Ethics Dunces

Its Post-Harvard President Firing Tantrum Shows That The Left Is Even More Corrupt Than We Thought! Part III: The News Media and the Race-Baiters [Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

In a recent essay, Victor David Hanson concisely summarizes why the Left’s angry narrative that Claudine Gay was forced out as Harvard’s president because of racial discrimination is untenable and self-damning. He wrote in part,

…In the respective press releases from both Gay and the Harvard Corporation, racial animus was cited as a reason for her removal. Gay did not even refer to her failure to stop antisemitism on her campus or her own record of blatant plagiarism. Yet playing the race card reflects poorly on both and for a variety of reasons. One, Gay’s meager publication record — a mere eleven articles without a single published book of her own — had somehow earned her a prior Harvard full professorship and presidency. Such a thin resume leading to academic stardom is unprecedented.

Two, the University of Pennsylvania forced the resignation of its president, Liz Magill. She sat next to Gay during that now-infamous congressional hearing in which they both claimed they were unable to discipline blatant antisemitism on their campuses. Instead, both pleaded “free speech” and “context” considerations.

Such excuses were blatantly amoral and untrue. In truth, ivy-league campuses routinely sanction, punish, or remove staff, faculty, or students deemed culpable for speech or behavior deemed hurtful to protected minorities — except apparently white males and Jews. Yet Magill was immediately forced to resign, and Gay was not. Also noteworthy was Magill’s far more impressive and extensive administrative experience, along with a more prestigious scholarship that was free of even a suggestion of plagiarism.

Academia’s immediate firing of a white woman while trying desperately to save the career of a less qualified and ethically challenged Black woman will be seen not as a case of racial bias but more likely of racial preference.

And yet one after another of the prominent pundits, journalists and commentators immediately worked hard to spread the “Gay was a victim of systemic racism” narrative. In so doing, they discredited themselves and the ideology that warps their judgment and ethics.

Presidential candidate Cornel West, a former Harvard professor, wrote, “How sad but predictable that the same figures and forces enabling the ethnic cleansing and genocidal attacks on Palestinians in Gaza – Ackman, Blum, Summers and others – push out the first Black woman president of Harvard! This racism against both Palestinians and Black people is undeniable and despicable! I have experienced similar attacks from the same forces in academia with too many of my colleagues remaining silent! When big money dictates university policy and raw power dictates foreign policy, the moral bankruptcy of American education and democracy looms large! But we shall remain strong in our fight for Truth Justice Love!”

Al Sharpton told his MSNBC audience that the Harvard president’s resignation is an “attack” on “every Black woman” in US.

Mara Gay, one of several NYT’s race-baiters, told MSNBC that”This is really an attack on academic freedom … This is an attack on diversity. This is an attack on multiculturalism, & … I don’t have to say that they’re racist, because you can hear and see the racism in the attacks”

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Ethics Dunce: Business Insider

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

And here is yet another despicable example of an unethical backlash in reaction to Claudine Gay’s wholly deserved exit as president of Harvard University.

Billionaire hedge fund manager, major Harvard donor and Harvard alum Bill Ackman has been among the most outspoken critics of Gay, beginning with his disgust at the then-Harvard president’s infamous performance under questioning at a Congressional hearing. He was adamant that the subsequent plagiarism revelations mandated Gay’s resignation, and after she did resign earlier this week, he wrote on X that Gay should be fired from the faculty as well. “Students are forced to withdraw for much less,” Ackman tweeted. “Rewarding her with a highly paid faculty position sets a very bad precedent for academic integrity at Harvard.”

Is anyone seriously going to dispute that? The only argument can be that Harvard has allowed other professors to get away with plagiarism with no more than some embarrassment as their punishment. See my Ethics Scoreboard post The Plagiarizing Professor, and the weekly Standard’s Laurence Tribe and the problem of borrowed scholarship. (And don’t forget that my professor at Harvard for the American Presidency course was Doris Kearns, later Goodwin, who had a major plagiarism scandal after leaving the faculty.) In another post on the topic, I concluded, “Harvard …has a full-blown plagiarism problem among its faculty, and it is more than likely that it has extensive company among other prestigious universities. Institutions of higher education must unite and begin serious and extensive inquiries into the extent and the causes of a trend that threatens the integrity of scholarship and undermines the ethics of America’s students.”

Needless to say—well, apparently it does need saying because the “Everybody does it” excuse has been cited repeatedly in defense of Gay—the way to fix a faculty plagiarism problem is to stop tolerating plagiarism by members of the faculty.

But I digress. This post is about Business Insider. What BI broke as a scoop late yesterday was that its minions had uncovered evidence of plagiarism by Bill Ackman’s wife Neri Oxman, who was a tenured professor at MIT from 2017 to 2021. “Oxman plagiarized multiple paragraphs of her 2010 doctoral dissertation, Business Insider found, including at least one passage directly lifted from other writers without citation,” Business Insider crowed.

To which I respond, “So what?” Sure, shame on her, but why is that newsworthy? Oxman’s plagiarism has nothing to do with the president of Harvard. It has nothing to do with Harvard. It does not mitigate Gay’s misconduct in any way. It does not prove that Bill Ackman is a hypocrite: he’s not a scholar, nor an academic, and he presumably married his wife for reasons unrelated to scholarly attribution practices. At best, BI is engaging in obnoxious “whataboutism.” At worst, its slap at Ackman through his wife is like the plague of “swatting” going around lately. Ackman helped bring down Gay, so Business Insider sets out to disrupt Ackman’s family.

Nice.

Assholes.

Oxman addressed the question of her plagiarism on Twitter/X, and also revealed that she was blindsided by the Business Insider reporter, who contacted her yesterday and gave her little time to review his findings and respond before BI’s hit piece went up. She described the aspects of her dissertation that had attribution issues and involved quotes without quotation marks, said she regretted them, apologized to the authors involved, and said she would ask M.I.T. to allow her to make corrections where necessary. Her post is a completely reasonable response to BI’s findings, indeed exactly the kind of response Gay should have made, but didn’t and hasn’t.

But again, it doesn’t matter. Oxman isn’t the president of a university. She isn’t a university faculty member. She isn’t a candidate for political office, like Joe Biden was when he plagiarized a speech, or Elizabeth Warren was when it was revealed that she copied someone else’s recipes for her cook book, “Pow Wow Chow.” Oxman authored one scholarly product while a student that inadequately credited sources; Gay’s plagiarism was present in several separate works published as professor. Oxman was targeted by Business Insider to strike at her husband.

So this is the way its going to be, is it?

You can find my honors thesis on “The Great Man Theory and the American Presidency” in Widener Library, guys, and my book (with historian Ed Larson) can be purchased here. Go for it.

Unethical Quote of the Month and Ethics Dunce: Ex-Harvard President Claudine Gay

/ Jack Marshall / 34 Comments

I was prepared to write a sympathetic and generous post in response to the resignation of Claudine Gay from the presidency of Harvard University. It must be a crushing blow for her, both personally and professionally. At this moment, I can’t think of a fair analogy from the past in any field: the closest I can come is Richard Nixon’s forced resignation from the American Presidency. She was celebrated as a great trailblazer as the first black and first black female president of the world’s most famous university only a few months ago. Her fall was rapid and ugly.

I an not sympathetic any more, however. Her Unethical Quote of the Month is her resignation letter, which you can read here. It is disgraceful. She never alludes to her failure to adequately address the anti-Semitic and pro-terrorism demonstrations on the Harvard campus. She never mentions her plagiarism in multiple scholarly papers, without which she probably could have survived the criticism arising from her inept testimony in Congress. What she says, in the midst of empty rhetoric about her aspirations and how much she cares about Harvard, is this:

“[I]t has been distressing to have doubt cast on my commitments to confronting hate and to upholding scholarly rigor — two bedrock values that are fundamental to who I am — and frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus.”

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Ethics Dunce: Carolina Panthers Owner David Tepper [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

This one is almost too easy to bother posting.

The NFL’s Carolina Panthers owner was videoed as he threw a drink at a fan or fans in the stands beneath his box near the end of his team’s latest loss, a 26-0 wipe-out to the Jacksonville Jaguars. There’s no audio in the video, which was posted on Instagram, so we don’t know (yet) what the provocation was, but it doesn’t matter. Dousing a fan with a drink will get usually get the drink-tosser escorted out of any stadium or arena—I’ve seen it, more than once. For an NFL owner to do it to a fan, well, this mandates a Costanza:

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When Ethics Alarms Don’t Ring: Nikki Haley’s Answer To “What Caused The Civil War?”

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

At a New Hampshire town hall, long-shot GOP Presidential wannabe Nikki Haley was asked what she believed caused the Civil War. She answered,

“I think the cause of the Civil War was basically how government was going to run. The freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do….I think it always comes down to the role of government and what the rights of the people are. And I will always stand by the fact that I think government was intended to secure the rights and freedoms of the people. It was never meant to be all things to all people. Government doesn’t need to tell you how to live your life. They don’t need to tell you what you can and can’t do. They don’t need to be a part of your life. They need to make sure that you have freedom. We need to have capitalism. We need to have economic freedom. We need to make sure that we do all things so that individuals have the liberties so that they can have freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom to do or be anything they want to be without government getting in the way.”

When the questioner said it was “astonishing” that she didn’t mention slavery, Haley replied: “What do you want me to say about slavery?” and called for the next question.

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Unethical Quote of the Month: Washington Post Associate Editor Ruth Marcus [Link Restored]

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

“This was not my original instinct. I thought, and continue to believe, that Gay’s accusers and their allies were motivated more by conservative ideology and the desire to score points against the most elite of institutions than by any commitment to academic rigor. This was, and is, accompanied by no small dose of racism, and the conviction that a Black woman couldn’t possibly be qualified to lead Harvard.”

—Washington Post columnist and associate editor Ruth Marcus, a Harvard Law grad, in an opinion piece titled, “Harvard’s Claudine Gay should resign.”

Marcus, who has one of the thickest and damning dossiers of any pundit on Ethics Alarms, usually strikes me as a dim and predictable partisan analyst, but this is disgusting even by her bottom-of-the barrel standards.

You see what she’s doing there? She agrees with the conservatives who have called for Harvard president Claudine Gay to be fired or resign, but while in Marcus’s case, the conclusion is honorable, considered, rational and pure, conservatives who reached the exact same conclusion did so because of bias and bigotry.

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Harvard’s Claudine Gay Scandal Just Keeps Getting Better, Though I Guess We Shouldn’t Be Surprised That An Unethical University Uses Unethical Lawyers

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

It’s really a shame that I have to post this today, when the Ethics Alarms traffic consists largely of metaphorical tumbleweeds blowing down the empty dusty streets. However, we know most of the news media is trying to bury the series of revelations that prove that the leader of higher education rot hired an unqualified president because she was black, female, and a DEI agent, and that because she is black and female, Harvard is employing lies, excuses and rationalizations to avoid dumping her when a white male president who had been revealed as a plagiarist in scholarship and a blathering fool before Congress would have been fired in a flash.

I know this blog is a small, tinny voice in the vast wilderness, but it’s something.

Above you see excerpts from a 15 page letter sent to the New York Post threatening to sue on Harvard’s behalf if the paper continued to report the discovery by conservative reporter Christopher Rufo and others that Gay had plagiarized the works of other scholars by using their words and ideas as her own without attribution in dozens of instances, including her Harvard dissertation. The Post points out that Harvard, through its attorneys at Clare Locke, stated that there was no plagiarism and that the allegations were false before Harvard had bothered to investigate the claims. This also means that Gay approved of the letter, which she knew was itself “demonstrably false”:

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Stupid Unethical Quote Of The Month: Donald Trump

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

“Joe Biden is a threat to democracy. He’s a threat. And you know—We’ll bring in adversaries and I’ll bring it in right now—Even Vladimir Putin—Has anyone ever heard if Vladimir Putin?—of Russia says that Biden’s — and this is a quote – ‘politically motivated persecution of his political rival is very good for Russia because it shows the rottenness of the American political system, which cannot pretend to teach others about democracy.’”

—–Donald Trump, in the same stream of consciousness rant that produced his previous Unethical Quote of the Month in New Hampshire (the clip is here)

I don’t have to explain what’s wrong with this, right? I don’t have to explain it because if you read Ethics Alarms, you must have at least a sufficient number of functioning brain cells to know why this is a stunningly idiotic thing for Trump to say. Now, I might decide that it is interesting that Russia’s Machiavellian dictator is using the various prosecutions of Trump by Democratic officials and Biden’s Justice Department to point out the hypocrisy in U.S. democracy under Biden, and refer to that Putin quote (if it really is a quote) for that purpose. However, I would never use a Putin in an appeal to authority, which is what Trump did in New Hampshire.

‘You don’t believe me that Biden is a threat to Democracy? Well, even such a distinguished expert as the Russian dictator agrees with me, so there!’ is what Trump said, in essence. Putin cannot be used as an authority because Putin is a proven liar, and is especially useless for that purpose regarding the United States, which is, after all, supporting a nation Russia is currently fighting. What Trump said is literally as absurd as it would have been for Richard Nixon, running for President against Hubert Humphrey in 1968 at the height of the Vietnam war, to quote Ho Chi Minh or Chairman Mao saying that the Johnson administration was filled with warmongers and fools. Nixon didn’t do that, of course, because whatever else he was, Richard Nixon was a good lawyer, and knew that if you use an unreliable and discredited authority in a brief or oral argument, the court is going to think, “Wow, this guy is desperate. And an idiot…”

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Unethical Quote Of The Month: Yes, Donald Trump Of Course…

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

“They’re poisoning the blood of our country, that’s what they’ve done. They’ve poisoned mental institutions and prisons all over the world. Not just in South America, not just the three or four countries that we think about, but all over the world they’re coming into our country from Africa, from Asia…all over the world they’re pouring in.”

–—Presumptive GOP Presidential nominee Donald Trump during a rally in Durham, NH.

To its credit, C-Span introduced the clip of Trump blathering by noting he was talking about illegal immigrants, and I’m sure he was. However he never said “illegal immigrants” or anything similar. He just gave a number that could be illegal immigrants or just immigrants. “When they let 15, 16 million people into the country…we’ve got a lot of work to do,” he began. Wait, we “let” legal immigrants into the country: is Trump complaining about them?

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Incompetent Elected Official Of The Month, Ethics Dunce, Unethical Quote Of The Month: Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.)

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Imagine: this guy is on the House Judiciary Committee! Imagine again: here is what passes for rational, logical, responsible rhetoric on MSNBC.

Asked about the disgraceful performance of the three college presidents under questioning from Rep. Elise Stefanik, Rep. Raskin pulled out every irrelevant anti-Republican talking point he could think of to avoid criticizing fellow woke warriors, beginning with saying he hopes a college president would take action when there are calls for genocide on campus because “lax Republican gun laws” mean “we’ve got to take very seriously” people making threats.

Yes, the debacle at the hearing was about gun control. Then he really got rolling:

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