After Harvard president Claudine Gay resigned her post amid plagiarism and other accusations, National Review senior editor Charles Cooke said on the Editors podcast that he’s encouraged by what this incident has uncovered.
“They always try to have it both ways when defending affirmative action or identity politics,” Cooke said Wednesday. “They say ‘without our beneficence, no person of color could possibly make it. Also, how dare you suggest they’ve been helped.’”
Cooke argued this case “has exposed the anti-intellectualism of many of our supposedly intellectual institutions and highlighted a shift that has led to the first high-profile failure in recent memory.” From one end to the other, “responses to the allegations have all been poor” and fallacious.
“They tried everything,” Cooke told listeners. “Barack Obama got involved. . . . They tried the race card. They tried the feminist card. They tried to redefine plagiarism. They held a fake investigation. They tried to drag it out so that people would forget about it. . . . And it didn’t work. She’s gone. No one cared.”
“I think we are seeing a palpable reduction in the power of elite institutions to bully those who are telling the truth out of their willingness to do so.”
The Editors podcast is recorded on Tuesdays and Fridays every week and is available wherever you listen to podcasts.