Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ on X - "It’s like Harvard’s boosters have no sense of narrative. Attacking me as an outsider, a plebe, a mafia-stained ethnic, makes my scalping of Harvard’s president even more delicious. Americans love the underdog, the Will Hunting archetype, the kid who exposes the sneering frauds."
Thread by @wokal_distance on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "There's an element of @realchrisrufo's strategy no one has picked up on yet. It's this: Almost nobody outside universities reads academic papers, so the papers radical activist professors write in which they defend absurd ideas don't get read by the general public. So... Leftist acadenics are free to use academic journals to advance their social and political goals in the academy and no one notices because no one outside the academy reads it. This dynamic allows leftist profs to make absurd claims on behalf of leftist dogma and pay no price. Since no one outside academia reads these journals, activist profs could claim truth does not exist, everything is about power, men can become women, and other such wild claims, and the general public was unaware that academia had been hijacked by a political agenda. But.... Now @realchrisrufo has started a plagiarism war in academia. And you what that means? It means people are now looking for plagiarism in academia, and in order to do find plagiarism gues whst they are going to have to do? That's right...they have to read academic journals. And when they read those journals they are going to find paper after paper denying objectice truth, papers claiming racial identity matters more than facts, papers that claim lived experience is more important than evidence, and papers claiming children can pick their gender. What @realchrisrufo has done by starting the plagiarism wars is to get people outside academia to actually READ all of the insane nonsense that's being produced by activist professors. Now regular people, even those who hate Rufo, will be forced to confront the fact that the universities have been hijacked by activists who are using the universities as a vehicle to advance the political and social goal of the left. It's brilliant. @realchrisrufo has figure out how to out people in a position where they HAVE to read the papers... And when they do they will quickly see that he was telling the truth about political corruption in our academic institutions."
Chris Brunet on X - "Gary King, Claudine Gay's mentor, describes how affirmative action admissions work, or used to work, at Harvard's PhD program in political science: "Then, according to departmental custom, we admit, in a separate Affirmative Action category, any minority applicant who we believe would complete the program if admitted ... if we applied the same rule we are required to use for our Affirmative Action list (admitting those we think would graduate) to all applicants, we would admit 200-300 students a year.""
Opinion | The Persecution of Harvard’s Claudine Gay - The New York Times - "When I spoke with the U.C.L.A. Law and Columbia Law School professor Kimberlé Crenshaw last year about the battle in Florida over the teaching of Black history, she warned that this scapegoating of academics would spread to D.E.I. efforts beyond academia, including in corporate America. “This thing will not be satisfied by one victory,” she said. “This is just one skirmish in a wider, broader battle” to make discussions about the legacy of racism in this country taboo and “to contain the power of Black folks, queer folks, women and pretty much everybody else who doesn’t agree to the agenda of reclaiming this country that the MAGA group claims.”... At a time when Black women are ascendant in the culture, they have become, for some, the emblems of unwelcome change; their presence in positions of power represents a threat to the power traditionally clustered in the hands of a few. As such, Black women see their credentials relentlessly attacked, their characters impugned, their lives scoured. The issue is not that the bar is lowered for them to succeed but rather raised so that any imperfection can be inflated into a fundamental flaw. These women are trapped in prisons of others’ demands for perfection... The Democratic governor of California, Gavin Newsom, committed to appointing a Black woman to the Senate if Dianne Feinstein’s seat became vacant. After she died, one headline from the far-right publication The Federalist blared, “Dianne Feinstein’s Senate Replacement Will Be Defined by the Racist, Sexist Criteria She Fits.”"
Zero tolerance for plagiarism is an unrealistic standard. The cope is that universities, which up until now have been very clear about plagiarism, selectively apply these standards on black women
Saying that you're hiring based on race and sex is racist and sexist is wrong when black women are the beneficiaries
A university president resigned after a recent plagiarized speech. It's not the first commencement address lifted - "The resignation of University of South Carolina president Bob Caslen for plagiarizing remarks in a commencement speech is the most recent example of the awkwardness faced by educators and school leaders when higher-ups find inspiration in the wrong ways."
As someone noted, he didn't meet the Wonder Woman standard either
Ida Bae Wells on X - "Let’s be real. This is an extension of what happened to me at UNC, and it is a glimpse into the future to come. Academic freedom is under attack. Racial justice programs are under attack. Black women will be made to pay. Our so-called allies too often lack any real courage."
Whateverdear on X - "You're saying that plagiarism equals academic freedom?"
Christina Buttons on X - "Former Harvard president Claudine Gay has been accused of over 50 instances of plagiarism throughout her career, some of which have been confirmed by left-leaning sources. She is responsible for the choices she made to commit academic fraud. Despite this, progressives have flooded X with posts gaslighting the public by suggesting her resignation is due to racism, white supremacy, anti-blackness, and being the target of a “right-wing attack.” This is how Critical Social Justice activists sustain their ideology and enforce universal adoption of DEI — by trying to convince people that racism and prejudice exists where it clearly doesn’t, and that you need their special “critical” insight to see it. I have a message from the majority of Americans: we are fed up. Take your race-baiting bullshit and shove it. DEI is done."
Timur Kuran on X - "The American professoriate owes a debt of gratitude to conservatives such as Elise Stefanik and Chris Rufo. By grilling the presidents and highlighting evidence of plagiarism, they have forced professors to confront the double standards, hypocrisy, and harms of DEI. Professors who wouldn’t touch DEI matters with a ten-foot pole are now talking to each other about DEI truths that they’ve long understood but avoided discussing. Many are recognizing that, as leftists, they have less in common with progressives than they thought. Many leftist professors now see as never before the absurdities of DEI’s oppressor/oppressed binary. They understand that double standards in hiring, promotion, and the selection of leaders are destroying the legitimacy of US universities.Ultimately, then, much good may come from the spectacle of the presidents’ congressional testimony and its ongoing repercussions. They are setting the stage for long-overdue honest public discussions about DEI’s compatibility with core missions of American universities."
Josh Kraushaar on X - "NEW @J_Insider via @matthewkassel: “Former President Obama privately lobbied on Harvard President Claudine Gay’s behalf as she faces growing scrutiny”"
Oilfield Rando on X - "The DEI-zation of every institution is so vital to the communist movement that it warrants a personal call from the God King of community organizers when it gets in trouble"
Claudine Gay Is Not the Real Story - The Atlantic - "The conservative activist Christopher Rufo, who helped kick off this controversy when he and fellow conservative Christopher Brunet leveled a round of accusations against Gay last month, has spent the past 24 hours doing a victory lap. It is this unseemly context that many academics are hung up on: In their minds, a college president succumbed to conservative pressure. And this fact is melting their brains and obliterating their standards for professional conduct... The true scandal of the Claudine Gay affair is not a Harvard president and her plagiarism. The true scandal is that so many journalists and academics were willing, are still willing, to redefine plagiarism to suit their politics... Rufo won this round of the academic culture war because he exposed so many progressive scholars and journalists to be hypocrites and political actors who were willing to throw their ideals overboard. I suspect that, not the tenure of a Harvard president, was the prize he sought all along. The tragedy is that we didn’t have to give it to him... the historian David A. Bell wrote that the language games some progressives are currently playing are positively Trumpian. “What bothers me most about this whole affair is the fact that Gay herself has not taken responsibility for the plagiarism,” Bell said, “and that so many have supported her in not doing so.” A Harvard alum who’s an academic acquaintance of mine offered a similar summary: “Sitting here watching people I respect say ‘We all do this all the time; nothing to see here’ actually hurts me a bit. I feel gaslighted, in the parlance of our time.”... Those who rushed to characterize her resignation as the outcome of a “bullying” campaign designed to oust Harvard’s first Black president omit an inconvenient detail: She was clearly guilty. The bullying worked because the facts were too difficult to massage. That didn’t stop many of my fellow academics from trying. A day after McWhorter called for Gay’s ouster, the Renaissance scholar, climate-change activist, and New School affiliate faculty member Genevieve Guenther shared a disturbing story on social media about a professor who, she claims, stole her ideas and then went on to great acclaim and success. She added, “And EVERYONE KNOWS HE’S A PLAGIARIST.” Guenther was a graduate student at the time, and the abuse she alleges is terrible. But her thread ends with a bizarre twist: Strangely, the lesson Guenther draws from this experience is that we need to “Support Gay. Support DEI. Support antiracism.” Rather than hold everyone accountable or even suggest that we revisit our punishments for misdemeanor-style plagiarism like the former Harvard president’s, the thread ends in a tacit call to obliterate academic standards in the name of politics. What is galling about this kind of defense is that it is perfectly possible to maintain that Gay shouldn’t have been fired while also conceding that she’s guilty of serial, if low-stakes, plagiarism. But many progressives have been deeply reluctant to admit that Gay did anything wrong or unusual at all. Rather than use the P-word, Guenther describes Gay’s’s plagiarism as “repeating banal phrases”—yet another polite euphemism to be added to the Orwellian pile. Not until yesterday did she concede that at least one of the examples (arguably the most egregious) did amount to an example of plagiarism. Not to be outdone, the CNN reporter Matt Egan was at pains to note that Gay had not stolen anyone’s ideas. An important and mitigating distinction to be sure, but Egan goes on to add, “She has been accused of … copying other people’s writing without attribution. So it’s been more sloppy attribution than stealing anyone’s ideas.” Again, “copying people’s writing without attribution” is just a way of saying “plagiarism” in five words rather than one. Harvard’s plagiarism policy doesn’t contain a waiver for “sloppiness,” nor have the policies of any institution I’ve ever attended or taught at. Others have attempted not simply to minimize but to actually normalize the kind of language theft practiced by Gay. A number of professors on Twitter have suggested that every academic would be found guilty of plagiarism were their scholarly record subject to sufficient scrutiny... Guldi had insisted that it is not Gay who should be condemned, but the other professors who accused the president of plagiarism. These claims are preposterous on their face: One needn’t be an expert on text mining to look at two nearly identical paragraphs and determine that plagiarism has taken place. Whether or not Big Tech tools were used is entirely ancillary to what was found, and what was found was straightforward theft... Using watery euphemisms to refer to blatant plagiarism debases our profession, and the assertion that everyone plagiarizes if you just look hard enough debases it further. The media are currently distracted by the shiny bauble of Harvard’s ousted president, but we should be far more concerned about the crisis of academic culture that this incident has exposed. For all the talk of “glass ceilings,” Gay is a Cambridge woman through and through: Born to a family that runs a Haitian concrete empire, she was shot out of America’s most prestigious boarding school before being educated at Princeton, Stanford, and Harvard. As the first Black woman to lead America’s most prestigious university, Gay may have changed the color of the mold, but she sure didn’t break it. The idea that clear and long-established criteria for plagiarism should have been thrown out to save the elite-born president of an elite university, solely on the basis of her skin color, is not only preposterous; it’s that old soft bigotry."
Jennifer hochschild on X - "On Rufo: what do integrity police say about his claim to have “master’s degree from Harvard,” which is actually from the open-enrollment Extension School? Those students are great - I teach them- but they are not the same as what we normally think of as Harvard graduate students"
Apparatchik-Fil-A on X - "He wrote this a month ago. It’s not like he was trying to hide it:"
PoIiMath on X - "Imagine thinking that a Harvard professor attacking Harvard's Extension School hurts Chris Rufo more than it hurts Harvard"
Cernovich on X - "It is a masters degree. If you claim otherwise, then Harvard has engaged in false advertising and is subject to a lawsuit for fraud. Is it your claim that Harvard has engaged in fraudulently advertising?"
Based James Polk on X - "“We laugh at the Harvard Extension students who work 40+ hours a week, have a family and take classes on the side to get their degree.” Says the grad student who went to class, did some homework, smoked weed and caught the Celtics game."
🏛 Aristophanes 🏛 on X - "You're a "Professor for African and African American Studies" which is as worthless as tits on a bull, why would absolutely anything you say matter to anybody?"
J. Obeseya Ph.D. on X - "What I find hysterical is that these people know nothing of African culture; tell me about Shaka Zulu…Who? What about Egypt? Uhh, wrong kind of Africa since they’re Arabs… These programs are a cover for leftist activists to pander to American blacks. Wake up America."
Conor Friedersdorf on X- "Shouldn't you be asking about Harvard's integrity here as they are the ones selling the degrees knowing that a large part of their value comes from the brand name attached to them?"
Gina Cho on X - "This is not very good advertising for the online program... and I guess some of your students will now know you don't value them as much as other students. Unbelievable... You just devalued some of your students, as an educator, in public, for the world to see."
Pixel Grid on X - "This Harvard Professor just flippantly undermined the future of 14,000 students of the Harvard Extension School—an institution that has been in existence for over one hundred years."
Aaron Sibarium on X - "Jennifer Hochschild’s books include “The American Dream and the Public Schools”—which argues that “policies to promote individual success too often benefit only those already privileged by race or class”—as well as “Bringing Outsiders In.”"
Benjamin B@dejo on X - "Professor Hochshild (@Jenniferhochsc2 ): if you do not retract your ill-advised statements about Harvard Extension School, some HES students who paid for their studies with federal student loans will formally apply for Borrower Defense Loan Discharge (as in, formally dispute their obligation to repay their loans) via the official @usedgov Borrower Defense process, citing fraud. They will use your tweets as evidence, and they will win... Professor Hochshild’s statements have now put @Harvard in a very awkward position. If the university ignores her comments and she does not retract them, Harvard will be inviting mass discharge of HES alumni federal loans. But if the university formally rejects her comments in order to avoid that outcome, the university impliedly will be siding with @realchrisrufo …again. The university may also then have to reluctantly yield to longstanding demands of HES students and alumni for their degree to no longer be called a “Master of Liberal Arts in Extension Studies” degree and agree either to clearly specify the particular area of study on the diploma or to make it a Master of Arts degree outright (which will make the degree nearly indistinguishable from degrees earned through Harvard’s Graduate School for Arts and Sciences.)"
Sohrab Ahmari on X - "Do you want to know why there’s been a “de-alignment” between the left and the working class? Behold the shocking number of self-proclaimed leftists who are sneering at Rufo’s “Harvard night-school degree.”"
Steve McGuire on X - "Here’s how the Harvard Extension School advertises itself:
-“The best of Harvard”
-“A Harvard education”
-“The weight of that reputation and lineage on your resume.”"
🏛 Aristophanes 🏛 on X - "This is hilarious, Harvard is basically burning down their own extension school out of spite, portraying it as being worth about as much as Trump University, all because that's where Chris Rufo got his graduate degree."
Rob Henderson on X - "The clucking about whether Harvard Extension is the real Harvard reminds me of George Orwell in The Road To Wigan Pier explaining how upper middle class snobs "while theoretically pining for a classless society, cling like glue to their miserable fragments of social prestige.""
Richard Hanania on X - "First they say everyone plagiarizes each other in academia to own Rufo. Now they say Harvard Extension School isn’t real, it’s a scam akin to Trump University, once again to score points against Rufo. Liberalism has been increasingly failing the marshmallow test."
Armand Domalewski on X - "Harvard Extension is such a funny little scam, because it relies on everyone involved having contradictory assumptions: 1) Attendees believe it is “really” Harvard or that other people will think it is 2) Harvard alumni want you to know it’s “not really Harvard” because anyone can get in 3) Harvard administrators want group 1 to think that so they get paid but group 2 to think that so their prestige isn’t undercut and they still donate
the scam isn’t the school, the scam is the way Harvard talks out of both sides of its mouth about it...
no, Harvard very much tells people who attend Harvard Extension that it’s “really Harvard” and then insists they explicitly list “Harvard Extension” on their resumes afterwards"
moonman on X - "I’ve been laughing all morning. This Rufo guy has somehow managed to get Harvard alum, staff, and supporters to come out and slam the extension program, which all extension students can see, despite Harvard openly advertising it as Harvard. They’re getting dogwalked."
Jeremy Carl on X - "The notion that @realchrisrufo , who has singlehandedly strategically outmaneuvered the mandarins of the elite left for several years, somehow needs a Harvard degree to validate his work is hilarious. When I was doing a mid-career Masters at the Kennedy School, the then-Dean of Students said that she loved working with the Mid-Careers because Harvard got to take credit for all of the great things they had already done (or would do-- one of my classmates became Prime Minister of Bhutan and another is the Prime Minister Designate of Singapore). That Dean showed way more awareness of the real situation and the real value of a "Harvard Degree" than any of these idiots sniping about "Extension School.""
Melissa Chen on X - "Liberal elites touting their progressive credentials in support for Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) policies sniveling at Chris Rufo for listing his affiliation with Harvard via the Harvard Extension School sounds pretty exclusionary to me. If you want to gatekeep the elite brand of Harvard, by definition you can’t be inclusive. Also.. it’s not Chris who taints the Harvard brand. It’s Claudine Gay and every plagiarism apologist. Ever notice that it’s the people who roam the halls of the most exclusionary spaces publicly genuflecting the most about how much inclusion matters? See: TED, Hollywood, Met Gala, etc.. It’s entirely by design. Harvard Extension purportedly exists to democratize access to a Harvard education. You would think a progressive Harvard Law School grad wouldn’t turn down her nose at it"
Lomez on X - "The guy who went to Harvard Extension and is being ridiculed for it is very obviously outmaneuvering and outsmarting all of the people from actual Harvard, which tells you everything you need to know about this whole affair. The proof, as they say, is in the pudding."
Peter Spiliakos on X - "1. In a sane world, Rufo being a very effective political activist would improve the brand value of Harvard Extension School. 2. Being a plagiarist doesn't make you a fraud, but going to night school while balancing parenthood and a day job does is definitely a set of values."
Geoffrey Miller on X - "The debate over whether 'Harvard Extension School' is 'really Harvard' provides a good pretext for reminding everyone to read the @bryan_caplan book 'The case against education' (2018). Caplan contrasts the 'signaling view of education' (it's a reliable signal that you had the IQ & conscientiousness to get in to a certain institution, even if you don't learn much there) versus the 'human capital' view of education (that you actually learn good & useful things once you're admitted, increasing your 'human capital'). tldr: The signaling view is largely correct. (As I also argued in my book 'Spent' (2009), Chapter 11) This is why the 'real Harvard' people (who passed through a much more selective admissions process) are so pissed off about HES (which is much less selective -- and which thereby waters down the signaling value of their 'real Harvard' degree.)"
Geoffrey Miller on X - "One irony here is that Harvard Extension School (HES) _actually_ embodies the values of diversity, equity, & inclusion, by admitting a greater diversity of students with regard to age, class, background, & ideology, by advancing more equitable outcomes, and by being more genuinely inclusive. So of course all the 'real Harvard' grads who say they believe in DEI, but who actually believe in ideological homogeneity, class favoritism, & credentialist exclusivity, are outraged about @realchrisrufo et al."
A.J. Delgado on X - "Yep. And when I, or others, who spend THREE YEARS in freezing Boston, away from our families, not sleeping, grinding to class.. say "Wait a minute..." it's all, "WHY ARE YOU SUCH A BITCH?""
Fusilli Spock on X - "THREE YEARS in Boston. Are you fucking kidding me. Going to college in one of the worlds greatest cities is some sort of fucking hardship. This is some first world whining to the next level. I mean leaving Earth's orbit level."
Sotales (aka Adam Bretey) on X - "Wait until she learns about the people who live there all their lives."
Thread by @sfmcguire79 on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "“Claudine Gay was in Rome on a family vacation on Dec. 27 when Penny Pritzker, the leader of Harvard University’s governing board, called to ask: Did she think there was a path forward with her as the school’s president?” Informative account of Gay’s resignation in the NYT.Dr. Gay was planning a “spring reset,” but some board members thought the plan “showed that she didn't understand the urgency of the expanding crisis.” The first member of the Corporation to turn was Timothy R. Barakett, the treasurer. (Others joined him, as we know, after having dinner with members of the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard.) Board members received a fresh round of input from friends, family, and acquaintances over Christmas vacation. And finally the pressure got to them"
James Lindsay, anti-Fascist on X - "Suddenly, intent matters again. LOL. This is a new play: they're going to trying to argue that "unintentional plagarism" should receive no disciplinary action. Guess who will judge what is "intentional" or not? They'll grant themselves an immunity carveout—for Leftists only."
Paul Rossi on X - "They always judge themselves based on their intentions (“trying to build a more just world” etc). They only ever judge their enemies based on impact, and through a lens darkly."
Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ on X - "A full-blown “plagiarism war” will turn the Right’s major disadvantage in academia—being outnumbered ~10:1 on elite university faculties—into a massive asymmetrical advantage. Game on."
Jason Busch on X - "3 things in favor: 1) Numbers game (faculty demographics based on political orientation) — academy is 85%+ left (if not more) 2) Progressives are lazy thinkers (since they act as NPCs regurgitating the same stuff). Likely greater incidence of plagiarism 3) Established codes of conduct at each institution specify the penalty for students (no back-tracking on that now) Game on indeed"
Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ on X - "Let's talk prestige, scholarship, degrees, DEI, affirmative action. Let's have a full-blown plagiarism war. The more attention focused on elite academia, the more people will see the incompetence, the psychopathologies, and the ideological rot. Accelerate!"
