This is not the plagiarism of Claudine Gay and Jason Arday. From what I have read, both of these people substantially plagiarized only a single author each. This has the danger of making their plagiarized works not original, but other people’s work passed off as their own. This is much more serious. In the former plagiarism, original work is done and described, only the background work is introduced using a hodge-podge of other people’s sentences. In the case of Gay and Arday, it is possible that there never was any original work, at least nothing substantial.

The first type of plagiarized dissertation is a problem because of the lack of paraphrasing of sentences. The work is worthy of a doctorate, but the work was tainted with plagiarism. The latter is a problem because there may not be sufficient original work to justify the doctorate at all. These are potentially illegitimate degrees, which is why the plagiarism is so serious. For Harvard to keep such a person on faculty is appalling. It hows the academic bankruptcy of the institution.

This is the result of the repudiation of meritocracy. To justify DEI, they had to state that merit didn’t matter, and it was racist to boot. Meritocracy is whiteness. This is easy to get away with in a field that doesn’t really matter. There is no ‘right’ way to justify black supremacy. There is no ‘correct’ way to declare that everything involving ‘whiteness’ is bad. There is no ‘right’ way to blame everything bad on ‘the patriarchy’. There is no merit in those fields because there is no absolute truth, no reality to check against. In fact, such fields would declare all three of those things ‘whiteness’ and ‘the patriarchy’ and rail against them. As cultural Marxism spread from the deconstructionists to all other fields, merit landed on the back burner. We reached the point where air traffic controllers were selected for NOT knowing anything about engineering, aircraft, or air traffic control!

I don’t know what can be done for people who will justify Arday and Gay’s plagiarism and lack of ability in flagship institutions. I suspect you can’t reform such places, you can only tear them down and start again. I explained to my classes how the dark ages happen, how you end up with people who can’t actually understand the knowledge that came before. I explained how it could take over 1000 years to rebuild an education system to the point that the old knowledge could be used. The pre-meds just ignored it. The engineering students pointed out that they can’t understand their textbooks now and need the professor to interpret it for them. They engineers were scared and the pre-meds denied that it could happen.

We better find some way to get back to objective truth and transmitting knowledge to the next generation because we are about 30 years from the next dark ages.