Harvard President Claudine Gay’s resignation followed weeks of mounting accusations that she lifted language from other scholars in her doctoral dissertation and journal articles.

The downfall of Harvard’s president has elevated the threat of unearthing plagiarism, a cardinal sin in academia, as a possible new weapon in conservative attacks on higher education.

Claudine Gay’s resignation Tuesday followed weeks of mounting accusations that she lifted language from other scholars in her doctoral dissertation and journal articles. The allegations surfaced amid backlash over her congressional testimony about antisemitism on campus.

The plagiarism allegations came not from her academic peers but her political foes, led by conservatives who sought to oust Gay and put her career under intense scrutiny in hopes of finding a fatal flaw. Her detractors charged that Gay — who has a Ph.D. in government, was a professor at Harvard and Stanford and headed Harvard’s largest division before being promoted — got the top job in large part because she is a Black woman.

Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist who helped orchestrate the effort, celebrated her departure as a win in his campaign against elite institutions of higher education. On X, formerly Twitter, he wrote “SCALPED,” as if Gay was a trophy of violence, invoking a gruesome practice taken up by white colonists who sought to eradicate Native Americans.

“Tomorrow, we get back to the fight,” he said on X, describing a “playbook” against institutions deemed too liberal by conservatives. His latest target: efforts to promote diversity, equity and inclusion in education and business.

  • @ashok36
    10•11 months ago

    “SCALPED,” as if Gay was a trophy of violence, invoking a gruesome practice taken up by white colonists who sought to eradicate Native Americans

    Maybe I’m showing my ignorance here but isn’t the author getting this backwards? I know, of course white people scalped their foes sometimes, but my understanding was that scalping was far more prevalent among native Americans.

    • @givesomefucksEnglish
      16•11 months ago

      Scalping happened world wide, earliest examples tho are Northern Europe.

      However, scalping was so prevelant in America, because American colonies paid for Native scalps like animal pelts. Specifically wolve/Coyote pelts.

      So while Natives might have taken scalps as a trophy from a mighty warrior they killed, it wasn’t exactly common.

      Until they started coming across Native villages where everyone (including women and children) were scalped while alive and left to die slowly.

      So the Natives started doing it back.

      The reason we only heard about Natives doing it, is because America wanted Americans to think of them as violent savages. So a couple generations later, and we started getting people who believed like you do

    • Piranha Phish
      5•11 months ago

      Yeah, I was scratching my head at that as well.

      • blargerer
        7•11 months ago

        While its true that some First Nation’s practiced scalping of defeated enemies for hundreds or thousands of years, it’s also true that some English Colonies had a bounty on dead First Nations to encourage genocide, and one way this was confirmed was with a scalp rather than full dead body or head.

    • @[email protected]English
      1•11 months ago

      It tended to be that Native Americans would do it in or after battle/fighting an enemy. But in response, colonists, particularly those “settling” the West, started offering standing rewards for every Native Americans scalp people could collect. Many white colonists then ended up scalping every Native Americans they could find, regardless of enmity, and even scalping others as well, such as railroad workers, in order to pass off their scalps as those of Native Americans. All to say that, yes, much like many things, scalping was a tradition of another culture that colonists adopted and took much further.