I was interviewed by The Harvard Crimson

I spoke to them on the phone for half an hour, and I was hesitant because I thought they would twist my words or butcher them. I am pleasantly surprised that it is a relatively competent and unbiased article:

• https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2024/5/23/plagiarism-culture-war-feature/

The funniest quote is this one:

That the allegations targeted DEI administrators and scholars of race was, to Brunet, simply an ironic illustration of the intellectual bankruptcy of liberal institutions.

“[DEI admins plagiarizing] is funnier than if a biology professor got hit, or if a physics professor or an English professor,” Brunet said. “They’re not real scholars. It’s a fake profession to begin with. So, when it’s fake and plagiarized, it makes it double funny.”

But I am mentioned several other times:

And amidst it all — as the Harvard Corporation met to discuss Gay’s future at the University — right-wing activist Christopher F. Rufo and journalist Christopher Brunet hit publish on a piece that would add a new element to the controversy: allegations that Gay had plagiarized large sections of her Ph.D. dissertation at Harvard.

The report was timed to make waves. Rufo, a prominent critic of critical race theory, boasted on X that their timing had been intentional. They had the tip for about a week, he wrote, and held it till “the precise moment of maximum impact.”

Rufo’s report was quickly followed by an article by Aaron Sibarium in the right-leaning Washington Free Beacon, which unearthed additional allegations spanning Gay’s academic career.

The duo — Rufo and Brunet — had successfully hijacked the conversation, expanding a ballooning national scandal over antisemitism at Harvard to include both Gay’s academic credentials and the school’s diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, which they said were to blame for Gay’s presidency.

The Corporation, backed into a corner, could not ignore the new attacks. After a review of Gay’s work, they said that though Gay would submit seven corrections to add citations across her dissertation and published works, they found that she had not committed academic misconduct.

…

Rufo has rejected the notion that his work has racial motivations, as have Sibarium and Brunet. Still, he was startlingly candid about the demographics of those he had accused.

…

Brunet said he found the original tip and brought it to Rufo while he was reporting on academic fraud.

“I think the plagiarism speaks for itself,” Brunet said, referring to Gay’s corrections. “I’m just an academic scandal guy and sometimes race gets caught up there.”

…

Brunet said that he felt “conservatives have a duty to weaponize” plagiarism allegations “as much as possible.”

“Liberals would be weaponizing it as much as possible, if they could,” he said.

…

But Brunet, the journalist who reported on Gay, offered a counterpoint: institutions’ reviews are “so broken,” he said, that “there’s no other choice than to play it out in the public arena.” Brunet argued that schools are biased actors, with “every incentive to sweep” allegations against faculty and administrators “under the rug.”

…

While the threat of such reviews — and their subsequent politicization — looms larger than ever, Brunet said he believes plagiarism stories don’t have much left in the tank.

“I see the public getting tired of it eventually,” Brunet said.

“I think there’ll be one big [plagiarism] wave eventually and maybe continued stories here or there, but I don’t think it’s going to be a consistent theme for the next five years,” he added.

In other news, the SPLC is writing a hitpiece about me:

https://x.com/realChrisBrunet/status/1793708983754309673