It’s really a shame that I have to post this today, when the Ethics Alarms traffic consists largely of metaphorical tumbleweeds blowing down the empty dusty streets. However, we know most of the news media is trying to bury the series of revelations that prove that the leader of higher education rot hired an unqualified president because she was black, female, and a DEI agent, and that because she is black and female, Harvard is employing lies, excuses and rationalizations to avoid dumping her when a white male president who had been revealed as a plagiarist in scholarship and a blathering fool before Congress would have been fired in a flash.

I know this blog is a small, tinny voice in the vast wilderness, but it’s something.

Above you see excerpts from a 15 page letter sent to the New York Post threatening to sue on Harvard’s behalf if the paper continued to report the discovery by conservative reporter Christopher Rufo and others that Gay had plagiarized the works of other scholars by using their words and ideas as her own without attribution in dozens of instances, including her Harvard dissertation. The Post points out that Harvard, through its attorneys at Clare Locke, stated that there was no plagiarism and that the allegations were false before Harvard had bothered to investigate the claims. This also means that Gay approved of the letter, which she knew was itself “demonstrably false”:

In a threatening legal letter to The Post in late October, the college called allegations that she lifted other academics’ work “demonstrably false,” and said all her works were “cited and properly credited.”

Days later Gay herself asked for an investigation and Harvard tore up its own rules to ask outside experts to review her work, saying it had to avoid a conflict of interest.

And the experts then found she did need to make multiple corrections to her academic record.

The bare-knuckled law firm Harvard employed to try to keep the plagiarism allegations from ever coming to light told The Post it would sue for “immense” damages.

Harvard never revealed an investigation had been launched as the lawyers put pressure on The Post to kill its reporting. 

But more than a month later, on December 12 Harvard said Gay had been investigated by its top governing body and was correcting two academic journals, to acknowledge where her work had really come from — meaning the claim it was “properly credited” was false…

Nice.

What this means is…

1) that Gay’s excuse for Harvard doing nothing to protect its Jewish students while terrorism- and genocide-supporting demonstrations were overwhelming the campus—that the University was committed to “free speech”— was a lie. Harvard used its high-priced lawyers to attempt to bully a newspaper, the New York Post, into censoring an accurate report that the public had every right to read.

2) that Gay again demonstrated her own lack of integrity and honesty by permitting Harvard’s lawyers to state that her published works contained no improperly quoted material before she asked Harvard to investigate the extent of her plagiarism.

3) that Harvard, whose motto is “Veritas,” has chosen to protect, deny and enable Gay rather than subjecting her to the same standards it would any plagiarizing student. Come to think of it, I have no idea if that is true any more. Maybe Harvard allows its black students to get away with cheating. At this point, I would not be surprised.

The Post goes on to tell us,

Then this week she had to correct her own dissertation after new allegations of using others’ academic work without attribution surfaced — and was hit by an official complaint from an academic at another university which alleges 40 separate incidents of plagiarism in her 11 published works and her dissertation.

Now Gay is at the center of a wide-ranging Congressional probe into her academic record and Republican lawmakers say they are willing to subpoena Harvard over the college’s apparent sham investigation.

Rep. Elise Stefanik (NY), a Harvard alumna, told The Post: “Harvard University’s pathetic record of stifling free speech has expanded beyond campus, threatening the New York Post following their investigation and coverage of Claudine Gay’s history of serial plagiarism.

“This attempt at bullying and subsequent censorship is entirely unacceptable; the Congressional investigation will use every tool at our disposal including subpoena power to expose the rot of antisemitism plaguing higher education and the hypocrisy of the poisoned ivy towers of Harvard. This is a reckoning.”

Also this week, it was revealed that Barack Obama had engaged in lobbying close associates on the Harvard governing body to keep Gay on her position. Spot on as usual, Barack! It should be obvious now that Gay’s reputation and credibility will not recover, and that as long as she is Harvard’s president, she will be a detriment to the university’s prestige and its own credibility.

As for Clare Locke—yecchh. Lawyers are not strictly unethical when they rely on their lying clients, but the letter to the Post and its empty threats when they lacked the facts to back them up are examples of American legal practice at its ugliest. Both the American Bar Association and other state bars have issued ethics opinions in recent years stating that an attorney has an ethical duty to investigate when there is reason to believe a dodgy client’s motives are suspect. The firm will doubtlessly argue that there was no reason to think the famous university with “Truth” as its mantra was lying.

Soon everyone will know that “Veritas” is a lie as well.