My problem with the hearing was that none of the presidents had the necessary gravitas to be the president of major university. Would Woodrow Wilson or Dwight Eisenhower have been asked such dumb questions or given such dumb answers. (I'm not defending those men, especially Wilson, personally. I'm just saying that they were personages of heft in their day.)

One can't escape the feeling that Pres. Gay was what is flippantly known as an "affirmative action hire." Yes, she had credentials and experience, but she didn't have stature, which suggests to me that her writing was never vetted, which is why the plagiarism is just now being discovered. Her work had probably never been properly scrutinized.

I don't know how serious Prof. Gay’s infractions are in the eyes of academics. But I do know that they should have been discovered earlier, and I suspect they would have been discovered if hiring "the first black woman" weren't an independent goal of the people who failed to discover them. Those people did black scholars no favor.