Former President Obama reportedly intervened in the battle over Harvard’s plagiarist President Claudine Gay, urging the school to keep her in place.
Obama was a law student at Harvard, so its easy to see how this issue would be personal to him.
Claudine Gay’s academic works continue to be scrutinized for acts of plagiarism and the list of examples just keeps growing, but Obama doesn’t seem to have a problem with that.
The New York Post reports:
Obama secretly pushed Harvard to keep president Claudine Gay despite campus antisemitism, plagiarism controversies: report
Former President Barack Obama has secretly lobbied Harvard University officials to stick by embattled President Claudine Gay as she faces pressure to resign for giving cover to antisemitism on campus and for committing plagiarism.
Obama, 62, a 1991 graduate of Harvard’s law school, privately urged the university to let Gay remain in office after she testified Dec. 5 before the House Education and Workforce Committee that calls for the genocide of Jews may be permissible under the school’s code of conduct, depending on “context,” according to a report out Friday.
“It sounded like people were being asked to close ranks to keep the broader administration stable — including its composition,” a source told Jewish Insider of the former president’s clandestine effort.
The report did not say whether that effort had continued after Gay’s scholarship was called into question following her testimony for dozens of instances of alleged plagiarism.
In case anyone has forgotten, Obama has had his own issues with plagiarism.
CBS News reported in 2008:
Obama Accused Of Plagiarism In Speech
Presidential candidate U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., has come under scrutiny for a speech he gave Saturday in Milwaukee and its similarities to a speech by Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick.
The website www.youtube.com has a video showing the similarities of the two speeches, and both campaigns, Obama’s and U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton’s, D-N.Y., have responded to the accusations of plagiarism.
Obama’s speech Saturday sounded similar to a speech given by Patrick in his 2006 campaign for governor, according to the video.
“Don’t tell me words don’t matter! ‘I have a dream.’ Just words. ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’ Just words. ‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself.’ Just words, just speeches,” Obama said in his speech.
Patrick used many of the same phrases in his speech.
David Axelrod managed the political campaigns of both Deval Patrick and Obama so it’s obvious how that happened. They even had similar campaign slogans. Obama’s was ‘Yes We Can’ and Deval Patrick’s was ‘Together We can.’
