Recall Madonna Constantine, the Columbia University professor who made headlines last October after claiming to be a victim of a hate crime when she found a noose hanging from her door. At the time, it wasn’t public that Constantine was also under investigation for widespread plagiarism, charged with lifting others’ work without credit in numerous academic journal articles she bylined. So then it was thought that perhaps somebody sympathetic to Constantine, or Constantine herself, had placed the noose on her door to drum up sympathy for her, boning up her defense that she was the victim — of “structural racism that pervades this institution,” according to her own words.
An investigation was launched to encompass both matters and now, it seems, a conclusion:
Oh crap! I just hate it when this sort of thing happens. It not okay to be racist against her, but she got herself in the news for the noose incident so now people will notice that she has been fired. If the noose thing had not happened this would not be news. This just leaves me uneasy…