As I suggested in the post yesterday, bias and arrogance is a particularly toxic combination, and that is what we are seeing at Harvard now. Characteristically, the university is retreating to its traditional “Who are those low-IQ peasants to tell us what’s right and wrong?” stance.
Mediaite reported last night: “The Harvard Corporation, one of the two boards governing the Ivy League school, will meet Monday to discuss the future of President Claudine Gay in light of the fallout from her anti-Semitism testimony before Congress last week. The other governing body, Harvard’s Board of Overseers, met Sunday. Tensions are reportedly high at both boards over whether taking action would be worth it appearing that Republican. Rep. Elise Stefanik was able to ‘force’ an ouster.” I have not seen this anywhere else, but it’s so ineffably Harvard that I am inclined to believe it. Harvard’s leadership might decide not to take the correct and responsible action because they don’t want to appear to be bending to—yechh!—Republicans. The university would rather let its reputation and credibility fester, not to mention leaving the supposedly superior institution under the management of an administrator who has shown herself unable to handle the job, to avoid being momentarily on the same side as the people it teaches its students to despise and distrust. This is pure hubris, vanity, and pride.
Meanwhile, the faculty has generated a letter with the thinnest possible endorsement of Gay, signed by a few hundred professors as I post this including the apparently senile LaurenceTribe, once a constitutional law scholar, now a social media lunatic, who had called Gay’s congressional testimony on antisemitism “hesitant, formulaic and bizarrely evasive.”
But the letter he and the rest were asked to sign had only two sentences to agree with: “[We the undersigned] urge you in the strongest possible terms to defend the independence of the university and to resist political pressures that are at odds with Harvard’s commitment to academic freedom, including calls for the removal of President Claudine Gay. The critical work of defending a culture of free inquiry in our diverse community cannot proceed if we let its shape be dictated by outside forces.”
Oooooh, “outside forces”! Scary! Those forces consist of those who oppose anti-Semitism, hypocritical distinctions between what is acceptable speech on campus and what is hate speech or harassment, and who recognize the cultural and societal harm of the nation’s most influential university failing its obligation to teach and insist that students conduct themselves within traditional American ethical standards.
I continue to believe nothing will make Harvard bail on its first black president, whose background and training make her a virtual template for the perfect DEI university administrator….well, except that she lacks management skills. What the various leadership bodies are trying to concoct now is the strategy for saving her, not getting rid of her.
The majority of Harvard’s students almost certainly support this approach as well, even as it devalues their future diplomas. The New York Times interviewed a junior who said he did not believe Gay should leave because “her resigning would be dangerous and set a precedent for higher education that would signal that with enough resources and commitment, powerful people can cow universities into making fundamental decisions about their structure.” That student has certainly absorbed the ethics lessons of his Harvard education thus far: when you screw up horrifically, refuse to accept responsibility and blame everything on powerful adversaries with resources and commitment because you’re better than they are.
The Times was not able to find any Jewish students to interview, apparently. Perhaps they were hiding in the attics.
Seeking to find another reason for Harvard to fire Gay, some conservative “Gotcha!” specialists dug into her 1997 dissertation, “Taking Charge: Black Electoral Success and the Redefinition of American Policies” which earned Gay a doctorate in political science from Harvard. Conservative guerilla Christopher Rufo reports that “As evaluated under the university’s plagiarism policy, the paper contains at least three problematic patterns of usage and citation.” You can read his indictment: I hate this tactic. Harvard’s plagiarism definitions are extreme, and I would guess that a significant percentage, maybe even a majority, of the school’s dissertations and honors theses, subjected to the kind of line by line comparisons modern technology now allows, would be found to be “problematic.” This is another variation of the sexual harassment “gotcha”—if there is a prominent figure on the “other side” you want to destroy, canvas every woman he might have encountered over many decades until you find one who will, upon reflection, decide that his sexual advances were “unwelcome.” The sole issue regarding Gay should be her terrible handling of the pro-Hamas, anti-Jewish activities on the Harvard campus and her inability to articulate and enforce the school’s standards of acceptable campus conduct and speech.
Next I expect Rufo to track down politically incorrect emails and texts Gay sent to a now hostile ex-friend 30 years ago.
As Harvard roils, other universities are happy to see their own anti-Semitic activities go relatively unpublicized. At Yale, the Boston Red Sox of Ivy League schools, a pro-Palestinian student tried to plant a Palestinian flag on a menorah. The New York Post—you know, that untrustworthy right wing rag that claimed the laptop the Russians planted to be linked to Hunter Biden was genuine—reported,
George Washington University’s medical school hosted a faculty panel last week that declared Hamas terrorists have a “right of resistance” against Israel, according to video footage exclusively obtained by The Post.
The Dec. 4 discussion was titled “Understanding the Conflict in Israel and Palestine” and was sponsored by the School of Medicine and Health Sciences’ Anti-Racism Coalition and the Institute for Middle East Studies.
Panelists referred to the Jewish state’s military operation in the Gaza Strip as “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide,” while failing to discuss atrocities Hamas committed in its Oct. 7 attack against southern Israel, its designation as a foreign terrorist organization or that it is still holding more than 100 Israeli and US civilians hostage…
Several concerned students and faculty tried to ask questions about the panel’s presentation but were ignored — with some also berated by anonymous users in the chat box during the Zoom meeting.
Jewish students at the medical school were particularly appalled by the panel discussion and told The Post that it had only contributed to the spread of antisemitism on campus that has exploded in the wake of Hamas’ terror attack.
All of this is a natural consequence of the ideological indoctrination across higher education that Harvard exemplifies and that president Gay was hired to continue and accelerate.
Ethics Alarms 
It’s a familiar pattern: when caught doing something indefensible, go on the offensive. Try to make the catching itself the problem, rather than what you were caught at.
The Catholic Church tried this during the sexual abuse scandal of the 90s, blaming the tales on anti-Catholic forces. The police tried the same thing in the 2010s, blaming various groups with axes to grind against police. Both were at least partially true, both ignored how their own conduct swelled the ranks and influence of such groups, both resulted in the institution in question suffering a long-term loss of credibility and influence.
Now it looks like it’s Academia’s turn to learn the same lesson.
That’s going to leave a mark.
As I wrote in the previous post, I don’t think the plagiarism allegations are a serious as they make them out to be, but I don’t think they are as meaningless as this suggests. A dissertation is supposed to be original research. The accusers note paragraph after paragraph after paragraph of thinly paraphrased work copied from others throughout the dissertation. It would have taken me a monumental effort to find a paragraph that I could copy into my dissertation from someplace else, barring the Introduction. The work was original, so the work of others wouldn’t fit. This strongly suggests Claudine Gay’s dissertation was not sufficiently original for a doctorate. This calls into question her academic qualifications for the job (and the quality of Harvard doctorates). It gives more credence to the people stating that she was merely hired because of her skin color and because she possesses the correct reproductive organs. Her academic background is very narrow, she went to a elite private boarding school, followed by Stanford, followed by Harvard, followed by Stanford, followed by Harvard. This isn’t an ideal background for a President of a high-profile institution. Some experience outside the elite world of Harvard, Stanford, and expensive boarding schools might be useful in such a role.
One criticism of affirmative action is that it most benefits minority members who are already wealthy and powerful. The people that most benefit are the minorities that have already made it, but now can achieve well beyond their modest abilities while the capable poor are left out. On paper, Claudine Gay seems to fit that criticism.
I do love the fact that she offered to include a ‘carve out’ for Jewish students in Harvard’s Office of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging to get Bill Ackman to stop criticizing her. Currently, White, Asian, Indian, and Jewish students are excluded from the OEDIB protections. Racial politics at its best.
I think the issue is important. I just detest the tactic of searching for dirt to facilitate an attack on a public figure for an entirely unrelated issue. (Trump’s legal troubles are related to this.) Here’s an interesting take on the plagiarism issue by Glenn Reynolds:
My take is how original can the work be if you can just drop in a dozen or so paragraphs from other people’s work, unless it is in the introduction? That is pretty bad. Plagiarism of intros is pretty common, unfortunately. I knew a group that had a boilerplate intro for almost all of their papers. Because different authors put it in papers, it could count as plagiarism even though it was basically the longstanding ‘research group intro’ (unless the PI actually wrote it). Eventually, the journals made them stop using it.
Getting off-topic to the journalism aspect of that story, there is this:
https://blackghost426.com/
Things to note:
Qualls never said he street raced this car. He never said he street raced at all.
The car is a bone-stock 426 Challenger, it wouldn’t have been an effective street racer, especially in Detroit. The successful street racer cars of the period were 4-5 seconds faster in the 1/4 mile than this car.
Qualls just gave the car to his son and told him not to sell it.
His son is a moviemaker, interested in ‘telling stories’.
His son suddenly had all this information about his father sneaking out from time-to-time, street racing the car and demolishing all-comers. The son said the car became known as the ‘black ghost’ because no one knew where it came from or who the owner was. It just appeared, destroyed everyone, and then disappeared. However, his father said nothing about any of this.
Now, the car has sold for $1 million due to its ‘historical significance’, a tribute version of the Dodge Challenger has been made, and there is a movie coming out.
Hmmm…
“Tensions are reportedly high at both boards over whether taking action would be worth it appearing that Republican. Rep. Elise Stefanik was able to ‘force’ an ouster.””
Well, considering that, as you pointed out yesterday, 72 members of Congress have called for the resignation of Gay (and the others), an appropriate response would be “Bite me.”
But, you can’t say “Bite me,” and immediately capitulate. You have to make it absolutely clear that you will not bow to such pressure (particularly that of politicians, who have no business abusing their powers that way (or any way, for that matter)). Then, you say you are going to investigate the matter and encourage her to resign so she “won’t be a distraction from the educational mission of the school.” Then, after placating the alumni by telling them how seriously you handled the matter and valued their input, you issue another “Bite me” to Congress for good measure.
-Jut
So who are the companies that hire Harvard grads? Are they uniformly woke, progressive companies that approve of what is going on at Harvard and other schools? Are there enough of them who are either anti-semitic themselves or feel that one more pogrom or genocide of Jews is just not that big a deal to be concerned about?
If so, then it is probably hopeless to think about getting these schools to change course.
However, while there may well be plenty of woke, progressive firms out there, my feeling is that the majority of them are not on board with antisemitism and genocide. If enough companies refuse to hire these demonstrators perhaps prospective incoming students (and parents) will take note. Get your degree from Harvard and aspire to become a manager at McDonald’s in time.
One can only hope.
PBS is reporting that Gay is under heat to resign:
jvb