An Ideal Harvard

I was going crazy trying to remember what the whole Claudine Gay imbroglio reminded me of; imagine my excitement, and chagrin, when I realized it was the obscure Oscar Wilde screen adaption after which this very blog is named! An Ideal Husband, starring a luminous Cate Blanchette and a young, unspoiled Jeremy Northam, is a gem from the late 1990s cinematic renaissance of Victorian drawing room comedies; see if it you can.

But first, allow me to introduce you all to Mrs. Laura Cheveley.

She's bad news, obviously. The haircut is a dead giveaway (has any woman with those bangs ever not been up to no good?), but it's barely the tip of the iceberg. Cheveley is a conniving, grasping, socially-climbing succubus who has arrived in London with one goal: to ruin the career and reputation of one Lord Chiltern, a political wunderkind recently appointed the secretary of something-or-other in the British government. The important thing is, Chiltern has power. And if he doesn't endorse the Argentine canal scheme into which Mrs. Cheveley invested a considerable amount of money, she's going to publicly accuse him of the worst sort of misconduct: selling cabinet secrets to a financier friend who made a fortune off the information. 

First of all, how dare she. It is a scandal, an outrage, a baldfaced attempt to destroy an honorable and decent man — one who has spent his life in public service to his country! Not only that, but Mrs. Cheveley is the worst, and everyone knows it.

Which is why it’s so awful that she also happens to be right. Chiltern did indeed abuse his position to tip off a friend, who made an investment, which made him millions, a portion of which was then funnelled back to Chiltern by way of saying thanks for that crime you did (the evidence of which he stuipdly put in writing, which means that not only does Cheveley know everything, she's got the receipts, too.)

Obviously, there are certain key differences between this thing and the Claudine Gay thing (for one, this thing involves a lot more saucy winky British sexual subtext), but what struck me is how Chiltern's justifications for his crime run in near-perfect parallel to the plagiarism discourse. Sure, he did a naughty thing, but c'mon! He was young and ambitious and needed the money, and other politicians have done just as bad if not worse, and it was a victimless crime, and Mrs. Cheveley sucks so bad anyway, and and and. There's even a surprise appearance by the contemporary (or so I thought) trope of the Hapless Kidult, as Chiltern laments his ruination over misdeeds committed when he was a mere infant just shy of his mid-twenties.

SIR ROBERT CHILTERN. [Pacing up and down the room.] Arthur, do you think that what I did nearly eighteen years ago should be brought up against me now? Do you think it fair that a man's whole career should be ruined for a fault done in one's boyhood almost? I was twenty-two at the time, and I had the double misfortune of being well-born and poor, two unforgiveable things nowadays. Is it fair that the folly, the sin of one's youth, if men choose to call it a sin, should wreck a life like mine, should place me in the pillory, should shatter all that I have worked for, all that I have built up. Is it fair, Arthur? 

The other key difference, of course, is that we are meant to understand Chiltern's bewailments for the absurd, writhing self-justifications that they are, whereas Claudine Gay's defenders are saying all this stuff in absolute earnest. 

I wish they wouldn't. Because look, maybe it's true that everybody does this. Maybe academia really is just as rife as politics with corruption and corner-cutting and naked grasping ambition, all of which is only a problem if you're unlucky enough to get caught. And when it comes to who does get caught, and why, and by whom, maybe this, too, isn't the most morally pristine of processes; like Mrs. Cheveley, maybe the people who stand to benefit the most from exposing bad acts are, themselves, bad actors. 

But surely none of this is news to Claudine Gay, who had to know exactly what kind of game she was playing when she chose to pass off the language of other academics as her own — just as she had to know what kind of chance she was taking when she accepted the top job at the most prestigious university in the country.

Honestly, it seems bizarrely belittling of her that so many people want to pretend otherwise. Plagiarizing your way to the presidency of Harvard is not some small-stakes scam, and the type of person who manages this is not some hapless idiot. And she almost got away with it! To quote Chiltern, once he stops blubbering about the unfairness of being held accountable for his youthful indiscretions: "I tell you that there are terrible temptations that it requires strength, strength and courage, to yield to. To stake all one's life on a single moment, to risk everything on one throw, whether the stake be power or pleasure, I care not — there is no weakness in that. There is a horrible, a terrible courage."

If letting Claudine Gay keep her laurels is out of the question (it is, clearly), at least she can continue to rest on an extremely brass set of balls.