One could hardly ask for a better caricature of a closed-minded leftist academic than this quote from retired Harvard Law professor Charles Fried on the plagiarism charges against Harvard president Claudine Gay:

“It’s part of this extreme right-wing attack on elite institutions,” said Charles Fried, a professor at Harvard Law School and a former solicitor general in the Reagan administration. “The obvious point is to make it look as if there is this ‘woke’ double standard at elite institutions.” “If it came from some other quarter, I might be granting it some credence,” he said of the accusations. “But not from these people.”

Of course, not one of the plagiarism charges depends upon the credibility of the people raising them. This is not the sort of accusation that involves anonymous sourcing or he-said-she-said disputes over an event. It’s literally just a matter of comparing two texts. If Fried won’t read the evidence before running to the New York Times to comment, that says more about him than it does about the critics.

Which is a sad emblem of how far the 88-year-old Fried has fallen in his late years. Fried was never a social conservative, and some in the Reagan administration suspected him of not having his heart in the argument when (as Solicitor General) he urged the Supreme Court in the 1980s to overturn Roe v. Wade, a stance he later recanted. Still, he was not just the best professor I had in law school, with an encyclopedic capacity for connecting the common strains across disparate areas of law (having taught just about every subject); he was also the faculty adviser for every right-leaning group on campus, there being no other alternative. We felt adrift in the fall of 1995 when he left to serve on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, where he served for four years.

Fried, who lent his good name to the support of John Roberts and Samuel Alito during their confirmation hearings in 2005, began his turn against his old allies in 2008 when he endorsed Barack Obama, largely out of distaste for Sarah Palin’s selection as John McCain’s running mate. It’s an interesting departure point. Fried had been critical of Harriet Miers in 2005. As I noted last year, the Miers fight was a kind of early dry run for the Never Trump movement, but there was a distinction between the people who were anti-Miers and pro-Palin, most of whom have remained conservative in spite of dissenting from Trump, whereas the people who turned against both Miers and Palin have tended to drift entirely away from Republicans and conservative policy in the Trump era, because they “saw in Palin the same thing they saw in Miers: the unwashed horde.”

In Fried’s case, that drift started before Trump, as he made himself a vocal spokesman for the legal defense of Obamacare. It has continued to the point where he was last seen defending Gay’s ghastly congressional testimony on campus antisemitism. A sad coda to a distinguished career.