RUTHFULLY YOURS

Folks, I do not regret to inform you even in the slightest bit that Christopher Rufo is at it again. Or rather, he continues at it. After he and the journalistic team at the Washington Free Beacon combined to light a fire that ended up incinerating former Harvard president Claudine Gay — it was not her repulsive testimony before Congress that toppled her but the revelation that her already threadbare academic career had been stitched together in large part from the plagiarized work of other, better scholars — he has now pressed forward with an investigation and public rhetorical assault on others similarly situated in the woker spheres of academia. (“Alphabet-soup land,” as I’ve taken to calling it.) At the present moment, Rufo claims to have made embarrassing revelations about former Michigan State professor Lisa Cook (currently a Federal Reserve governor), and prior to this he had flagged the plagiaristic misdeeds of a Harvard Extension administrator and an assistant professor of sociology there.

And by gum, Harvard’s young and comically ingenuous students are not taking it lying down. They have noticed that each of these people is a black female — Rufo, loquaciously online as always, has been happy to point it out to them — and have begun to harbor suspicions that Rufo might be, well, you know . . . a racist. And almost certainly a misogynist, but no need to overdetermine things. (The fact that all of these people are pretty much nailed dead-to-rights on the merits is of course immaterial in this analysis, in exactly the same way that traffic cameras in Chicago were — this is not a joke — deemed “racist” by ProPublica and the city council because they kept disproportionately flagging the wrong demographic of driver. “Equity” in action, my friends.)

I therefore salute Harvard Crimson opinion columnist Maya Bodnick for standing up to Rufo’s transparently racist, reactionary agenda. She sounds the alarm in the title of her piece: “A Witch Hunt Is Targeting Black Harvard Faculty.” First they came for Claudine Gay, she says. Then the Free Beacon tossed the school’s chief DEI officer into the frying pan for a quick sizzle. Now they’re coming for our beloved untenured faculty:

Clearly, the right has an agenda: crafting a narrative that Black academics, particularly women and those who study race, disproportionately plagiarize.

But plagiarism has nothing to do with race, gender, or identity — rather, it’s a broad problem in academia. [. . .] Frankly, it’s very troubling that the Harvard administration has let Rufo and his allies dominate the plagiarism conversation. The University has stuck its head in the sand, ignoring the gigantic bullseye on the backs of Black female faculty. It’s time to take back control.

The critical first step? Harvard should conduct a broad plagiarism review of the entire faculty. I believe that this review will at last set the story straight and reveal that plagiarism is an issue for many academics across demographics and disciplines — it’s not just a Black, female, DEI issue.

Yes, let’s. Your terms are acceptable. You have, in fact, offered up such a fine idea that I not only immediately move to adopt and implement it but propose to expand it: Why stop at faculty? Let’s look at Harvard’s administrators too, who secure their jobs in large part on the basis of their academic credentials. In fact, since Harvard is such a trend-setting institution within the elite academy, why not spearhead an Ivy-wide initiative to get Yale, Princeton, Penn, Columbia, and Dartmouth to review their faculties’ plagiarism records in exactly the same way? (Nobody cares about Brown or Cornell.) And if plagiaristic violations are found, then may a thousand professional guillotine blades simultaneously plummet — or else the entire concept of academia would instantly discredit itself in a way it can never fully recover from in modern American society.

Which, of course, is the point. Christopher Rufo is not a stupid person. He — we, all of us who are increasingly disgusted with the corruption of higher learning, eager to kick at its termite-gnawed balsa-wood struts to bring the entire rotten edifice down upon itself — are practically begging for Harvard to throw us into this briar patch. The Left seems to think that the Right’s skepticism toward academia is based entirely on phobias and atavistic “-isms”: racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc. (When they’re being more generous, they patronizingly chalk it up to the simple inability of low-IQ rockheads to keep up with their elevated intellectual discourse.)

No — our problem is that we think that most of you are phonies even by the standards you claim to set for yourselves. And when I say “we,” I do not speak solely for ideologues like Rufo or myself, or even for conservatives at large: An increasingly vast swath of American society has come to realize that, outside of the hard sciences, the majority of present-day academic scholarship is merely one long ouroboros of self-perpetuating narcissistic folderol (viz. the explosion of “studies” and ethnic/sexual identity fields that center authorial experience above all else). So we are very much interested in discovering whether many of these academics have been plagiarizing one another lazily all these years, because not even they take what it is they do seriously as a calling — rather as a means to a comfortable and self-actualizingly prestigious middle-class end.

So may a thousand plagiarism review panels bloom. Let the sunlight shine upon the process of these inquiries as well: no closed-door cases. As Aaron Sibarium (who has led the Free Beacon’s coverage of the ongoing scandal in academia) said yesterday, “I for one would love to see a systematic plagiarism review of all Harvard faculty — with the results broken down by race, age, gender, and (especially) field of study.” Perhaps his — and my — supposition is wrong, and what would emerge is a purely normal distribution both across disciplines and ideological leanings. But I suspect not, because I know the restrictions conservative academics operate under, how most of them feel like their every move is being surveilled, and how terrified they are of drawing undue attention to themselves. (It is sadly telling that of the many right-leaning professors I correspond with on social media, every single one outside of legal faculty tweets under a well-managed pseudonym.) I’ve seen sausage being made, and I still enjoy a good bratwurst every now and then; I’ve also seen the construction of modern academic “consensus scholarship” behind the scenes in the past 20 years — and there’s a reason I no longer consume it.