“Why is Harvard giving Claudine Gay ‘plagiarism privilege’?” asked the New York Post editorial board Saturday.

It must be a rhetorical question. Professor Carol Swain, who was ripped off by Gay and complains “I feel like her whole research agenda, her whole career, was based on my work,” has some idea.

“A white male would probably already be gone,” Swain, a black woman herself, told journalist Christopher Rufo recently.

Instead, Gay, who assumed Harvard’s presidency just this July, is being retained and defended by her ivy league school. Never mind that investigation has thus far “left four of her 11 peer-reviewed papers flagged for possible plagiarism, plus her thesis,” relates the Post. Never mind that Swain isn’t the only academic upset about Gay’s appropriation of their writings. Never mind that Harvard has frequently expelled students for plagiarism. The accountability Gay must endure is that she’s being allowed to “correct” her work so she can continue enjoying a position obtained via academic fraud.

It’s a bit like robbing a bank, letting smarter people invest the money for you and parley it into a fortune and then, being caught 25 years later, being allowed to return the original sum (without interest) and continue enjoying the opulence your thievery has granted you. It’s what a different ivy league president might’ve said was “an example of ‘inverse racism’ by a bunch of white liberals ‘embarrassed by... [their institution’s] makeup.’” And that man, ex-Columbia head William McGill, did say that more than two decades ago about what may be the mother of all cases of black plagiarism privilege.

In fact, if there is a defense of Gay, it’s that she has countless co-conspirators: A woke (mostly) white world that has for decades helped enable left-wing-favored blacks’ plagiarism. For example, early-20th-century black author Pauline Hopkins’s rampant plagiarisms, the Journal Oxford Academic suggested some years back, were perhaps just “inspired borrowings.” (Hmm, if she was only “borrowing, when did she “give them back”?) There’s also “American Nigerian” scribe and serial transgressor Jumi Bello — who, among........

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