Some semi-alert Harvard fundraiser decided to tweak this letter to emphasize supporting students rather than the institution itself. I rule that deceitful, but it’s such an obvious and pathetic ploy that the chances of it fooling anyone with an IQ above 80—most, though not all, Harvard alums probably can top 100— are slim.
This year-end fundraising appeal arrives in my mailbox the same week that the school’s leadership unanimously supported a president who embarrassed herself, the school and its alumni in a public forum. It comes after Harvard gave tacit approval to students threatening the welfare and educational opportunities of Jewish students by refusing to take any action against other students extolling terrorism targeting Jews, and espousing intafada and genocide. While a lesser Ivy League institution, UPenn, correctly dismissed its president who made almost exactly the same tone-deaf and cowardly statements before Congress that Harvard’s Claudine Gay did, saying that whether calls for the death of Jews constitutes harassment and a violation of the school’s conduct code depends on their “context,” Harvard’s governing body submitted an absurd-on-its-face endorsement of Gay, stating “Our extensive deliberations affirm our confidence that President Gay is the right leader to help our community heal and to address the very serious societal issues we are facing.”
Yes, the most prestigious university in the U.S., among all its scholars and graduates, can’t find a better leader than one unable to explain the limits of free speech on campus, or do better under questioning than to repeat verbatim the canned answers provided by lawyers as if she were reciting “The Wreck of the Hesperus.”
Who believes that? What informed graduate not yet in the throes of senility doesn’t comprehend that the vote of confidence means, “We chose this woman because she was black and a DEI hun, and not having black alums and woke faculty rebel is more important to us than showing that we reject anti-Semitism and care sufficiently about maintaining Harvard’s reputation. “
If there was doubt that President Gay could do anything short of running naked with a bloody machete through Harvard Square and keep her job, she was also permitted to pilot “Back to the Future’s” Delorean and remove plagiarized sections of her nearly 30 year-old PhD dissertation, though it was in its illicit form when the document won her the doctorate. Although the Harvard Crimson has supported Gay (on the theory that Harvard should never do anything demanded by evil, racist Republicans) it also concluded in an investigation…
The Crimson independently reviewed the published allegations. Though some are minor — consisting of passages that are similar or identical to Gay’s sources, lacking quotation marks but including citations — others are more substantial, including some paragraphs and sentences nearly identical to other work and lacking citations.
Some appear to violate Harvard’s current policies around plagiarism and academic integrity.
The Crimson goes on state that Harvard’s own guide to “‘What Constitutes Plagiarism?”says that when copying language ‘word for word from another source,’ scholars ‘must give credit to the author of the source material, either by placing the source material in quotation marks and providing a clear citation, or by paraphrasing the source material and providing a clear citation.’” So let me get this straight: Harvard’s president, supported by its governing bodies, can continue in her job despite conduct that would get any student flunked, suspended or expelled, after revealing herself as incompetent and ill-prepared to guide the university “during these difficult times.” Evidently what matters most to the school is gender and skin shade, which, appropriately enough, is the position Harvard advanced in its losing affirmative action case before the Supreme Court, and is the box that Harvard was checking when it hired a diversity activist as its president last June.
How can Djordje learn to think “outside the box to devise new solutions” and gain “the ability to effectively solve problems and seeing that through true collaboration and shared exploration we can best grasp complex concepts” at a university that thinks and behaves like that?
Easy. He can’t.
Ethics Alarms 
Boy! Someone at Harvard is not reading your blog.
-Jut
Correction. NOBODY at Harvard reads EA. My college roommates don’t read it. With the exception of my wife, my family doesn’t read it. My neighbors don’t read it. Almost none of my 300+ Facebook friends read it.
More’s the pity for them. They miss out on an opportunity to enrich themselves greatly. Your wisdom and perseverance would do many of them good, as they have done many of us good. Merry Christmas to you and yours, Jack!
Thanks, Aaron. This is shaping up as a really hard Christmas, so I am relying on the warmth of good wishes and hope for the future.
Claudine Gay has seriously tarnished the image of black intellectuals twice now. She is no Carol Swain. I wonder if she possesses the self-awareness to recognize this and be even the slightest bit embarrassed? Except for the dedicated woke, no one will ever look at her the same. Even her husband finds her less appealing these days.
I wonder how much of what happened was on-purpose. Carol Swain seems to have a lot of the key ideas in this field. Then, Swain decided that racially biased affirmative-action was not in the best interests of racial minorities. After this, she was blackballed. However, it seems like she had a lot of good ideas and those ideas were off limits for citation (or suffer guilt-by-association). So, did the field allow Claudine Gay to plagiarize the best of Carol Swain to make her ideas available again. Did they, essentially, take Carol Swain’s career and give it to Claudine Gay? It seems unlikely that the peer reviewers, journal editors, and scholars who read the papers all missed the plagiarism.
We all know what “context” means here. It is hilarious to watch them evoke Freedom of Speech. Either they lack self-awareness or they really think Americans are too dumb to notice the double standard. Perhaps, some Americans are.
Imagine what would have happened if protesters on campus during the height of the Black Lives Matter period had joined hands to march in favor of the police, holding signs vilifying George Floyd and Jacob Blake, and chanting, “Hang ’em High”.
Would there have been any doubt that those protesters would have been in violation of the Code of Conduct? Would coding the lynching of blacks have been considered within the bounds of free speech? Would they get away with arguing that “Hang ’em High” does not mean what black citizens have interpreted it to mean and have for a couple of hundred years? Would there be members of Congress rationalizing it as an “aspirational” phrase? (BTW, what does the word “aspirational” mean? Isn’t it something you want to do? Isn’t it something you would do if you had the means and the power to do it?)
There would have been no hand-wringing about context. The mere presence of anti-BLM protesters on campus would have been considered unsafe, regardless of what was said or written on signs. The protest would never have been allowed to take place or, if it did, there would have been violent counter-protests.
The Left is increasingly “Freedom for me, but not for thee.”
I have a B.A. from SUNY Buffalo, aka UB. That’s the moderately good and not very selective research university with the old campus on Main Street just inside the Buffalo city limits. The university also has a newer and larger “North Campus” located in the nearby suburb of Amherst, NY. UB is not to be confused with SUNY College at Buffalo, which is on Elmwood Avenue, and is more of a “teacher’s college” rather than a “research university.”
Students working as fundraisers call me several times a year from a “boiler room” asking me to donate money. Long story short, sometimes I give and sometimes I don’t. Tuition was cheap when I went there in the late 1980s, and it was pretty good education for the price. Mario Cuomo was governor then, and he opposed raising tuition–it had been frozen for some time. At one point after I left the tuition was abruptly doubled.
A few weeks ago when they called I told the caller “I’m not donating this year because of the rude and belligerent students who treated Allen West (former U.S. Representative) so poorly during his visit.”
I’m sure my statement doesn’t accomplish much, but it’s a start. I plan to send in a hard copy letter in their fund-raising envelope, and I’ll basically repeat myself.
Not sure what my polemical sentence will be. Something like “There are consequences to tolerating the unacceptable behavior of ill-tempered and illiberal students.”
Hear Hear!
PWS