So Claudine Gay was the victim of a right wing targeted take down.

Sounds an awful lot like another term describing the cancel culture that the left believed was such a good thing just a couple of years ago.

Conservative activists unleashed a pressure campaign to oust gay, the called her mediocre, unqualified, and an affirmative action hire. And they falsely called her our for plagiarism. Let's be clear, Harvard has never accused doctor claudine gay of plagiarizing anything, she stands by her work but offered to make minor changes to improper citations. That folks, is not plagiarism.

But Gay's support started to crumble and she made the decision to resign saying, quote, "After consultation with members of the corporation, it has become clear that it is in the best interest of Harvard for me to resign so that our community can navigate this moment of extraordinary challenge, put the focus on institution, rather than any individual."

Harvard decided it was unwilling to weather the storm of criticism being brought to Dr. Gay. Gay, who became the first black president in the second woman to lead the university and all of harvard's 387-year history, published an op-ed and in the New York Times, she wrote, "It's not lost on me that I make an ideal canvas for projecting every anxiety about the generational and demographic changes of American campuses, a black woman selected to lead a storied institution."

So lets start with the obvious. Copying someone else's work and not providing citations or references is the actual literal textbook definition of plagiarism. It would be like claiming that habitual shoplifting is just a minor semantic issue where you were actually legitimately shopping and just forgot to pay again and again.

Perhaps the President of Harvard is just so sloppy that she forgets over and over to give other authors credit for what they wrote. But is that really any better an explanation than she just knowingly copied other people's work without crediting them? Either she is a bad writer to the point of being incompetent, or she is a serial plagiarizer. Either way, that is a bad look for someone supposedly elevated to the pinnacle of academia.

Symone Sanders also seems to gloss over the real word affects of what this scandal was doing to Harvard. The University had lost hundreds of millions of dollars in donations, and were looking at more losses long term. Applications and enrollment were down almost 20% since Gay took over. On top of all that was the obvious loss of prestige and the general public treating Harvard like a punch line rather than treating it like the respected institution that is has always been. But most alarming was the attitude that Gay had done and was doing nothing wrong. How could the Harvard corporation and board believe that things would get better when the President was embracing the sorts of things that were making things worse?

Either way, the meltdown over this is fun to watch, only because so many of these people are upset because what they created is now being used against them.