Claudine Gay's Defenders Shoot the Messenger

CLAUDINE GAY RESIGNED as president of Harvard University in January, following numerous allegations that she plagiarized passages in her published works. But in some corners of the media, the fact that she committed plagiarism mattered much less than the fact that it was conservative writers who caught her.

- Robby Soave

Aaron Sibarium, a reporter at the right-leaning news website The Washington Free Beacon, performed the lion's share of the digging. Christopher Brunet, a conservative writer; Christopher Rufo, a conservative writer and activist; and Phillip Magness, a libertarian economic historian, also made important contributions. Their allegations were very serious, and what they found led many commentators-including Harvard students to conclude that she should be held accountable. Even The Harvard Crimson's editorial board, writing in support of Gay, nevertheless acknowledged that she had committed plagiarism and that the university's investigation had been inadequate.

Gay's defenders said the charges against her lacked importance and that she was guilty of mere sloppiness-failing to sufficiently paraphrase the passages she had copied. This position became less tenable after subsequent reporting from Sibarium revealed that she had in fact committed traditional plagiarism as well: copying passages from other scholars without citing them.