No, this is not the Babylon Bee. It is real life on an Ivy League campus. 

Claudine Gay, as you recall, is the utterly disgraced former president of Harvard University who put herself in the crosshairs by defending calls for genocide and then was exposed as a serial plagiarist. 

It seems right for a professor to teach research ethics to Ivy League students. Who better?

This is utterly amazing. https://t.co/Lh3WYBv3Uo

— Wilfred Reilly (@wil_da_beast630) April 18, 2024

I read the news earlier this week on The College Fix, and never got around to writing about it. But as it is Friday and I am in need of a bit of humor to end my week, I decided to take a stab at it. 

Harvard University’s former president who resigned after numerous plagiarism allegations is slated to teach a graduate level “Reading and Research” course this upcoming semester.

Professor Claudine Gay returned to teaching and her reportedly nearly $900,000 annual salary after resigning the presidency after ongoing plagiarism accusations and criticism of her response to campus antisemitism.

Gay looked set to keep her sinecure as Harvard President until the plagiarism scandal hit. The Board stood behind her despite enormous pressure from alums and others, but their determination collapsed when Gay was forced to acknowledge that she made some faux pas in her scholarship. 

Not even her intersectional privilege could survive the double blow. Harvard could sustain the financial costs for a while--they are immensely wealthy--but having to endure the jokes at their expense was a bridge too far. 

Gay is still getting her nice salary of nearly a million a year--peanuts to Harvard, of course--as a lovely parting gift, and I suppose she has to pretend to do some work in order to justify that yearly stipend. Harvard certainly couldn't let her go, after all. She is a Black woman and the world would spin out of its orbit before they took that reputational hit. 

Outkick had more than a little fun at Harvard's and Gay's expense upon reading the news. 

Harvard says the course does not provide letter grades. Letter grades uphold a grading system that disproportionately favors white students, several Harvard administrators argue. 

Grades are racist.  

The school adds that the course requires "written work of sufficient quantity and quality so that the course is equivalent to a lecture course or a seminar."

Got it.

Future employers can rest assured that students who pass the course will be well-equipped to publish adequately-cited work after learning from Dr. Gay… 

"Quantity and quality." You can generate the first by stealing quotes from other scholars. The second is not so easy. Perhaps people should get David Hogg or Jazz Jennings to help them with their research. I hear they got into Harvard due to stellar skills. 

Ivy league schools have gotten so far and happy that they resemble the aristocracy in a late feudal society. Merely existing as such provides all the resources and prestige that their forebears earned. 

Harvard certainly retains great reserves of scholarly resources, but those are sort of beside the point. Nice to have around and all, but irrelevant to the mission of the university anymore. It is all about being in the right class. 

And if you are a lazy Harvard student, the right class in this case is Claudine Gay's.