A MISSED OPPORTUNITY TO REMOVE THE AFFIRMATIVE ACTION ASTERISK.

A new Atlantic essay, "The Real Harvard Scandal," by Bates College environmentalist T. A. Harper, opens with what could be a Friday short take, but for the opening of the latest Friday short takes looking more like a Chicago Great Western freight train.  "Academics debase their profession when they redefine plagiarism to suit their politics."

The essay starts, as you might expect in a journal that exists to validate the Permanent Establishment, with a bout of motive-questioning.

The conservative activist Christopher Rufo, who helped kick off this controversy when he and fellow conservative Christopher Brunet leveled a round of accusations against Gay last month, has spent the past 24 hours doing a victory lap. It is this unseemly context that many academics are hung up on: In their minds, a college president succumbed to conservative pressure. And this fact is melting their brains and obliterating their standards for professional conduct. As Harvard Law’s own Charles Fried told The New York Times, “It’s part of this extreme right-wing attack on elite institutions.” And: “If it came from some other quarter, I might be granting it some credence … But not from these people.” Although the donor revolt and conservative pressure campaigns on elite universities—and, more important, public universities—are deeply worrying, the response of some faculty members to this plagiarism scandal is bound to make things worse.

Put another way, had the faculty and the trustees engaged in proper stewardship, rather than abdicating their obligations to the proper canons of scholarly inquiry, l'affaire Gay could have been avoided.

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 “sloppiness” and “technical attribution issues”—in a desperate effort to insist that lifting entire paragraphs of another scholar’s work, nearly word for word, without quotation or citation, isn’t plagiarism. Or that if it is plagiarism, it’s merely a technicality. Or that we all do it. (Soon after Rufo and Brunet made their initial accusations last month, Gay issued a statement saying, “I stand by the integrity of my scholarship.” She did not address those or subsequent plagiarism allegations in her resignation letter

Rufo won this round of the academic culture war because he exposed so many progressive scholars and journalists to be hypocrites and political actors who were willing to throw their ideals overboard. I suspect that, not the tenure of a Harvard president, was the prize he sought all along. The tragedy is that we didn’t have to give it to him.

Let us note, dear reader, the presence of the absence.  That passage manages to damn the defenders of business as usual without going down the rabbit hole of "those meanies are picking on the black woman, because racism."  That's fortunate, as Twitchy's Sam J. has the proper riposte to those arguments.  "How long do you all think it will take the media to figure out they're being racist by making excuses for the fraud because of her skin color?"  Well, yes.  Defenders of affirmative action have long slagged on many of its critics as mediocrities whose claims to jobs being filled on merit are hollow as long as there are explicit or implicit hurdles outsiders, however defined, must jump, whilst insiders get waved around.  To suggest it's racist to note that the diversity hire also got waved around the hurdle, particularly when it's a major hurdle, such as an entry-level curriculum vita, is to concede that yes, hiring committees are trading excellence for diversity, even if they don't admit it.  Mt Harper concedes that point.

The idea that clear and long-established criteria for plagiarism should have been thrown out to save the elite-born president of an elite university, solely on the basis of her skin color, is not only preposterous; it’s that old soft bigotry. There are talented senior academics and administrators of color across this country who don’t need anyone to lower plagiarism standards for them. Harvard can, and should, hire one of them. Doing so would put a thumb in the eye of the meddling right, defending the ideal of diversity while sending a clear message that neither conservative media nor billionaire alumni get to decide who runs the university.

That argument might hold for Harvard, as does anybody really care whether the football team plays on New Year's Day?

Politico contributor Michael Schaffer offers a related argument, noting that although there might be those Evil Normal Populists stacking bodies, the conventions of scholarly discourse are still worth defending.

The people who actually made decisions about Gay, who were almost all on the left and the center-left. In other words, exactly who you’d expect to be in the mix at a liberal university.

Rather than a monolith to be attacked by MAGA die-hards, elite higher ed is a world with significant existing tensions between the moderate and not-so-moderate left. Conservatives may have fanned the flames, but the divides that defined Gay’s tenure — over DEI, over Israel/Gaza, over speech and even over how seriously to take her plagiarism — were among folks well outside the far-right universe. As such, it’s a lesson for all sorts of other blue-state organizations, from think tanks to businesses to the Democratic Party.

The perpetual political turmoil doesn't interest me.  The possible superiority of conventional norms about scholarly discourse and scholarly inquiry over, say, liberating tolerance, emerges in that passage.  When it becomes unclear whether a cause is "a movement from the Right" worthy of the full force of intolerance the Diversity Weenies can muster, or a "movement from the Left" that in the Sixties was worthy of tolerance, whilst these days the Diversity Weenies will call for it to be Celebrated!  Affirmed!  Declared! and that confusion afflicts ... the very self-styled progressives in control of Harvard or Northern Illinois or any other thirteenth-grade institution, why, that is something to note, and to hail.  And say, see, I told you so.  "In time, though, the zealots begin to turn on each other ('sectarianism' being perhaps the worst thought-crime in much of the intellectual left) and thus do we get some sort of hierarchy of oppression."

The Atlantic article is worth reading in full, although the challenge confronting scholarly writing Mr Harper engages is outside the scope of today's already lengthy post.  If you're working in a field with a few central topics and a few fundamental papers and concepts, do you subject the reader to a fog of elegant variation simply to avoid referring to "landmark" legislation or a "fundamental" court decision or a "seminal" (oops, sorry, make that "pathbreaking") paper and is it plagiarism to write "Elliptic curves are modular, therefore Diophantine equations of order greater than 2 have no nontrivial solutions in integers?"  or "There is no such thing as a free lunch."  Yes, strictly speaking, you should follow that sentence of descriptive mathematics with (Wiles 1995) but do you get bounced from your deanship for not appending (Friedman 1972) to the second quote?  It's possible, particularly with multiple scholars looking for Minimal Publishable Units in the same area, that computer-assisted searches are going to come up with paragraphs that seem to be near-matches for each other.

Alas, in Professor Gay's case, it went from happenstance to coincidence to plagiarism.

Conservatives have long seen Gay as the “diversity hire” avatar of their DEI bogeymen. They wanted an excuse to force her out, so they went looking for skeletons. The problem, for progressives, is that the conservatives found a closet full of bones. As The Intercept’s Ryan Grim put it, “The right launched a witch hunt against Gay but instead found a plagiarist.” Although the initial examples of plagiarism were weak—easy enough to excuse as shoddy paraphrasing and forgotten quotation marks—a series of subsequent investigations by the conservative outlet The Washington Free Beacon found more damning cases. As Rufo predicted, the plagiarism story soon broke into the mainstream, thanks to sustained coverage in outlets such as The Boston Globe and The New York Times.

Reality bats last, and reality can't be mau-maued.  Obliterate conventions of long standing for the expediency of the moment at your peril.

I might have more to add about scholarly discourse next week.  I will address the confusion among the Diversity Weenies next week.  First I'm ready to work on the railroad for a while.