Claudine Gay, erstwhile Harvard University president reliably accused of serial plagiarism, resigned yesterday. It is not a victory. She should have been fired.

In a collectivist world, no one owns anything. Neither name, face, voice, nor written words.

Neither right, title nor interest in anything tangible or intangible attaches to anyone. No clothes, no food, no shelter, no means of transport, no currency, no birthright, no property. No progeny. No legacy. Everyman, and woman, is named Emanon, or Emanona.

Possessions, likewise identities, are held in common. Or by the state.

Undermining the quaint notion of the rugged individual is  the assault on speech and objective truth, denying private property,  expropriating the work product of someone else’s labors from the mind or the hand.

 In a collectivist world, ideas, or intellectual issue cannot be asserted by any individual. No one has a claim on any expressed thought or notion, neither spoken nor written, sung nor acted, painted, sketched, molded, or spun.

In a collectivist world, intellectual property is an unearned meritless construct. Likewise, valor is mere merchandise, a commodity, like a crab apple in a public park, low hanging free bounty.

Original ideas, novel theorems, new art, music, and screeds, however exceptional or tedious, can be stolen, copied, appropriated by anyone with impunity.

Theft of intellectual property, stealing someone else’s words, phrases, style, punctuation and pith, is no mere misappropriation. It ranks amongst the most egregious sins against the civilized world.

Claudine Gay is no mere sloppy pretend scholar mislaying citation note cards.  Claudine Gay is more than a petty thief, or pickpocket.  Not content with grabbing a purse, or a piece of someone else’s luggage at an airport baggage claim carousel, Claudine Gay would erase faces, birth certificates, passports, VIN numbers, and even genetic codes to claim others’ bounty as her own.

An unrepentant plagiarist as the head of the most venerable institution in the Americas, where learning, scholarship, original research, profound insights, examinations, and narratives about the natural world, and mankind’s place in it, have triumphed since the early 17^th century, Claudine Gay is a fraudulent purveyor of WH Auden’s “making, knowing, and judging,” unworthy of defense or deference.

Maureen Callahan of the UK Daily Mail provided the money quote:

“If this resignation letter proves anything, it's that Claudine Gay is an unoriginal thinker, a terrible writer, and a supremely unserious person. She was never up to this job, because in her mind, her race and gender were reason enough to deserve it.”

Claudine Gay combined sloth, envy, false witness, and theft to commit a crime arguably worse than murder. Of course, she didn’t kill a man. But Claudine Gay killed an institution.

And so, Harvard University, at the hands of Claudine Gay, joins the fallen state, akin to “Adam Lay Ibounden” for a thousand winters:

Adam lay ibounden, 

 Bounden in a bond; Four thousand winter    

 Thoght he not too long; And all was for an appil,

 An appil that he tok…

Photo credit: YouTube screengrab