What's baffling is that it took twenty years for this to come out, and it wasn't even the university that discovered the plagiarism.
I went to film school. It's not like I went to a college that has the same kind of academic reputation to defend as some of these institutions. Still, when I was serving as a student representative, we caught a student plagiarizing a paper that was worth somewhere about 5% of his grade in an acting class. I was in favor of immediately expelling the student. We only ended up suspending him. Still, there was due diligence done.
Academic institutions shouldn't be allowed to get away with overlooking these problems. This isn't a small thing.
We're still dumb enough to thing that a PhD means that you're somebody we should listen to. If the people looking at Robin DiAngelo's work had done their damn jobs, DiAngelo wouldn't have been able to contribute to the "anti-racist" mind virus and bilk people out of millions of dollars to listen to her word salad. If the people reviewing Claudine Gay's work had done their damn jobs, then Harvard wouldn't have gone though a period of being run by an anti-semitic, lying piece of shit.
I don't know how anybody has faith in these institutions anymore.