Claudine Gay has now lost her job as president of Harvard University due to a startling procession of revelations showing many plagiarized passages in her comparatively short and pedestrian roster of academic publications. Her position had already been weakened by her disastrous performance at a congressional hearing into Harvard’s tolerance for antisemitic harassment of Jewish students. Harvard could abide Gay’s indulgence of bigotry and her embrace of the ideology that breeds it, but it ultimately could not stomach the embarrassment of academic malfeasance in the service of academic mediocrity.
It is only fitting that a major plagiarism scandal — one big enough to bring down the leader of the nation’s most prominent university — should erupt on the watch of Joe Biden, the nation’s most prominent plagiarist. The tales of Biden’s plagiarisms run the gamut from academic dishonesty to cribbing other people’s rhetoric to stealing other people’s life stories. Combined with a battery of lies inflating his own academic record, they sank his first campaign for the presidency and made him a national laughingstock. They sit comfortably alongside a lifelong pattern of fabulism that continues to this day. Yet they did not ultimately stop him from advancing to the nation’s highest office.
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