In its statement vowing to back Harvard President Claudine Gay today, tomorrow, and forever, the Harvard Fellows took up the issue of Gay’s plagiarism. The Fellows asserted that Gay “is proactively requesting four corrections in two articles to insert citations and quotation marks that were omitted from the original publications.” I translated “proactively” as meaning “when she was caught.”

I stand by my translation.

The statement dated Gay’s proactive voyage to “allegations regarding three articles” brought to the university’s attention “in late October.” To piece out the rest of the story, we can now turn to Isabel Vincent’s New York Post account in “Harvard covered up a secret plagiarism probe into president Claudine Gay during antisemitism storm — threatened The Post.”

From Vincent’s story we learn that the “allegations regarding three articles” were brought to the university’s attention by the Post itself, which was investigating Gay’s plagiarism. When the Post requested comment and awaited the university’s promised response, “on Oct. 27, The Post was sent a 15-page letter by Thomas Clare, a high-powered Virginia-based attorney with the firm Clare-Locke who identified himself as defamation counsel for Harvard University and Gay.”

From Vincent’s story we can infer that the 15-page letter threatened the Post with a lawsuit and that it in fact inhibited the Post from reporting on the “allegations regarding three articles.” The Post left the story to others, such as the Washington Free Beacon’s Aaron Sibarium in “‘This is Definitely Plagiarism’: Harvard University President Claudine Gay Copied Entire Paragraphs From Others’ Academic Work and Claimed Them as Her Own.”

From the Harvard Fellows we learn that the deep meaning of “proactive” is “engage high-powered counsel to threaten the newspaper with a lawsuit” and prevent the story from coming to light. It worked for a while and then it didn’t. In retrospect, the statement of the Harvard Fellows can be seen as reactive — as lies heaped on disgrace.