The Associated Press has apologized for an article it published about the resignation of Harvard President Claudine Gay that claimed the discovery that she plagiarized other people’s work was the “new conservative weapon against colleges.”
“The story doesn’t meet our standards,” Lauren Easton, vice president of AP Corporate Communications, told Fox News Digital.
The article’s original headline, “Harvard president’s resignation highlights new conservative weapon against colleges: plagiarism,” was met with backlash and ridicule on X, and was soon slapped with a fact check from “community notes,” X’s proprietary public fact-checking system.
“Plagiarism is a breach of rules for Harvard University,” the note reads, linking to the university’s policy pages. “Plagiarism—or application of the rules around plagiarism—therefore cannot be considered a ‘weapon.’”
The Associated Press responded by changing the article’s headline to “Plagiarism charges downed Harvard’s president. A conservative attack helped to fan the outrage.”
The lede was changed to “American higher education has long viewed plagiarism as among the most serious of offenses. Accusations of plagiarism have ruined the careers of academics and undergraduates alike.”
The Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo, who helped orchestrate a campaign against Ms. Gay, wrote “SCALPED” on X to celebrate her resignation.
The AP article interpreted his use of the word “as if Gay was a throphy of violence,” then went on to define scalping as “a gruesome practice taken up by white colonists who sought to eradicate Native Americans.”
Following the blowback, the outlet added to the sentence, “and also used by some tribes against their enemies.” The potentially lethal practice is known to have existed on the continent long before the arrival of Europeans.
Even CNN commentator Scott Jennings mocked the original headline’s phrasing, saying that it was “remarkable” conservatives “had the time to invent the concept of plagiarism over the last couple months.”
Ms. Gay first came under fire over her response to a question at a congressional hearing about whether calls for the genocide of Jews was a violation of Harvard’s code of conduct, to which she said it depended “on the context.”
The Washington Free Beacon then found dozens of instances of plagiarism in Ms. Gay’s academic work, ranging from missing quotation marks around a few sentences to multiple verbatim passages copied without proper citation—including in documents instrumental to her degree and later appointment, such as her 1997 Ph.D. thesis at Harvard.
The Harvard board announced it unanimously stood by its president in December, even as more examples of plagiarism were uncovered by Mr. Rufo, Karlstack’s Chris Brunet, and the New York Post’s Isabel Vincent.
Following pressure from university donors, Ms. Gay announced her resignation on Tuesday, claiming the allegations against her were fundamentally fueled by “racial animus.”
In a New York Times opinion piece published the following day, she admitted that she had “neglected to clearly articulate that calls for the genocide of Jewish people are abhorrent and unacceptable.”
As for the accusations of plagiarism, Ms. Gay conceded that “some material duplicated other scholars’ language, without proper attribution,” but emphasized her feeling that she was the victim of unjust persecution.
“I make an ideal canvas for projecting every anxiety about the generational and demographic changes unfolding on American campuses: a Black woman selected to lead a storied institution,” she wrote, describing how distressing it has been to see doubt cast on her commitment to “upholding scholarly rigor.”
