led by conservatives who sought to oust Gay and put her career under intense scrutiny in hopes of finding a fatal flaw,” the article continued. “Her detractors charged that Gay — who has a Ph.D. in government, was a professor at Harvard and Stanford and headed Harvard’s largest division before being promoted — got the top job in large part because she is a Black woman.”
The AP’s post on X directing people to the article was hit with a “community note” that stated, “Plagiarism is a breach of rules for Harvard University. Claudine Gay was ultimately forced to resign for a series of breaches of this policy. Plagiarism – or application of the rules around plagiarism – therefore cannot be considered a ‘weapon.'”
Harvard president's resignation highlights new conservative weapon against colleges: plagiarism https://t.co/GiVkT3LgUo
— The Associated Press (@AP) January 3, 2024
Still, some leftists attempted to defend the AP for publishing the piece.
“This is journalism. Getting closer to what truly happened and why,” said Critical Race Theory proponent Ibram X. Kendi.
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Many political commentators, however, piled on the legacy media outlet for its attempt to cast blame on conservatives for the Harvard president’s resignation.
“Harvard president’s resignation highlights new conservative weapon against the Left: [insert any objective standard here],” wrote Daily Wire Editor Emeritus Ben Shapiro.
“Pretty worried about this new chronoweapon that can force you to go back as many as 27 years in time and commit plagiarism,” said statistician and political writer Nate Silver.
“This headline is something,” Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) wrote. “Plagiarism is actually bad. It’s not a ‘conservative weapon.’”
Gay’s alleged plagiarism was first brought to light by Manhattan Institute senior fellow Christopher Rufo, who outlined what he indicated to be three instances of Gay plagiarizing, per Harvard standards, in her dissertation. The former Harvard president has now been hit with nearly 50 allegations of plagiarism affecting eight of her 17 published works.
The AP’s piece also went after Rufo for celebrating after Gay announced her resignation, claiming that his use of the word “scalped” in a social media post “invok[ed] a gruesome practice taken up by white colonists who sought to eradicate Native Americans.” Scalping was a common practice used by American Indian warriors — both in intertribal conflicts and clashes with European settlers — to achieve honor and to showcase their victims’ scalps as a trophy.
You’d think nothing in the article could top the headline, but then you see @AP’s definition of scalping. https://t.co/BaC9cJaBjs pic.twitter.com/WORZ2IqISp
— John McCormack (@McCormackJohn) January 3, 2024
“It’s almost like the @AP buried the lede,” said The Dispatch Editor-in-Chief and CNN contributor Jonah Goldberg. “‘Taken up by white colonists’ is a polite way of saying the settlers culturally appropriated the indigenous custom.”
Hayden Daniel contributed to this report.