https://thespectator.com/topic/claudine-gay-way-words-dei-plagiarism/
Claudine Gay is a self-declared “transformational” president of Harvard University. She campaigned for the job by promising to retire the old Harvard of privilege and patrimony and to bring into being a new Harvard founded on principles of anti-racism and social justice. How is she doing?
At the moment, she is a bit distracted by allegations of plagiarism in her slim portfolio of publications. But she has a whole sea of troubles to take arms against. Let’s let her rest a moment on the shore and consider a small story from the not-always-illustrious past of America’s greatest university.
In 2007 Harvard admitted as a transfer student a young man, Adam Wheeler, who had completed his first two years at Bowdoin College in Maine. Adam had achieved a spectacular academic record at Bowdoin and would go to achieve comparable results as junior and senior at Harvard. But before he could graduate, Adam was exposed as a fraud who through a combination of plagiarism, forgery and arrant lying had faked his way through his whole undergraduate career. Julie Zauzmer, a reporter for the Harvard Crimson, provided the audacious nuts and bolts in her 2012 book, Conning Harvard.
How did Adam Wheeler get so far? He worked very hard at fooling people but, beyond that, he trusted that Harvard would never bother to double-check anything he submitted. His test scores were phony. His grades were doctored. His letters of recommendation were forged. And his essays were plagiarized. And he was right.
Wheeler’s luck ran out only when the chairman of the English Department, James Simpson, read his application for a Fulbright fellowship and discovered that Wheeler had stolen long passages from a book he knew well: Essays on General Education in Harvard College.