As I’m sure most readers here saw coming, I have elevated the Claudine Gay fiasco taking place in the halls of Old Ivy to official ethics train wreck status. This mess is not going to stop advancing or be cleaned up any time soon. The recent developments:

1. Winkfield Twyman Jr., the African-American author of “Letters in Black and White: A New Correspondence on Race in America,” authored a column for Newsweek arguing that the DEI-obsessed Gay doesn’t deserve to have “racial wagons” circled around her. “Did you know that Claudine Gay during her Harvard career has repeatedly targeted and disrupted the careers of prominent black male professors?” I did not know that, but he writes that she was behind the dumping of black law professor Ronald S. Sullivan Jr. as dean of Harvard’s Winthrop House in 2019 because he was representing Harvey Weinstein. (This episode was the major, though far from the only reason for my decision to boycott my Harvard reunion in 2022.) Twyman also writes that Gay “coordinated a ‘witch hunt’ against [black] economics professor Roland G. Fryer Jr. after his research into the killings of unarmed black men in Houston, Texas, found no racial disparities.” He concludes by stating that Gay “has waived any benefit of the ‘first Black’ defense.”

2. Roger Kimball writes in “When will Harvard give Claudine Gay the boot?,” “Gay is bad for Harvard, but Harvard is bad for the country, so her continued presence is a net positive.” He also alerted me to this, from last week in “The Manhattan Contrarian”….

3. An allegation of data falsification to go with the 40+ plagiarism incidents!

Here’s the latest from Christopher Brunet in a post at something called The Dossier yesterday: Claudine Gay has been asked for, but has refused to provide, the data that underlie a 2001 article she published in the American Political Science Review (“The Effect of Black Congressional Representation on Political Participation”). The 2001 APSR article was a critical piece in Ms. Gay receiving tenure from Stanford. In 2002, two researchers who had looked at the APSR paper — Michael Herron of Dartmouth and Kenneth Schotts of Stanford — thought the result anomalous and sought the underlying data from Gay. Herron and Schotts reported the results of that effort in a working paper they presented at the 2002 conference of the Society for Political Methodology. Brunet has obtained a copy of the Herron/Schotts working paper, and links to it at his piece. Here is the key quote from the Herron/Schotts working paper: “We were, however, unable to scrutinize Gay’s results because she would not release her dataset to us (personal communication with Claudine Gay, 2002).”…the gist [of their paper] is that the Gay paper’s methodology appears on its face to be “logically inconsistent,” so the authors asked for the underlying data, and they were refused. As far as I am concerned, failure by a researcher to share the underlying data as to published work is prima facie evidence that the data have been falsified. The ability to disprove that inference is completely in the hands of the researcher, here Ms. Gay, and there is no reason to refuse disclosure other than known problems in the data….Is there any other reason to think that something suspicious is going on here? Well, the Herron/Schotts paper from which the above quote comes appears nowhere on the internet (except as Brunet has now posted it), and there is evidence to suggest that the paper was intentionally disappeared….  Was the reason for disappearance of the Herron/Schotts paper to protect Gay, as Brunet hypothesizes? You be the judge. Anyway, it is completely in Ms. Gay’s hands to disprove any inference of data manipulation by disclosing her data. I’m somehow guessing that that’s not going to happen…

4. But wait! There’s more...How long can Harvard’s governing body continue to protect Gay as the drip-drip-drip of damning evidence accumulates? Well, if they reason like Dr. Genevieve Guenther, who has published the most head-exploding justification for Gay’s continuing as Harvard president yet, who knows? Gunther is a climate change activist, a PhD, the founding director of End Climate Silence, a faculty member at the New School, author of “The Language of Climate Politics”(among others) and, apparently, so woke that her brain no longer functions. Here is what she posted on “X”…it’s long, but it will demonstrate as few bits of prose can how thoroughly wokish biases, progressive cant, Trump Derangement and DEI mania corrupts:

“One of the most powerful English professors of the past 40 years stole an argument I made in a seminar presentation, turning it into the core of his next book. The week after my presentation, he came into the classroom and and he read a conference paper he was going to deliver at the Shakespeare Association that month, re-articulating exactly what I had said about the same material the week before. The 15 or so grad students around the seminar table were dumbfounded. Jaws on the floor.

“It was the classic Trumpy move: do something illegal, but be so blatant about it, trusting that your power gives you immunity, that somehow committing the criminal act manages to normalize it simultaneously.

“I will say, proud of my early-20-something grad-student self, that I went up to him after the seminar and said “I think we may have a problem.” To which he responded: “oh no, there’s no problem. Hamlet is a big enough play for us both to work in. Give me a hug.” And then he proceeded to wrap me into his arms and give me a full-body, pelvis-to-pelvis hug, which of course made me freeze, Jean E Carroll style, and then just smile weakly at him when he let me go, patted me on the shoulder, and breezed off down the hallway.

“At post-seminar drinks that evening (the class would always go out for beers after), the other grad students, still shocked, kept asking me what I was going to do. I think I just shrugged it off, because I soon decided that I would just let him have my idea. I had chosen Berkeley over other graduate programs not just because it was the best in my field, but also because this guy was there and I wanted him to be my dissertation supervisor. If I had to give him one of my ideas so that he would see I was smart, so be it.

“Yes, I realize that this is abject and not the way it works, and the whole story is a symptom of pre-#Metoo workplace politics, but I had no power and he had all the power and I thought he was brilliant. (I want to hug my first-year grad student self).

“Anyway, the seminar went great, although I wasn’t able to publish the paper that came out of it because, well, this professor had already circulated my argument. But again, I thought his plagiarism was a down payment I was making on an investment which would bring big returns. And he did favor me all year, in various ways. But then, over the summer, it was announced that he was leaving for Harvard. Which he must have known all along. But of course never told me, leading me on all the while. I never spoke to him again.

“Since then I’ve heard from many trustworthy sources that this guy has plagiarized arguments from multiple graduate students both at Berkeley and Harvard — AND that his (second) wife got the topic of her second book from one of her graduate students’ seminar papers.

“Again, the person I’m talking about is perhaps the most celebrated scholar in the field — and a hugely successful crossover author. And EVERYONE KNOWS HE’S A PLAGIARIST.

“So if there are any doubts over double standards — comparing one white professor stealing whole arguments to a black grad student repeating banal phrases, performing “scholarliness,” in her f***ing acknowledgements, which are not even ideas — let this anecdote help put them to rest.

“The right is going after Gay because they don’t want the kids at Harvard to have any sort of an anti-racist education and they’re not even trying to hide it. DON’T FALL FOR IT, FFS. Support Gay. Support DEI. Support anti-racism. whatever the number is now, I forget.

“And, yes, US right-wing politics are so dangerous right now that I feel like I have to defend the president of f***ing *Harvard*, which is absurd, but that’s the power of today’s white supremacists, to make *Harvard* a bastion of racial sanity. What a time to be alive.“

What a time indeed. Well, I just can’t let that garbage go without noting:

• You have to be in Stage 5 Trump derangement to bring him into this issue, but Dr. Guenther manages. This is signature significance, as well as what passes as virtue-signaling on the Crazy Left.
• “Everybody” knows her old sexually harassing professor is a plagiarist at Harvard, but she won’t reveal his name.
• It appears that she rose in academia by accepting an unethical quid pro quo deal involving good seminar grades in exchange for letting a pig get away with prohibited conduct. She had the power to make a complaint. Lots of female students with ethical principles did before MeToo, and successfully.
• Her argument literally is that because a single white unnamed Harvard faculty member  whom she refuses to name has not been sanctioned for plagiarism,  it is racist to take action against a black female Harvard president whose plagiarism has been thoroughly documented. I wouldn’t credit any argument on any topic put forth by someone who reasons like that. No one should.
• In addition to her argument amounting to epic reliance on Rationalization #1 on the list, “Everybody does it,” and #22, the worst of them all (“There are worse things”), Guenther cherry-picks shamelessly. There are over 40 identified instances of Gay plagiarizing other works and scholars in substantive passages. Her stealing of another scholar’s acknowledgements was cited by Washington Post editor Ruth Marcus as the final straw for her, not the primary proof that Gay cheats. Marcus wrote, “Now, can I just say? Acknowledgments are the easiest, and most fun part, of writing a book, the place where you list your sources and allies and all the people who helped you get the manuscript over the finish line. Why not come up with your own thanks? What does it say about a person who chooses to appropriate another’s language for this most personal task?”
• So it’s all just racism and white supremacy at work, and Gay is another victim of racists conservatives! This is a supposedly credentialed and intelligent expert, and she publicly writes this utter nonsense exposing her shallowness, bias and lack of principles for all to see, assuming it will be persuasive. Maybe to her intended audience it is. Maybe the Left’s minions are truly this far gone. Frightening. If so, the current stage of the so-called “culture wars” are more akin to a zombie apocalypse.