In the wake of Harvard’s DEI president having to resign in disgrace, conservatives are taking a victory lap, progressives are whining or making asses of themselves, and Harvard’s students are breathing a sigh if relief, as their future degrees were being devalued like bitcoin. But before we get to all that, let’s make Barack Obama put his money where is mouth is…

Let’s draft Barack Obama to take over Harvard. Does Obama have the courage of his convictions? Does he possess loyalty to the people and institution who got him where he is today? Is he capable of embarrassment? We can determine all of this and more if the clamor for Obama to be Claudine Gay’s successor becomes loud enough to attract media attention.

Obama has this job for the asking. The Harvard Corporation, which now is seeing its DEI aspirations crumbling before their eyes, is in ethics zugzwang. Their own credibility is shot, as their much-ballyhooed appointment of Gay, already a dean at Harvard, as the first black president there and only the second woman, now looks careless and incompetent. She almost immediately proved that the promotion was the Peter Principle in action, and worse, Harvard’s blue ribbon search committee never vetted her scholarship, which was paltry, inadequate, and sloppy. She is a serial plagiarist. Yesterday it was not only clear that the students were turning against her (and they are a least as leftist as their university overseers), but those mean conservatives at the Washington Free Beacon published evidence of even more plagiarism by Gay after Harvard’s leadership had taken a “Harvard presidents can get away with plagiarism that students can’t” position that was both cowardly and dishonest.

So Gay resigned, proving herself to be an unethical hack in the process by virtually ignoring the academic misconduct issue and blaming her self-fueled ejection on racism. The Harvard leadership then provided an amusing “It isn’t what it is” coda, saying goodbye with a letter calling her all the things she clearly wasn’t, like an effective leader.

Back to the ethics zugzwang: Who can Harvard recruit to succeed Gay that won’t cause more controversy and criticism? Essentially nobody. Harvard faces a challenge to its woke priorities (ideological indoctrination, not superior education, is its mission now, as Ethics Alarms has been pointing for years) flowing from the Supreme Court finding that Old Ivy was discriminating against whites and Asians, so it is almost forced to find another diversity hire like Gay to fight the good fight. Marc Lamont Hill, himself a diversity hire but with the wrong chromosomes, made this clear with a tweet any legitimate scholar would be embarrassed to post (5.5 thousand followers loved it, the morons):

Yet any black woman who is appointed to succeed Gay will look even more like someone hired because of race and gender than Gay did, and worse, she will also be tarred with the rank of second best—to a bad choice. If Harvard appoints a white academic or established leader…

…or, heaven forbid, a Jewish one, Harvard will be seen as a traitor to the cause.

There is only one way out of this mess, and it is delicious: the new Harvard president has to be Barack Obama. Hear me out, now.

Continue reading →

As I’m sure most readers here saw coming, I have elevated the Claudine Gay fiasco taking place in the halls of Old Ivy to official ethics train wreck status. This mess is not going to stop advancing or be cleaned up any time soon. The recent developments:

1. Winkfield Twyman Jr., the African-American author of “Letters in Black and White: A New Correspondence on Race in America,” authored a column for Newsweek arguing that the DEI-obsessed Gay doesn’t deserve to have “racial wagons” circled around her. “Did you know that Claudine Gay during her Harvard career has repeatedly targeted and disrupted the careers of prominent black male professors?” I did not know that, but he writes that she was behind the dumping of black law professor Ronald S. Sullivan Jr. as dean of Harvard’s Winthrop House in 2019 because he was representing Harvey Weinstein. (This episode was the major, though far from the only reason for my decision to boycott my Harvard reunion in 2022.) Twyman also writes that Gay “coordinated a ‘witch hunt’ against [black] economics professor Roland G. Fryer Jr. after his research into the killings of unarmed black men in Houston, Texas, found no racial disparities.” He concludes by stating that Gay “has waived any benefit of the ‘first Black’ defense.”

2. Roger Kimball writes in “When will Harvard give Claudine Gay the boot?,” “Gay is bad for Harvard, but Harvard is bad for the country, so her continued presence is a net positive.” He also alerted me to this, from last week in “The Manhattan Contrarian”….

Continue reading →

I really am hoping I don’t have to go through another holiday season like this one has been, both here at home and around the ethics world. It hasn’t quite reached the gloomy depths of the Christmas of 2010, the second one after my father had died on my birthday on December 1, 2009, with the hospital my mother was in for an infection that another hospital had given her trying to dump her on Christmas Eve, only to have me realize while wheeling her out to the car that she was desperately sick still, turning around and getting her readmitted, as Mom kept insisting tearfully that she was okay and wanted to be home for Christmas. Ah, those wonderful holiday memories! (The infection killed her in February.)

Well, not having any Christmas decorations up and with nobody opening gifts, clean-up this season has been a breeze. I did get some mordant good news: the law firm I was recruited into as an ethics partner along with a distinguished group of successful lawyers five years ago (that subsequently failed to meet its funding goals after debuting with a dazzling business plan and has been slowly shedding its initial cases as it winds down) finally sent me my first check from the enterprise. It was for $64.52.

Happy New Year!

1. The rest of the story: you recall that earlier this month I wrote that the lawyer representing Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s now disbarred sleazeball lawyer in his pre-White House days, had submitted a court document with three fictional cases cited. Well, guess who found those fantasy cases? Yes it was Trump’s old legal eagle himself. Cohen said in court papers unsealed this week that he had mistakenly given his lawyer bogus legal citations generated by the artificial intelligence program Google Bard. Cohen explained that he had not kept up with “emerging trends (and related risks) in legal technology and did not realize that Google Bard was a generative text service that, like ChatGPT, could show citations and descriptions that looked real but actually were not.” Of course, the fact that Cohen’s lawyer accepted the research done by a disbarred lawyer who was never reliable to begin with means that he is still responsible for the botch, and could be sanctioned.

Continue reading →

It sure seems like everyone’s gone to the Moon in Virginia. No traffic, missing neighbors, nobody for Spuds to go nuts over when we take a walk: it’s so quiet outside, I feel like Burgess Meredith in “The Twilight Zone.”

If you’re out there, what better way to reach than to launch a thread about an ethics issue?