You may have noticed that there has not been the same frequency of Christmas-related posts on EA this year. I’m sorry; it’s the most ethical time of year, but even hearing a Christmas carol depresses me right now, and I need to be in top form because challenges and crises are accumulating on all fronts, professional, familial, financial and personal. No tree, no decorations, no parties or festive social events…no fun. Sometimes life forces tough choices, and though this is one I never imagined I would have to make, here it is. It’s time to be a responsible adult. I hate being a responsible adult…

1. The City Journal (an excellent site) on the Harvard president’s scandal:

“…The hypocrisies are mounting at Harvard. The school’s academically undistinguished, DEI-happy, and arguably malevolent new president has been unmasked as a repeat plagiarist by Christopher F. Rufo and Christopher Brunet, Aaron Sibarium, Isabel Vincent and her colleagues at the New York Post, and Phillip W. Magness. After apologizing for her words before Congress with the admission, “Words matter,” President Gay, along with the rest of the Harvard machine, went straight back to disregarding basic codes of conduct and acting as though words didn’t matter. No more legalese for this president or for the 11 other members of the Harvard Corporation: just a behind-the-scenes legal threat of defamation against the Post, which was poised already in late October to break the story.

Unlike the conflict in the Middle East, which even I—an ardent supporter of Israel—admit is complicated, academic dishonesty is rarely complicated. In most cases, including Gay’s, there is no middle ground: either you are a plagiarist or you aren’t.

Gay is guilty of plagiarism by the code of conduct of any modern academic organization, certainly including Harvard and Phillips Exeter Academy, where she went to school and was a trustee until this past June.

Gay’s record of dishonesty is extensive. At last count, incontrovertible examples of plagiarism have been uncovered in seven publications spanning 14 years, including her Harvard dissertation. Any one of even her less egregious infractions—shorter phrases lifted from cited works without quotation marks—would land a Harvard student in hot water. Any one of her larger infractions—paragraphs lifted from works not cited at all—would almost certainly result in suspension. And any student who displayed this full range of behavior would be expelled.

Everyone knows this. The members of the Harvard Corporation know this. The five living former presidents of Harvard who “offer[ed their] strong support” know this. Those scholars from whom she plagiarized but who inexplicably deny that she did so, or say that they don’t care, know this.…Gay herself knows this, surely, despite saying, “I stand by the integrity of my scholarship.”

As long as Gay remains president—indeed, as long as she remains a member of the faculty—Harvard is in greater trouble than its higher-ups appear to understand.

2. More…Here is the letter to the Harvard alumni magazine authored by the most recent graduate to comment (Class of ’03). It takes less than half the letter for the writer to pivot to Trump and evil Republicans: :

Dear Dr. Gay,

Perhaps the worst part of your congressional testimony was not that you didn’t give an unequivocal yes when asked if calling for the genocide of Jews violated Harvard’s bullying and harrassment policy—it was that you responded to Elise Stefanik as if she had asked an honest question.

The same would go for telling Muslims to go back to their shithole countries, it should be noted, or saying they should all be treated like terrorists. The only real conceivable exception in either case would seem to be a satirical utterance in the vein of A Modest Proposal. But the congresswoman wasn’t interested in having a good faith conversation about the line between free speech and bullying and harassment, or the line that leads from rhetoric to action…or even about whether anyone at Harvard had actually leveled this particular charge, or was it merely a hypothetical. She wanted to use you as a political prop, and you let her.

If you’re going to apologize for anything, you should be apologizing for that.

If it’s any consolation, at least you’re not alone in this matter. It seems to be a recurring problem lately in academia and in the progressive and liberal democratic traditions more broadly—this treating of the authoritarian right as faithful opposition—a seeming lack of recognition that they are playing by a different set of rules, if not a different game entirely.

This is a woman who would not say that, at the very least, Donald Trump should be barred from holding office again after his speech and behavior between the 2020 election and the events of January 6. For anyone who puts our Constitution and our country above their partisan loyalties and personal ambitions, that should have been an easy call. But she didn’t make it. Instead, she decided Trump should not be held accountable for fomenting political violence and perpetrating fraud as part of his attempt to hold on to power.

She doesn’t take her oath of office seriously, and you shouldn’t either.

Perhaps you shouldn’t have shown up at all. Remember what happened when the January 6 Committee issued a subpoena to Rudy Giuliani? Absolutely nothing. All you did by going was allow people like her to act as if they have some sort of moral authority.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t talk about antisemitism, or Islamophobia for that matter; you absolutely should. We can talk about the plight of the Palestinians and be critical of Israel’s occupation and settlement policies while also condemning kidnaping, rape, torture, indiscriminate bombing and other acts of terrorism committed by Hamas—and we can do all of that while ensuring students and the broader Harvard community remain free to express themselves and are free from bullying and harrassment.

That is what we do at Harvard: tackle difficult problems, work toward a greater understanding, seek truth. For nearly 400 years now, that single word has been our guiding principle. So by all means, have deep, nuanced, serious conversations about serious issues with other serious people. But if you’re going to engage with someone who is looking to create a gotcha moment—to raise money and elevate their status within an authoritarian movement by furthering the partisan divide in our country—and you’re going to do it on their turf, you’d better know what game you’re playing, and you’d better be fearless in speaking the truth.

3. This is going to be like Whack-a-Mole: Yet another racial discrimination suit has been filed, this one against State Bar of Wisconsin, which has been operating a “Diversity Clerkship Program” advertised on the State Bar of Wisconsin’s website as “a 10 week paid summer employment opportunity” for first-year law school students “with backgrounds that have been historically excluded from the legal field.” Students applying also have to pass an ideological test, apparently. “Successful applicants,” the program’s webpage reads, “demonstrate a commitment to diversity and a record of academic achievement.” Students who apply must write a personal statement declaring how they have been affected by diversity, contributed to diversity, or “hope[] to contribute to diversity in the future.” The program, open to students who attend law schools at Marquette University and the University of Wisconsin, is being challenged by The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL).

Good.

4. Oh yeah, the AI revolution is going to be lots of fun: The FTC has slapped Rite Aid with a five year ban on using facial recognition technology for surveillance purposes. The Federal Trade Commission determined that the company “failed to implement reasonable procedures and prevent harm to consumers in its use of facial recognition technology in hundreds of stores.” As a result, the FTC ruled, from 2012 to 2020 Rite Aid’s deployment of artificial intelligence-based facial recognition technology to identify customers who may have been engaged in shoplifting “failed to take reasonable measures to prevent harm to consumers, who, as a result, were erroneously accused by employees of wrongdoing because facial recognition technology falsely flagged the consumers as matching someone who had previously been identified as a shoplifter or other troublemaker.”

5. Who couldn’t see this coming? From the tit-for-tat files: “Some Republican officials outraged by the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision to boot Donald Trump off the state’s primary ballot have suggested doing the same to President Biden in their states,” the New York Post tells us. “Seeing what happened in Colorado makes me think — except we believe in democracy in Texas — maybe we should take Joe Biden off the ballot in Texas for allowing 8 million people to cross the border since he’s been president, disrupting our state far more than anything anyone else has done in recent history,” Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham last night. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis mused in Iowa, “Could we just say that Biden can’t be on the ballot because he let in 8 million illegals into the country, and violated the Constitution?”

SCOTUS better move on that Colorado foolery fast.