'Step down': Expert urges GOP activist to condemn SCOTUS justice’s plagiarism history

Harvard University President Claudine Gay announced her resignation Tuesday, January 2, following weeks of criticism of her testimony during a December antisemitism on college campuses Capitol Hill hearing, as well as accusations of plagiarism.

The Harvard Crimson reports, "Though Gay initially signaled that she would try to weather the charges of plagiarism, at first defending her scholarship and then making a series of corrections, the steady stream of new allegations — which continued to roll in during the final days of her presidency — only added to doubts about Gay’s fitness to effectively lead Harvard."

A Wednesday, January 3 report from Politico notes conservative activist Christopher Rufo "has been at the forefront of a sprawling campaign to force Gay to resign," and "was in a celebratory mood" after she announced her exit.

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Author and editor at The Yale Review, James Surowiecki, took to X (formerly Twitter) to write, I assume Christopher Rufo will now move on and insist that Neal Gorsuch step down from the Supreme Court, given that he plagiarized parts of his 2006 book 'The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia'" — and he attached a screenshot from a 2017 Politico article, which includes a side-by-side of language from Gorsuch's book and language from a 1984 article in the Indiana Law Journal."

Surowiecki went on to write, "The defenses of Gorsuch's lifting, btw, were remarkably similar to the defenses of Gay's work: it was just 'sloppy,' not 'mendacious' or malicious, and was not serious because while it copied language, it didn't involve the purloining of ideas."

Per Politico's 2017 report, documents provided to the news outlet "show that several passages from the tenth chapter of his 2006 book, 'The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia,' read nearly verbatim to a 1984 article in the Indiana Law Journal. In several other instances in that book and an academic article published in 2000, Gorsuch borrowed from the ideas, quotes and structures of scholarly and legal works without citing them."

According to the report, despite former President Donald Trump's White House at the time denying any "impropriety," there were "six experts on academic integrity contacted independently by POLITICO" who "differed in their assessment of what Gorsuch did, ranging from calling it a clear impropriety to mere sloppiness."

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