Written by by William A. Jacobson at legalinsurrection.com
I’ve never been one of those “be true to your school” types. I feel no real allegiance or loyalty to Hamilton College or Harvard Law School. I never really fit in either place (a life pattern, it seems). Even if I had, I still wouldn’t understand the psychological grip that colleges have on alumni, it seems highly manipulated.
The only school-related place and people to whom I have allegiance are my childhood and high school friends, because “mentally and emotionally I’m still 17, it’s 1977.”
But enough about me.
Which brings me to Claudine Gay. She’s a real piece of work, we are finding out, as her plagiarism scandal unfolds. This from Wesley Yang is devastating and infuriating:
Carol Swain grew up in a shack without running water with 11 brothers and sisters. She was much feted in academia upon her emergence but quickly engaged in heterodoxies that got her blackballed and went on to become an evangelical Christian and a Trump supporter. That’s why her outraged demands for accountability for Claudine Gay stealing her work carry no weight with anyone that matters. She lacked the implicit knowledge of how to stay within the right-thinking consensus that Gay learned at Exeter and therefore became a pariah while Gay made a rapid ascent to the very pinnacle of all academic leadership.