Rufo’s collaborators

To get a sense of how much the plagiarism accusations — evidence of laziness and sloppiness, but generally boilerplate language unrelated to the core of the work — were the actual reason Gay was forced to resign, it helps to put her alleged misconduct and the coverage it generated in context:

Stefanik’s hearing saw the leader of Penn, after the urging of some donors, resign. But Harvard announced its support for Gay. Then Rufo took a different tack, which was to push a campaign against Claudine Gay for instances of plagiarism.

The campaign relied on analyses by Christopher Brunet, a blogger who lost his job from the conservative Daily Caller after he previously made false accusations of another Harvard professor of fabricating data in his research about race. He specializes in targeting academics who work on topics related to race and gender. He therefore is neither a neutral nor especially reliable source, but he served Rufo’s purpose, and they jointly published the plagiarism accusations.

For this campaign to work, they needed mainstream media to support them. And the media obliged. All in all, it has been a very successful couple of weeks for bad-faith attacks on higher education. In just 10 days, the New York Times published 13 pieces about the President of one university in the aftermath of both the hearings and the plagiarism allegations.

Is that a lot? To provide a comparison, we would need a benchmark of a university president accused of academic misconduct at a very prestigious institution. As it turns out, Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne faced more serious accusations of academic misconduct involving data manipulation. A formal investigation was announced in November of 2022, and he was forced to resign in July of 2023. So, how many articles did the Times write about the topic prior to his resignation? Zero. And zero is probably the right number, because this is not national news until an actual resignation. But that is not the standard being applied to Gay, because the campaign is not about academic misconduct.

I focus on the Times not because it is unusual, but because it is the standard bearer for the news. It wasn’t just the Times. Other national media treated the topic as national news. Something more important than almost everything else. Something that deserves your attention.

This is dispositive. It’s EMAILS all over again. We can debate, I suppose, whether past sloppy citation practices on the part of university administrators or the failure to comply with email server management best practices should be considered issues of major importance. What we do know is that they’re not considered major issues by anyone in the political press unless prominent Republicans start campaigns suggesting that hugely important misconduct is involved for very, very, obviously pretextual reasons.

What’s also instructive is what campus issues to press does not consider worthy of coverage:

I would argue that the concerted attack of DEI on campuses is perhaps a more newsworthy story than Gay’s plagiarism. For example, in the same time frame that the Times wrote a dozen stories about Gay, the Assembly Leader in Wisconsin, Robin Vos, stepped in to prevent pay raises for all employees at the University of Wisconsin system unless DEI offices were cut. And the Governor of Oklahoma signed an executive order removing funding from DEI offices in the university system. Neither event was covered in the Times. Legislation banning DEI has become law in other states, including Florida, Texas, North Dakota, Tennessee, and North Carolina. To the degree they are covered, such events are not treated as a critical story demanding your attention in the same way that Gay’s leadership at Harvard has been. Actual policy changes related to race on larger campuses matter less than whatever is happening at Harvard.

It is entirely feasible to not treat the bad-faith framings of events by the far right as legitimate news. It’s a choice. If you are concerned about the integrity of higher ed, there are more pressing examples. A recent AAUP report on censorship and the imposition of political control in Florida, for example, is vastly more important and deserves more attention. As Paul Krugman points out, in the only piece in the Times that covered the report as best as I can tell, 430,000 students are in higher education in Florida, compared to 7,000 undergrads in Harvard. In New College, where the experiment has gone furthest, Chris Rufo and other political appointees have overseen a pattern of cronyism, censorship and incompetence. This is how they want to transform higher education.

Anyone who thinks Gay’s forced resignation will be a net victory for free expression on campus or for that matter academic citation practices is absolutely out of their mind. The Republican agenda here could not be more clear — to move as many schools as close to the New College model as possible. The question is whether you choose to resist this, do nothing, or serve as active collaborators. The choice the political press made in this case is very clear.

Christopher Rufo and Elise Stefanik understand that the New York Times wants to behave this way. They want to inflate academic jaywalking by Harvard’s president into a massive scandal worthy of weeks of wall-to-wall coverage. But it obviously isn’t, and so they need an excuse, both for their readers and for themselves. Rufo and Stefanik provide that excuse: Influential conservatives are talking about this, so we have to cover it. And that’s where Rufo’s public announcements of his dishonest propaganda campaigns helps. If he kept his mouth shut about his plans, nobody would ever have heard of him. By announcing himself a successful propagandist, he gave the news media an excuse to make him one.

Rufo isn’t a master strategist or propagandist; he just understands that what progressive media critics have been saying for decades is true, and behaves accordingly.