Harvard University must force Claudine Gay to resign - "Whether we like it or not, the fate of Gay and the board will tell us if the far-left’s agenda has reached its zenith or is impervious to failure. The news that former President Barack Obama counseled Harvard’s governing board to keep Gay is not surprising. That, too, is a reflection of the stakes as well as Obama’s agenda. On the other hand, a friend notes that the mere fact that there is an open debate about the large role race played in Gay’s hiring is a major sign of progress. For the most part, such conversations have been held quietly. Another indication of the stakes is the desperation with which some on the left are dealing with the plagiarism findings and calls for Gay’s resignation... A former Reagan administration official, Fried added that if the revelations “came from some other quarter, I might be granting it some credence. But not from these people.” So facts are not facts unless they come from an approved source. That’s quite a lesson, professor. Sadly, his attitude perfectly captures the radical mindset that has polluted Harvard and many other institutions. Professors, or “tenured radicals” in the immortal words of author Roger Kimball, have substituted their politics for facts, reasoning and analysis. When nothing matters except which side you join, indoctrination has replaced education. For the control of young minds to be complete, counterarguments and criticism of the ruling orthodoxy must be banished. Hence the rise of cancel culture on campuses, where only politically approved speech is permitted. The fact that so many young people claim to be traumatized or “triggered” by the prospect of having to hear something they disagree with reflects a generational brainwashing that comes with serious social consequences. The rise of antisemitism on campuses and the double standard imposed on Israel by faculty and students is one such result. Worse, the inability of so many young people to see a difference between the Hamas terrorists’ slaughter of civilians and Israel’s right to defend itself demonstrates something more profound than a mere misunderstanding of facts. It shows that the curriculums on many colleges don’t include a moral compass. When did teaching right from wrong become prohibited? Like Harvard and the other Ivies, many colleges nowadays justify their outrageous tuitions by boasting that they are training America’s future leaders. Heaven help us."
Why Harvard Can’t Fire Claudine Gay - WSJ - "Why did the University of Pennsylvania hold Liz Magill to a higher standard than Harvard is holding Claudine Gay? Both presidents were guilty of indulging antisemitism on campus, repeatedly equivocating on what should have been a straightforward response to the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks on Israel, and embarrassing their institutions when testifying before Congress. Yet Ms. Gay has kept her job and Ms. Magill has been shown the door. You don’t need a Harvard degree to understand that Ms. Gay, the school’s first black president, advances the diversity imperatives of her institution in ways that Ms. Magill, who is white, doesn’t. Anyone suggesting that Ms. Gay deserves the same treatment as Ms. Magill stands accused of racism by liberal elites who maintain that all black people not named Clarence Thomas are off-limits to criticism. The head of the NAACP, Derrick Johnson, insisted that disapproval of Ms. Gay’s leadership is “nothing more than political theatrics advancing a white supremacist agenda.” More than 80 black faculty members at Harvard signed a letter stating that “any suggestion that her selection as president was the result of a process that elevated an unqualified person based on considerations of race and gender are specious and politically motivated.” Ms. Gay’s defenders pretend that her qualifications for the job are indisputable and that her being hired had nothing to do with race. That’s baloney and they know it. Bill Ackman, the hedge-fund manager and Harvard megadonor who has led calls for her ouster, said he was told that the search committee that chose Ms. Gay “would not consider a candidate who did not meet the DEI office’s criteria,” using the acronym for diversity, equity and inclusion. There is little reason to doubt him. That universities take race into account to fill job openings might be the worst-kept secret in academia. As CNN’s Fareed Zakaria put it recently, a “white man studying the American presidency does not have a prayer of getting tenure at a major history department in America today.” Hiring for new faculty positions, particularly in humanities departments, “now appears to center on the race and gender of the applicant, as well as the subject matter, which needs to be about marginalized groups.” Earlier this year, the Supreme Court scolded Harvard for using racial preferences to admit students. Why wouldn’t it have been doing the same thing to hire faculty, staff and administrators? On campus, that appears to be the assumption. After Ms. Gay landed the top job last year, the school newspaper hailed the appointment of “the first Black president and president of color in the history of the University” and editorialized that it “feels as though it heralds the start of a more progressive era at Harvard, one that understands representation, diversity, and inclusion as essential to creating the kind of vibrant intellectual community that can in turn create a better world.” To the extent that Ms. Gay’s academic bona fides were highlighted, it was to show that they advanced the DEI agenda... Ms. Gay’s predecessor, Lawrence Bacow, spent 10 years as president of Tufts University and 24 years on the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before taking over at Harvard. His predecessor, Drew Gilpin Faust, was already a noted historian who had taught for two decades at the University of Pennsylvania and authored several well-received books in her specialty, the Civil War South. The truth is that Ms. Gay’s defenders don’t want to acknowledge that her administrative experience and scholarly credentials don’t begin to match those of other people in similar posts. The same can’t be said of Ms. Magill, who was dean of Stanford Law School, provost of the University of Virginia and a clerk for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg before being tapped to run Penn... Harvard’s dilemma illustrates a broader practical problem with racial-preference policies. Once you lower standards for hiring administrators or admitting students, you are forced to lower standards for evaluating their conduct and performance. For purposes of window dressing, people who have no business running elite institutions such as Harvard have been put in charge of people who have no business teaching or matriculating there. What could go wrong?"
Opinion | Why Harvard’s Claudine Gay Should Go - The New York Times - "Harvard has a clear policy on plagiarism that threatens undergraduates with punishment up to the university’s equivalent of expulsion for just a single instance of it... It has always been inconvenient that Harvard’s first Black president has only published 11 academic articles in her career and not one book (other than one with three co-editors). Some of her predecessors, like Lawrence Bacow, Drew Gilpin Faust and Lawrence Summers, have had vastly more voluminous academic records. The discrepancy gives the appearance that Dr. Gay was not chosen because of her academic or scholarly qualifications, which Harvard is thought to prize, but rather because of her race. There is an argument that a university president may not need to have been an awesomely productive scholar, and that Dr. Gay perhaps brought other and more useful qualifications to the job. (She held the high-ranking post of dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard before the presidency, and so may have administrative gifts, but that job is not a steppingstone to the modern Harvard presidency.) But Harvard, traditionally, has exemplified the best of the best, and its presidents have been often regarded as among the top in their given fields — prize winners, leading scholars, the total package... there are two problems here. One is Harvard’s plagiarism policy for students, its veritas image and other standards of integrity and conduct. Second is the sheer amount of the plagiarism in her case, even if in itself it is something less than stealing ideas. If the issue were a couple of hastily quoted phrases in one article, it would be one thing. But investigations have shown that this problem runs through about half of Dr. Gay’s articles, as well as her dissertation. We must ask how a university president can expect to hold her head high, carry authority and inspire respect as a leader on a campus where students suffer grave consequences for doing even a fraction of what Dr. Gay has done. That Dr. Gay is Black gives this an especially bad look. If she stays in her job, the optics will be that a middling publication record and chronically lackadaisical attention to crediting sources is somehow OK for a university president if she is Black. This implication will be based on a fact sad but impossible to ignore: that it is difficult to identify a white university president with a similar background. Are we to let pass a tacit idea that for Black scholars and administrators, the symbolism of our Blackness, our “diverseness,” is what matters most about us? I am unclear where the Black pride (or antiracism) is in this. After the congressional hearing this month where Dr. Gay made comments about genocide and antisemitism that she later apologized for, and now in the aftermath of the plagiarism allegations, some of her supporters and others have argued that the university should not dismiss Dr. Gay, because doing so would be to give in to a “mob.” However, one person’s mob is another person’s gradually emerging consensus among reasonable people... If it is mobbish to call on Black figures of influence to be held to the standards that others are held to, then we have arrived at a rather mysterious version of antiracism, and just in time for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday in less than a month. I would even wish Harvard well in searching for another Black woman to serve as president if that is an imperative. But at this point that Black woman cannot, with any grace, be Claudine Gay."
Harvard president shouldn't get pass on plagiarism allegations - "Our society has become obsessed with identity politics, but someone’s race, gender or sexual orientation is not a free pass for bad behavior... Oddly, the fact that right-leaning media discovered these stories has garnered more attention than the discoveries themselves – at least at first... Symone Sanders Townsend, former chief spokesperson and senior adviser to Vice President Kamala Harris, complained on X, formerly Twitter: “Conservative activists are claiming the first Black president in Harvard’s 387 year history is an affirmative action hire & actually not qualified for the job. Folks…Black women do not get jobs only white men have ever had by being mediocre and unqualified. Not happening.” Then, Derrick Johnson, the president and CEO of the NAACP, said: “Enough is enough. @Harvard President Claudine Gay is a distinguished scholar and professor with decades of service in higher education. The recent attacks on her leadership are nothing more than political theatrics advancing a white supremacist agenda.” They both gloss over the allegations themselves and focus solely on Gay’s identity and who brought the misconduct to light. Similarly, Charles Fried, a professor at Harvard Law School, told The New York Times: “It’s part of this extreme right-wing attack on elite institutions. The obvious point is to make it look as if there is this 'woke' double standard at elite institutions. “If it came from some other quarter, I might be granting it some credence. But not from these people.” Huh? Shouldn’t people be more concerned about whether there is truth to the allegations – not how they came to light? Surely, this isn’t another situation that “depends on the context,” as Gay told the congressional committee."
Addendum: Fried sure showed there was no double standard!
Jonathan Kay on X - ""duplicative language," also known as plagiarism. If any of the many journalists reporting on this story were caught stealing content from other sources like this, they'd be fired. Why is this woman, a Harvard president, being held to such insultingly low expectations?"
Paul Graham on X - "You know something is bad when people have to invent a phrase you've never heard before in order to avoid using the ordinary word for it."
Peter Boghossian on X - "When you veer from valuing merit, you need to do extraordinary things to defend your positions. And the further you stray, the more fantastical your efforts must become. At core, you have to lie to yourself and others."
Wesley Yang on X - "This Washington Times critique of Claudine Gay's scholarship is of course right to deride her for how little she produced, and for how much she violated her university's rules on proper citation in the course of producing so little -- but its dismissal of her findings as "narrow" and "uninteresting" seems wrong-headed. That 1.) blacks vote for Democrats out of ignorance of the actual positions that party holds which many would disagree with if only they knew, and 2.) blacks resent successful Hispanics are both intuitive hypotheses -- but the point is to set out to prove or disprove them using reliable methods. They seem like perfectly worthy questions to try to answer and it's good that we know through evidence-based methods that exceed mere intuition that indeed, blacks support the Democratic party while remaining ignorant of what they are supporting and resent other minorities when they succeed."
Vox on X - "How Republicans are weaponizing antisemitism to take down DEI"
Wokal Distance on X - "When the left usses an issue to advance their politics that's "advocacy"
When the right uses an issue to advance their goals that's "weaponizing""
"Anti-semitism is excusable when fighting it hurts the left"
Wesley Yang on X - "Carol Swain grew up in a shack without running water with 11 brothers and sisters. She was much feted in academia upon her emergence but quickly engaged in heterodoxies that got her blackballed and went on to become an evangelical Christian and a Trump supporter. That's why her outraged demands for accountability for Claudine Gay stealing her work carry no weight with anyone that matters. She lacked the implicit knowledge of how to stay within the right-thinking consensus that Gay learned at Exeter and therefore became a pariah while Gay made a rapid ascent to the very pinnacle of all academic leadership.
Roland Fryer was abandoned by his mother early and his abusive father was convicted for rape, leaving him to fend for himself in the streets as a teenager. He righted himself and became the youngest tenured professor in the history of Harvard University, a favorite of the then-President of Harvard Lawrence Summers, and one of the most productive scholars at Harvard University, studying subjects seeking to find ways to ameliorate the condition of the black underclass. Soon after publishing a study demonstrating that police officers were slightly more likely to shoot white suspects than black subjects, he became the subject of a sexual harassment investigation. He ended up suspended for a year and the lab where he studied ways to ameliorate the condition of the black underclass was shuttered -- despite the fact that the female best friend of his accuser told investigators and went on the record with the press that his accuser was typically the instigator of the sexualized banter that occurred in Fryer's lab.
The dean of Harvard College who delivered this punishment was -- Claudine Gay.
Gay is the scioness of one of Haiti's wealthiest families and a graduate of Exeter. She obtained tenure at Stanford on the strength of four published papers, and was poached by Harvard. She has gone on to publish a total of eleven research papers and no books -- a record that a professor told me was easily in the bottom 5th percentile of all professors employed at peer institutions. Seven of those papers have been shown to have violated Harvard's rules on academic citation. All of these professors are beneficiaries of affirmative action -- Swain and Fryer overcame great adversity and disadvantage to do high level academic work that was generally regarded as of the first rank by their peers. They fulfilled the promise of that policy by taking opportunities granted to them on the basis of considerations beyond the strictly academic, given the diminished opportunities available to them in youth. Gay is a child of privilege who learned how to play the game among other elites -- she stole from Swain and shut down Fryer on her path to the presidency."
How Harvard became a poisoned campus - "As has been widely noted in the firestorm since, Harvard is now a place where you can be put on notice for using the wrong gender pronouns, where undergraduates can be chucked out if years-old social media posts deemed racist are unearthed – and where there are absolutely no consequences for calling for a second Jewish Holocaust, nor for the the mass disruption of classes with megaphones to chant pro-Palestinian slogans... This is more than a war of words. Gay’s stance on “pro-Palestine” student activity since Oct 7 has caused real harm. Harm that is a moral universe away from the confected micro-aggressions and made up grievances of those whose specialism is policing transphobia and racism. Boaz Barak, an Israeli computer science professor at Harvard, was refused space in The Harvard Crimson student newspaper, so he wrote a blog on his own site, reflecting on the aftermath of Oct 7 at Harvard... more than 30 Harvard student groups issued a statement holding Israel “entirely responsible for all unfolding violence” without mentioning Hamas at all. Barak was one of 400 academics, led by Steven Pinker, the celebrity Harvard professor of linguistics, to sign a letter against the statement. In response, an anonymous resolution condemning the letter was sent to the Harvard Graduate Student Union and emailed to all the letter’s writers, including Barak. The resolution rants on about how “Israeli apartheid” was the “root cause” of Hamas’s butchery against Israelis on Oct 7, and without shame or apology states that the goals of “some.. in the “Free Palestine movement” is the “total reconquest, total evacuation, or total eradication of the Jews and some pray for Israel’s destruction by an Iranian nuclear bomb.” Several Harvard students lost friends at the Nova festival massacre, but had to face social media comments from peers such as: “innocent festival goers line does nothing for me,” and they couldn’t “give a f---” about them”. On Sidechat, an anonymous social media app, students posted “Let ‘em cook” and “gotta get them all” with the Palestinian flags; one, according to Barak, posted an emoji of a baby with a severed head; another posted that the “two Israeli defeats” in October (1973 and 2023) make it a “great month”. And so on. All this has cost Harvard more than $1 billion (£0.78bn) as sickened donors have withdrawn their gifts. And still Gay stays on, defended by those who continue to insist that attempts to get her ousted are a racist, Right-wing smear-campaign, and, it is implied by some, the tantrum of the ever-complaining, over-entitled Jews. As one professor I know said in a private email I’ve seen, the real victims in all this are Muslim students whose harms, the professor bafflingly claimed, go unreported. The rot goes deeper and wider. Just like The New York Times, Harvard claims to serve the pursuit of truth (its motto is “Veritas”) while evidence points again and again to the iron grip of vested interests and power hierarchies, which bully out those who don’t conform and only selectively respects freedom of speech. Joan Donovan, a leading misinformation researcher at Harvard’s Kennedy School, claims to have been frozen out of Harvard for her work on Facebook, now Meta, just as Meta head and Harvard graduate Mark Zuckerberg and his wife were pledging $500 million to the university... Donovan has claimed that her funding was shut down, she was unable to hire people, and that she was targeted in a smear campaign. In a court filing, she says she was silenced “in order to protect the interests of high-value donors with obvious and direct ties to Meta/Facebook.”"
Steven Pinker's five-point plan to save Harvard from itself - "For almost four centuries, Harvard University, my employer, has amassed a reputation as one of the country’s most eminent universities. But it has spent the past year divesting itself of tranches of this endowment. Notorious incidents of cancellation and censorship have contributed to a plunge in confidence in institutions of higher education, prompting me and more than 100 colleagues to found a new Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard. That was before Harvard came in at last place in the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s Free Speech ranking of 248 colleges, with a score of 0 out of 100 — originally less than zero, but Harvard benefited from a bit of grade inflation... Harvard has persecuted scholars who said there are two sexes, or who signed an amicus brief taking the conservative side in a Supreme Court deliberation. It has retracted acceptances from students who were outed by jealous peers for having used racist trash talk on social media when they were teens. Harvard’s subzero FIRE rating reveals many other punishments of politically incorrect peccadillos. So for the president of Harvard to suddenly come out as a born-again free-speech absolutist, disapproving of what genocidaires say but defending to the death their right to say it, struck onlookers as disingenuous or worse... Outlawing hate speech would only result in students calling anything they didn’t want to hear “hate speech.” Even the apparent no-brainer of prohibiting calls for genocide would backfire. Trans activists would say that opponents of transgender women in women’s sports were advocating genocide, and Palestinian activists would use the ban to keep Israeli officials from speaking on campus. For universities to have a leg to stand on when they try to stand on principle, they must embark on a long-term plan to undo the damage they have inflicted on themselves. This requires five commitments.
Free speech
Institutional neutrality
Nonviolence
Viewpoint diversity
Disempowering DEI... since overt bigotry is in fact rare in elite universities, bureaucrats whose job depends on rooting out instances of it are incentivized to hone their Rorschach skills to discern ever-more-subtle forms of “systemic” or “implicit” bias."
Bill Ackman on X - "I have been asked by a number of CEOs if @harvard would release a list of the members of each of the Harvard organizations that have issued the letter assigning sole responsibility for Hamas’ heinous acts to Israel, so as to insure that none of us inadvertently hire any of their members. If, in fact, their members support the letter they have released, the names of the signatories should be made public so their views are publicly known. One should not be able to hide behind a corporate shield when issuing statements supporting the actions of terrorists, who, we now learn, have beheaded babies, among other inconceivably despicable acts."
Max Meyer on X - "Hitlerite college radicals all over the the U.S. are rapidly deleting their online presences as they realize that endorsing terrorism and mass murder makes them unemployable for the next decade. Too late!"
Max Meyer on X - "Well, that didn't take long. After less than 12 hours, Google has taken down the site with public information about which student groups endorse Hamas terrorism. Only @X allows the truth!"
Harvard Should Pay Its Fair Share - WSJ - "What can we do about the corruption of American higher education? Milton Friedman had an idea 20 years ago: Tax the schools rather than subsidize them. That reflected a change of heart. In “Capitalism and Freedom” (1960), he argued that college education had enough “positive externalities” to justify subsidies. But when I was researching a book in 2003, I emailed him (then 91) and asked if he still believed that. He replied: “I have not changed my view that higher education has some positive externality, but I have become much more aware that it also has negative externalities. I am much more dubious than I was . . . that there is any justification at all for government subsidy of higher education. The spread of PC”—political correctness—“would seem to be a very strong negative externality, and certainly the 1960s student demonstrations were negative externalities. . . . A full analysis along those lines might lead you to conclude that higher education should be taxed to offset its negative externalities.” The past 20 years have seen negative externalities multiply: discriminatory hiring, promotion and contracting; the exclusion of conservative scholars; the suppression of speech. The case for taxing universities is stronger than ever... The feds could help by getting out of the student-loan business and taxing schools’ investment income. Why should ordinary citizens pay a 23.8% tax on capital gains while Harvard, with its $50 billion endowment, pays nothing?"
Tax the rich - unless it hurts the left's agenda
Harvard Has a Veritas Problem - The Atlantic - "Harvard dropped the term master in 2016 because it reeked of the antebellum plantation. (Oddly enough, this compunction has not prevented Harvard from continuing to offer master’s degrees, for which it charges very healthy tuition.) Harvard then took plagiarism seriously—and in one way still does, disciplining dozens of students every year for this gravest of academic sins. Even transgressions falling short of plagiarism could still constitute “misuse of sources,” for which a year’s probation and suspension from participation in extracurricular activities were the usual response. Plagiarists, meanwhile—those who had lifted someone else’s language without quotation marks or citation—were bounced from the college for a year, during which time they were required to work at a nonacademic job (no year-long backpacking trip) and refrain from visiting Cambridge. They would be readmitted after submitting a statement that examined their original misdeed and reflected on it. The senior tutor was the one who received any initial complaint from a faculty member, some of whom were (or feigned to be) shocked when they learned that plagiarism could have material consequences. They would assemble the dossier, counsel the student, and present the case to the administrative board, composed of all the senior tutors and a few faculty and deans, about 20 people in all. The senior tutor would present the student’s case to his or her colleagues, and we would deliberate. If the board voted to rusticate the offender, the student could make a personal appeal, which was surprisingly rare. After long conversations with their senior tutor, most of the students understood that they had gone seriously astray, and left with a feeling of, if not relief, then catharsis. They could return to school with the slate wiped clean, and with much greater maturity and sense of purpose. This was, in part, because most plagiarists are not depraved or even lazy, but simply insecure. They came back as much more independent and self-reliant characters, which was what we wanted. It was a very good system. Harvard’s approach to plagiarism then rested on the notion that even a disciplinary process should be educational. At its heart was the importance of accepting responsibility for one’s actions. It was not enough to correct the errant document; it was necessary to look at oneself in the mirror and say, “I did this, and it was wrong.” I believe that this approach was rooted in Harvard’s lingering mission of developing leaders of integrity and courage. A leader must begin with a deeply rooted sense of responsibility; from there one moves to accountability, the ability to own one’s organization’s failings. For example, if Jewish students are being harassed and threatened on the university campus where one is president, it means saying, “I own this. I will fix it,” in simple and unqualified terms. The members of the administrative board were predominantly teachers and scholars, not administrators, and that was crucial... It is undisputed that Claudine Gay used other scholars’ language, often with the slightest modification or none, and occasionally without even a footnote acknowledgment. Were that not so, she would not have recently requested corrections to work dating back to her dissertation. I have looked at the evidence presented in various places, none of which has been controverted, and it is clear to me that this is plagiarism... Even if, in the most tolerant and sympathetic of readings, this and similar copying merely constitute “misuse of sources,” it is disqualifying for a position of leadership at any university. Her failure to accept responsibility in stark and unqualified terms makes matters worse... Instead of standing up for Harvard’s motto, Veritas (“truth”), the corporation has hunkered down. Students have a keen scent for the stink of hypocrisy; they understand Gay’s original misdeeds and the evasions of the Harvard Corporation. They may even realize that something has gone deeply awry with the university when a Harvard professor dismisses the claims as a right-wing attack and tells The New York Times, “If it came from some other quarter, I might be granting [the accusations] some credence,” as though the facts depend on the politics of those who point them out. I have no idea how as a teacher at Harvard today I could look an undergraduate in the eye and hold forth about why plagiarism is a violation of the values inherent in the academic enterprise. They would laugh, openly or secretly, at the corruption and double standards. And I would not blame them for doing so. President Gay is in a tough spot. The Harvard Corporation deserves to be in a much tougher spot, because it has betrayed the values that the university once cherished and that it still proclaims. In both cases, the remedy indicated is the one we senior tutors applied to many a student years ago: fess up, withdraw, and reflect."
