CAMBRIDGE, Mass. On a campus that has recently been riven by conflict over competing claims to faraway Palestinian land, it was a moment to warm the hearts of even the fiercest political opponents: Emily Greenstein, a senior at Harvard University from New Rochelle, New York, hugging her classmate Laila Najim, wearing a keffiyeh that signaled her solidarity with Hamas terrorists. “We have so much in common,” said Greenstein with a lump in her throat. “I know,” Najim replied. “If they take away our right to plagiarize, I’ll never graduate.”
The two young women are referring to what some say may bring down Harvard President Claudine Gay even if she survives calls for her resignation for botched Congressional testimony over harassment of Jewish students on campus; numerous claims, most of which appeared to be valid, that she has indulged in plagiarism throughout her academic career.
It’s not cheating if you get away with it.
“Harvard people are busy, and don’t have time to write their own material,” said Doris Kearns Goodwin, a Harvard graduate and overseer who was accused of plagiarizing Lynne McTaggart’s prior work “Kathleen Kennedy: Her Life and Times” in her book “The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys.” “We have to appear on public television a lot and collect honorary degrees from cow colleges, it’s exhausting.”
Tribe: “Who has time to write? I’m too busy being cited.”
Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe was credibly charged with using sentences lifted from University of Virginia Professor Henry J. Abraham in his 1985 book “God Save This Honorable Court.” “My mind, like the common law, is a brooding omnipresence,” Tribe replied, echoing–without attribution–a phrase used by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. in a dissenting opinion. “I’m on social media all the time since I’m never going to be on the Supreme Court, and when I see a nifty phrase or paragraph, I’m entitled to take it.”
Harvard University is known as the world’s most prestigious institution of higher learning in the 617 area code, regularly out-ranking Tufts University in nearby Medford, Massachusetts, which is named after American stage, film and television actor Sonny Tufts. Harvard was founded in 1636 and its motto–“Veritas,” Latin for “truth”–was stolen from the Holy Roman Empire by pranksters following the initial Harvard-Yale game. It was placed atop the Great Dome at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology along with a plastic cow from the Hilltop Steakhouse, a now-defunct restaurant in Saugus, Massachusetts.
Hilltop Steakhouse cow atop MIT Great Dome.
A candlelight vigil was held outside a Harvard Square copy center Monday night with many former enemies finding common cause in defending the right of Harvard students and faculty to cadge ideas, phrases and even entire paragraphs from the work of others, so long as they get good grades and high-paying jobs upon graduation. “Information wants to be free,” said Najim. “An A at Harvard doesn’t mean anything in Cambridge, but it’s gold to the rubes in the rest of the country.”