Perhaps the most telling commentary on Claudine Gay’s plagiarism came from a particularly clueless Matt Egan of CNN: 

“We should note that Claudine Gay has not been accused of stealing anyone’s ideas in any of her writings. She has been accused of sort of more like copying other people’s writings without attribution. So, it’s been more sloppy attribution than stealing anyone’s ideas.”

“Copying other people’s writings without attribution” is the very definition of plagiarism. Gay’s defenders are, of course crying “racism!” This is CNN.

I never imagined I’d agree with former Obama apparatchik Ben Rhodes: 

“The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”

Rhodes knew not much more, but he did know that.

Image: Babylon Bee. Used with permission.

What Gay’s excusers, and Gay, are primarily doing, however, is avoiding personal responsibility. That’s the underlying principle of Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity (DIE) and Critical Race Theory (CRT). Accepting no responsibility means no merit, no standards to attain. No need to perform and no need to apologize. Every failure is someone else's fault. There are two types of people: oppressors and the oppressed, though there are many sub-victim groups within the latter. Oppressors can do no right, only evil. The Oppressed can do no wrong; they are eternally blameless and no standards of performance or character apply to them.  To them, personal responsibility is foreign.

Among the essential lessons one must learn on the way to eventual adulthood is individual responsibility. No one is responsible for our failures, our lies, our excuses and evasions, but us. Refusing to take responsibility forever mires us in childhood and delusion. A nation of self-deluded children contribute to the degradation of America. They apparently also go to Harvard.

Oppressors, primarily white males, are responsible for all evil in the world, and Donald Trump is their Hitlerian leader and inspiration. Only oppressors have the dubious distinction of being personally and collectively responsible for sins, real and imagined. Personally, in that they can be prosecuted for non-crimes. Collectively, in that they’re a class of never-ending political scapegoats for every imaginary wrong the Self-Imagined Elite (SIE) must right, yet never seem to get around to righting. Among those wrongs is hate, and its companion, institutional racism.  

The only reasons Claudine Gay had to resign, tragically and shamefully consigned to a near-million-dollar annual tenured professorship, were hate and racism. She was blameless, a social justice martyr, because she was committed to confronting hate and upholding rigorous scholarship. We know because she said so. In a university that valued personal responsibility, Gay’s serial plagiarism, dual demolition of donor cash and Harvard’s reputation, and her spectacular lack of rigorous scholarship and qualifications for the Harvard presidency would have been the story. Instead, the story was people noticing all of the above, and daring to speak about it. Republicans—oppressors--pounce!

Men now comprise the minority on college campuses. In part, this is due to the overt hostility they find there. They’re more than willing to accept personal responsibility for their actions, willing to be judged on merit, but they face the very real risk of DEI kangaroo courts. Share a mutually consenting dalliance with a coed and they might find themselves branded, without a hint of due process, a rapist. Ultimately, it is the dual standard of no personal responsibility for the favored victim groups of the oppressed--in this case women--that is driving them from academia. That, and an ever-shifting hierarchy of victimhood. Some of the oppressed, it seems, are more oppressed than the rest, thus more deserving of absolution.

If our universities, if America, is to regain its moral center, its preeminence in the world, the acceptance of personal responsibility—restoring merit to its essential, rightful place—is essential. Yet merit is what the SIE fear as vampires fear sunlight. Until Americans are no longer collective members of favored, oppressed victim groups or disfavored oppressors, but individuals judged as Martin Luther King hoped, by the content of their character, by their words and deeds, our national decline will continue, and Republicans will continue to need to pounce.

Mike McDaniel is a USAF veteran, classically trained musician, Japanese and European fencer, life-long athlete, firearm instructor and retired police officer and high school and college English teacher.  His home blog is Stately McDaniel Manor.