You Cannot Give These People an Inch

Claudine Gay, Substack and the institutions giving bad faith actors the benefit of the doubt.

I didn’t write anything about the Claudine Gay plagiarism situation back when it was a little more timely because I didn’t have a lot to say. I’m not an academic. My background is in journalism and the standards for plagiarism in journalism are pretty different than they are for academia. 

Moreover, I am blessed to not be associated with any Ivy Leagues and plan to keep it that way. That our nation’s biggest newspapers spent weeks breathlessly reporting on every twist and turn of this drama felt more like a group of Ivy journalists who found a way to make their personal Slack chitchat everyone else’s problem than it did an actual news story requiring the nation’s attention.

But as the dust settles, the story has continued to interest me because (a) I found a few points personally vexing and (b) it seemed more and more like a microcosm of a much bigger issue that’s pretty relevant to all of us. The question at the heart of the Claudine Gay plagiarism situation is: How seriously do we really need to take these trolls? And the answer has become very clear to me: Not at all. You cannot give these guys an inch.