It’s still a man’s world
In high school back in the 20th century, I wrote my English language paper for the New York state Regents examination on the topic “It’s a Man’s World.’’ Deriding that reality using examples big and small, I could not know that many decades later men — Black and Caucasian alike — plausibly accused of plagiarism could still get elected as president of the United States, yet a high-profile Black woman so accused had to vacate the presidency of Harvard University.
Did he cheat?
Before his later election as president of the United States in 2020, Senator Joe Biden dropped out of his run for president in 1988 and 2008. Charges of plagiarism against him took center stage in his 1988 presidential Democratic nomination bid.
In addition to claims that he appropriated the words of British and American politicians as he campaigned in 1988, reports of him cheating as a 1960s student at Syracuse University College of Law dogged him as well.
At issue in Syracuse was a course in which he was reported to have appropriated material from a Fordham Law Review article without required scholarly attribution. It is further reported that he was made to repeat the course, and that he passed it.
I was the Syracuse University chief communications official (spokesperson) at the time the reports of Biden’s alleged law school plagiarism were swirling. Inundated with nebby (Pittsburghese for nosy) reporters’ questions, I invoked the Federal Buckley Amendment, responding, ‘’Under the Family Rights and Privacy Act, student academic records are confidential.’’
Joe Biden withdrew from the 1988 race.
Twenty years later, after losing his 2008 Democratic presidential nomination race, Mr. Biden was elected vice president of the United States. Today — as the world knows — Joe Robinette Biden is the 46th president of the United States States, having beaten adjudged rapist and real estate fraudster Donald Trump for the presidential title in 2020.
In 2008 the tall, skinny, littleknown African American U.S. senator from Illinois with the uncommon full name of Barack Hussein Obama had also run as a Democrat seeking the nomination for U.S. president. He became America’s first African American president. He was reelected in 2012. Joe Biden served as his vice president during both his terms.
Speechifying in Wisconsin for that 2008 nomination, Mr. Obama borrowed heavily without attribution from a 2006 speech by Massachusetts Gubernatorial aspirant Deval Patrick as he campaigned for governor. In both the Patrick and later Obama addresses famous phrases of FDR, JFK and MLK were used. His rival for the Democratic presidential nomination Senator Hilary Clinton roundly criticized him, declaring that his speech about the power of words ought to ‘’be his own words,’’ not Deval Patrick’s.
Gifted and Black
Barack Obama and Deval Patrick are both gifted and Black brainiacs who graduated from Harvard Law School. Obama was a Nobel Laureate and, in his student days, the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review, among numerous other distinctions. Deval Patrick gave a pass to his friend of 15 years, dismissing the Clinton critique.
Late last year, three women presidents of distinguished universities — two Ivy League — were hauled before the U.S. Congress to give testimony regarding their respective institution’s policies regarding campus antisemitic protests concerning the current Israeli/Hamas conflict.
Two of the women resigned their presidencies in the uproar that followed their congressional appearances. Although the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, biologist Sally Kornbluth, remains in office, lawyer Mary Elizabeth Magill of the University of Pennsylvania and political scientist Claudine Gay of Harvard are no longer CEOs of their respective schools.
Added to the kerfuffles, in the case of Harvard’s first Black woman president, is a plagiarism allegation. On December 10, 2023, she resigned as Harvard’s president. Like Joe Biden, she is charged by critics with plagiarism in her student days and in her later professional life.
Claudine Gay earned her Ph.D. at Harvard after writing a dissertation that won academic distinction. That paper came under attack this winter after her congressional testimony, occasioning her to revise it and to revise two subsequent scholarly journal articles.
In defense of Dr. Gay, Harvard is reported to have stood by her, denying that she violated the University’s academic integrity standards. Nonetheless, her dissertation was revised and her resignation was accepted. Meanwhile, the Harvard dust up and protests concerning Israel and Hamas continue.
Will she rise?
Two men associated with plagiarism became U.S. leaders of the “‘free’’ world. The first Black woman to head one of the two topmost universities of that world (Oxford being the other) is toppled after plagiarism issues arose following her congressional testimony misstep.
But she is a young woman. In this man’s world, will she rise like a Phoenix? Will she become a Joe Biden and a Barack Obama?