The Associated Press, discussing the resignation of Harvard president Claudine Gay after she was accused of chronic plagiarism, not only accused conservatives of using charges of plagiarism as a “weapon” to target leftists in higher education, but also decided to vilify white Americans, by writing American history from a woke perspective, saying scalping was a gruesome practice “taken up by white colonists who sought to eradicate Native Americans” and ignoring that Native Americans were scalping long before the colonists arrived.
AP published an article titled, “Harvard president’s resignation highlights new conservative weapon against colleges: plagiarism,” reporting that conservative activist Christopher Rufo — who along with Christopher Brunet broke the story of Gay’s plagiarism with later help from Aaron Sibarium— responded to the news of Gay’s resignation by tweeting, “SCALPED.” “On X, formerly Twitter, he wrote ‘SCALPED,’ as if Gay was a trophy of violence, invoking a gruesome practice taken up by white colonists who sought to eradicate Native Americans,” AP wrote.
But as American Heritage has pointed out, scalping was practiced by Native Americans long before colonists arrived in America:
When Jacques Cartier sailed up the St. Lawrence to what is now Quebec City in 1535, he met the Stadaconans, who showed him “the scalps of five Indians, stretched on hoops like parchment.” His host, Donnacona, told him they were from “Toudamans from the south, who waged war continually against his people.” Twenty-nine years later, another Frenchman, artist Jacques Ie Moyne, witnessed the Timucuans’ practice of scalping on the St. Johns River in Florida. …
The French were not alone in witnessing the Indian custom of scalping. When the English brazenly set themselves down amid the powerful Powhatan Confederacy in Virginia, the Indians used an old tactic to try to quash their audacity. In 1608 Powhatan launched a surprise attack on a village of “neare neighbours and subjects,” killing twenty-four men. When the victors retired from the scene of battle, they brought away “the long haire of the one side of their heades [the other being shaved] with the skinne cased off with shels or reeds.” The prisoners and scalps were then presented to the chief, who hung “the lockes of haire with their skinnes” on a line between two trees.
AP acknowledged, “Gay didn’t directly address the plagiarism accusations in a campus letter announcing her resignation,” but cited her plagiarism as “shortcomings”: “Reviews by conservative activists and then by a Harvard committee did find multiple shortcomings in Gay’s academic citations.”
AP quoted President Irene Mulvey of the American Association of University Professors, saying she feared plagiarism investigations could be “weaponized.” She told AP, “There is a right-wing political attack on higher education right now, which feels like an existential threat to the academic freedom that has made American higher education the envy of the world.”
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