Harvard needs an official inquiry into how all these distinguished, tenured academic luminaries failed at their quality-control responsibilities. No different than when the FAA investigates an airplane crash. Let each witness explain how they permitted a serial plagiarizer to earn a Harvard Ph.D. when similar offenses would have brought expulsion for lessor mortals. What facilitated this academic incompetence? Was it Gay’s skin color? Her past strident racial radicalism? Perhaps her winning charm? Ample evidence suggests that everything was about “diversity.”

This trial would include dozens of Harvard faculty and administrators would testify, and, no doubt, the public would relish watching the best and brightest hem and haw regarding why they failed to notice blatant plagiarism and then remained silent. Put the Harvard miscreants under oath so if these distinguished scholars commit perjury, they will lose their tenure and be fired.

Surely a scandal for prime-time TV, and who knows, future Harvard students accused of plagiarisms may now invoke “the Gay rule” in their defense: it takes at last two dozen instances of intellectual thievery for a conviction. A whole new meaning of colorblind justice.

[Fun to think about, but it will never happen — not at Harvard, where hundreds of the faculty just endorsed Gay’s leadership regardless of the plagiarism and incompetence that’s been on display this month. Even a donor revolt that reportedly has cost the school a billion dollars in endowments so far will move that monolith away from Gay. It will take a much bigger rejection of Harvard’s graduates in the marketplace to even dent their arrogance and insularity. — Ed]