Ahem. Later today, Beege will explore the question of what exactly it takes to get fired from Harvard. For now, let’s just marvel at the intellectual gymnastics of Harvard’s corporate board, which issued a statement just an hour ago or so expressing unanimous support for Claudine Gay … while tacitly admitting her plagiarism issues.

Here’s the Harvard Crimson report passing along their enthusiastic vote-of-confidence in the integrity of Gay’s leadership:

“As members of the Harvard Corporation, we today reaffirm our support for President Gay’s continued leadership of Harvard University,” the board wrote in a University-wide statement on Tuesday. “In this tumultuous and difficult time, we unanimously stand in support of President Gay.”

Aaaaaand here’s the Crimson report on Gay’s plagiarism scandal, published just before that statement. The same board that declares that they “unanimously stand in support” of Gay announced that she’s editing her doctoral thesis from 1997. Why? Because they’ve apparently been looking at Gay’s scholastic integrity for two months without doing anything about it until it got exposed by Christopher Rufo and Christopher Brunet:

In a statement to affiliates Tuesday, members of the Harvard Corporation reaffirmed their support for Gay’s leadership. Still, they addressed concerns raised regarding Gay’s scholarship, writing that the “University became aware in late October of allegations regarding three articles.”

“At President Gay’s request, the Fellows promptly initiated an independent review by distinguished political scientists and conducted a review of her published work,” they wrote.

“On December 9, the Fellows reviewed the results, which revealed a few instances of inadequate citation,” they added. “While the analysis found no violation of Harvard’s standards for research misconduct, President Gay is proactively requesting four corrections in two articles to insert citations and quotation marks that were omitted from the original publications.”

Since October, eh? Why didn’t the board force Gay to amend these papers at that time, rather than now? And if these didn’t amount to violations of Harvard policies that would result in expulsion for students, why make her go back and edit her thesis at all?

As it turns out, the scandal involves more than just Gay’s thesis. The Free Beacon’s Aaron Sibarium found three other papers in which Gay violated Harvard’s policies on attribution, including other instances of wholesale lifting of material and passing it off as original writing:

Harvard University president Claudine Gay plagiarized numerous academics over the course of her academic career, at times airlifting entire paragraphs and claiming them as her own work, according to reviews by several scholars.

In four papers published between 1993 and 2017, including her doctoral dissertation, Gay, a political scientist, paraphrased or quoted nearly 20 authors—including two of her colleagues in Harvard University’s department of government—without proper attribution, according to a Washington Free Beacon analysis. Other examples of possible plagiarism, all from Gay’s dissertation, were publicized Sunday by the Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo and Karlstack’s Chris Brunet.

The Free Beacon worked with nearly a dozen scholars to analyze 29 potential cases of plagiarism. Most of them said that Gay had violated a core principle of academic integrity as well as Harvard’s own anti-plagiarism policies, which state that “it’s not enough to change a few words here and there.”

In other words, the Harvard Corporation board knew of Gay’s lack of integrity and intellectual rigor for weeks before her testimony in Congress blew up into a major scandal. Her performance last week was so bad and did so much reputational damage that Gay had to publicly apologize for it. Her leadership on campus has inspired alumni and donors to repudiate Harvard, allowed activists to commandeer the campus, and made Jewish students fear for their safety while Gay pushed her “safe spaces” speech restrictions to benefit the cliques and ‘identities’ she prefers. And on top of this, Gay now clearly appears to be an academic fraud, at least by Harvard’s declared standards.

And this is what inspires the confidence of Harvard’s corporate board? That speaks volumes about the corruption and decline of Harvard, and of the Poison Ivies more broadly. As I commented last night, when billionaire alum and megadonor Bill Ackman first leaked the rumor of this decision, it at least has the virtue of clarity:

In a way, this is a good development. It demonstrates that the entire institution is corrupted and toxic, not just their top executive. @BillAckman https://t.co/LuN7hkgG6t

— Ed Morrissey (@EdMorrissey) December 12, 2023

Indeed. And now I wait with bated breath to see what Beege can discover on the question of how one gets fired at Harvard, if not for anti-Semitism and academic fraud. Any opposition to identitarian policies and DEI/CRT pedagogy would be an obvious guess, but that’s too easy. That’ll get you fired at practically every institution in Academia these days.