Harvard

Grading The Harvard Crimson’s Pro- and Anti-Claudine Gay Editorials [Updated!]

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Breaking! Minutes after I posted this, the Harvard Crimson announced that Harvard president Claudine Gay is resigning.

Harvard’s daily campus newspaper, the venerable Harvard Crimson, currently has two editorials and one student op-ed up regarding the President Claudine Gay scandal, aka The Harvard President Ethics Train Wreck, in which the new president, the first black and only the second woman ever to hold the post, faces duel crises of confidence regarding her leadership. The first is her stuttering and inadequate response to anti-Jewish demonstrations on campus, low-lighted by her evasive and cringe-worthy testimony before Congress. The second is the subsequent revelation that Gay engaged in plagiarism in multiple scholarly works to a degree that would get her school’s students sanctioned.

In an official editorial, “President Gay Plagiarized, but She Should Stay. For Now,” a majority of the editorial board argues that,

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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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Ethics Quote of the Month: 2022 Nobel Prize Recipient Philip H. Dybvig

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Commenting on Harvard’s increasingly apparent appointment of an under-qualified, diversity hire as the university’s president, Dr. Dybvig, who was a co-winner of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel “for research on banks and financial crises,” said,

‘‘I realize I have been too pure. I assumed that a lot of people shared my dream (expressed for example by Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King) of ending oppression. However, the dream of most people (especially but not exclusively the oppressed) seems to be becoming the oppressor. This is why there is a strong correlation between abusers of children and people who were abused as children.  Claudine Gay has power now and she is the oppressor of any group not favored by her and other people in power. This is a common pattern in governments heading for totalitarianism. First, say you represent the oppressed. Then you get power and oppress non-favored groups. This leaves you in a morally indefensible position that could not survive given free speech, so you do what you can to destroy anyone (“counterrevolutionaries”) who disagrees with your narrative.’’

In related commentary, Jason Riley wrote in the Wall Street Journal in answer to the question of why Harvard can’t and won’t fire Gay, “To admit she has performed poorly is to raise basic questions about the entire ‘diversity’ enterprise.” Prof. Glenn Reynolds, commenting on both pieces, suggests that there are benefits “for her to remain as a lasting discredit to Harvard.” I agree with that as well. The mask has dropped, and all can see (who are willing to see) the ugliness beneath.

Two Disparate Responses To Being Caught At “Good Discrimination”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Revealed Discriminator 1: Boston Mayor Michelle Wu.

Response: “Deal with it!”

Despite the legitimate uproar over Boston’s Asian-American mayor holding a party that explicitly excluded whites [covered here on Ethics Alarms], Wu and Boston Democrats decided to go with a moldy bunch of lame rationalizations (“it’s no big deal!”…”we’ve been doing it for years”..”we don’t care!”) and not only held the discriminatory event, but proudly issued a photo of it. Naturally, the news media’s reaction is “Republicans pounce!” but long-time conservative pundit Howie Carr, who is usually a bit extreme for my tastes, was spot on, writing in an op-ed for the Boston Herald:

“What if a white mayor had held a whites-only party at a city-owned building, after specifically disinviting all the non-white members of the City Council? It would have been the end of the world, a national story for days if not weeks on end. On the night of the party, there would have been rioting, or looting and violence….had the event been held by a Republican, every GOP politician across the nation would have been asked to denounce it…

Carr added that most of of the ‘state-run media’ in Massachusetts carefully avoided criticizing the party.

The reverse-racists are getting awfully cocky these days.

Revealed Discriminator 2: Harvard

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Ethics Hero: Edelson Law Firm Founder Jay Edelson

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

The large plaintiffs’ law firm Edelson PC announced that it will boycott recruiting events at Harvard Law School as a consequence of Harvard University president Claudine Gay’s Congressional testimony shrugging off campus antisemitism as “free speech,” followed by Harvard’s subsequent endorsement of Gay’s leadership. The firm informed Harvard Law’s career services office in a letter that announced the firm will skip the upcoming January law school recruitment as well Harvard’s larger on-campus interviewing event in August, when major firms do their hiring of summer associates.

Firm founder and CEO Jay Edelson explained, “This is not about Harvard law students. This is about the leadership of Harvard and how much of a megaphone it has on the world stage. They should use that megaphone responsibly.” Edelson added, “I understand that this is not going to be as relevant to them than if Skadden Arps pulled out, but I’m hoping they start seeing that even the liberal firms think this is well past a line.”

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The Harvard President’s New Scandal: Now The Only Way Gay Can Prove She’s Fit To Lead The University Is To Leave It [Expanded & Updated]

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

City-Journal, arguably the best of the conservative websites, has extensive coverage of the plagiarism allegations against Claudine Gay, whose presidency of Harvard was already on shaky ground following her awful testimony before Congress regarding the burgeoning anti-Semitism on campus. It is too detailed for me to summarize correctly, and if I cut and paste sufficient amounts of the piece I’ll be plagiarizing, so you should read all about it here. (You may have to register, but access is free.)

Disgustingly, the New York Times and the Washington Post have not reported this yet. That’s outrageous, and one more screaming example of how the Left circles its wagons any time an ally seriously screws up. Harvard is to progressive indoctrination in education what the Times is to progressive propaganda in journalism, but the last thing the mainstream media needs now is another Hunter Biden laptop fiasco. Harvard is very much in the news already for it’s ugly role in the Hamas-Israel Ethics Train Wreck; Gay is now a central figure, and for the plagiarism development to be given the “nothing to see here” treatment by the news media is spectacularly foolish as well as unethical. [Update: This afternoon, after Harvard mentioned the plagiarism issue, both the Times and the Post finally reported on it its digital editions.]

But I digress…I had initially assumed that the accusations that Gay had violated Harvard’s own policies on citations, credit to other scholars and plagiarism were like past attacks on controversial authors like Ann Coulter, technical but non substantive, the sort that could be dug up on many published public figures by those seeking to damage their reputations. I was mistaken, however. Gay’s violations are substantive and substantial. Moreover, Gay appears to have appropriated material from one of the most significant scholars in the field of racial issues in American, now retired Vanderbilt professor and author Carol Swain.

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Res Ipsa Loquitur: Much Appreciation To Rep.Stefanik For Validating My Estrangement From Harvard

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

One comment only: It is astounding and damning that a woman with the erudition of Harvard’s president could do not better than repeatedly resorting to pre-memorized, non-responsive, probably lawyer-crafted boilerplate in response to Stefanik’s questions.

It immediately remind me of former slimeball Congressman Gary Condit (well, he’s still probably a slimeball) in the infamous 2001 ABC interview about intern Chandra Levy, then missing. Condit was romantically linked to his intern, and considered a suspect in what was eventually found to be Levy’s murder. Every time Connie Chung asked directly about their relationship, Condit repeated the mantra, “Well, once again, “I’ve been married 34 years. I have not been a perfect man. I have made mistakes in my life. But out of respect for my family, out of a specific request by the Levy family, it is best that I not get into the details of the relationship.”

This, naturally, made him look guilty. As it turned out, he wasn’t.

But President Gay is guilty of hypocrisy and cowardice.

Schadenfreude Bonus: Watching Harvard Face The Consequences Of Its Own Hypocrisy and Corrupted Values

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

New Harvard President Claudine Gay can be expected to issue a fourth clarification of her initial reactions to the University’s large anti-Semitic contingent cheering on the Hamas massacre of Jewish citizens on October 7. To read Gay’s inaugural speech upon becoming the new president of America’s oldest and most storied educational institution, one would think “all is well” at Harvard, as Faber College student Kevin Bacon futilely screamed in the epic finale of “Animal House.” In marvelous ramalama-dingdong fashion, the standard issue race-obsessed progressive scholar babbled, predictably as Harvard’s first black President, about “this institution’s long history of exclusion and the long journey of resistance and resilience to overcome it.” Then she proved incapable of reacting forcibly when Harvard’s long history of anti-Semitism suddenly revealed itself not to have been resisted enough. Indeed, Harvard’s relentless efforts at woke indoctrination guarantee that it will flourish.

As discussed here, 31 Harvard campus organizations famously announced that Israel was fully responsible for all the violence erupting in and out of Gaza. Then, after efforts were made to reveal the names of the participating pro-terrorism and historically ignorant students so potential employers could cross them off their lists, we learned how well Harvard imbues its students with the ethical virtues of integrity, accountability, honesty, loyalty and prudence, along with such enabling virtues as fortitude, courage, and sacrifice. At least ten of the groups announced that they no longer endorsed the letter, now that there might be consequences attached to signing it. Some student members swore that they never approved the letter that their groups signed; others proclaimed that they didn’t really mean to say what the letters said, or that they hadn’t read it carefully.

Got it: you’re incompetent, irresponsible and cowardly fools. These reactions do not enhance your attraction as potential employees.

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What Does It Say About The State Of Higher Education In The U.S. That Its Oldest And Most Prestigious Institution Is The Nation’s Most Hostile To Free Speech?

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

It’s a rhetorical question. What this says is that the culture of the United States of America, which has been nurtured for centuries to embrace personal liberty and pluralism, is being threatened by its elite educational institutions and the indoctrinated citizens they graduate.

I suppose I should take some satisfaction that I began blowing the metaphorical whistle on my alma mater years ago, and felt sufficiently embarrassed by the ethics rot overwhelming the ivy there to turn my diploma face to the wall and to explain in my class notes that I would be boycotting the class reunion. Simply put, the American college long considered the exemplar for higher education cannot become fascistically woke without dire consequences to the nation. Harvard alumni, many, maybe even most, of whom recognize this, have been negligent in allowing matter to reach this point. But that point has been reached.

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I’m Sick Of Hearing These Arguments That College Admissions Favor The Wealthy And Privileged Because The Problem Is Easy To Fix. So Fix It.

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Nicholas Kristoff, a another New York Times progressive pundit but one who occasionally makes sense, has an intermittently valid op-ed in today’s paper titled, “The Real College Admissions Scandal,” which is, he argues, “affirmative action for the rich and privileged.”

Kristoff immediately knee-caps his own credibility by writing, perhaps to please his Dark Woke Masters, “I wish the Supreme Court had ruled differently on affirmative action for race, but unfortunately it blocked that path for diversity.” It’s a stupid statement. The Constitution blocked that path, and so did the 1964 Civil Rights Act. What his statement literally means is that he applauds “good racial discrimination and prejudice”, but deplores it when it adversely affects groups he cares about.

He also comes close to setting off the hypocrisy alarm, but at least is transparent. While including “legacy admissions” in his list of “affirmative action for the rich and privileged,” Kristoff says, “I was a member of the Harvard Board of Overseers, and my wife, Sheryl WuDunn, is currently a member and previously served on the Princeton and Cornell boards; our three children also attended Harvard.” Hmmm. So, having benefited from the policies he condemns while doing nothing to reform them, the pundit now want to stop others from benefiting from them! Cool. He also is silent about how much money he has given to his alma mater over the years. Donors also get an edge for their kids when they apply to prestige colleges.

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