Kash Gold (15K) (WQ arc) on X - "A lot of people attacked Chris Rufo for "saying the quiet part out loud" about his political strategy, as it gave the mainstream an excuse to ignore him. But it's increasingly clear that this *was* the strategy. The plan isn't to get Gay fired, it's to get her retained. Rufo has forced Harvard to keep Gay when getting rid of her was their only way out. If they did that, they would look at least somewhat credible. They would keep their donors. They might even make Rufo look like a bully. But now they can't, because it would be caving to the “right wing agenda.” The true agenda, however, has always been to drive cognitive dissonance among elites and convert marginal ones to our side. Claiming the scalp of a disposable mediocrity like Gay would be a pyrrhic victory. She could easily be replaced. Instead, Rufo has managed to irreparably humiliate Harvard and persuade powerful people of his cause in the process. Anime villain level mind game, and it just keeps going."
Harvard student says the decision to keep the president is ‘part of toxic culture’ on campus - "Mayesh said the decision to stand by Gay was about the left protecting its own. "We have to recognize that this is not about hypocrisy anymore. This is a very hierarchical system," Mayesh said. Mayesh, who is vice president of Harvard Law School (HLS) GOP explained further, "They get different treatment than us because they are different from us. The leftists will always be loyal to each other and the right will not ever be loyal to itself. The left always protects itself, and it is a perfect example in this situation."... Mayesh, a Catholic, added that the targeting of "White students and White Christian students" had happened on campus for a long time. "This is just a very direct and ugly manifestation of this horrible ideology. And so there are a lot of students who recognize that this is horrible and rightly so, and we're all talking against this," Mayesh said. "But there's a lot of people who also recognize that this is only part of a really large toxic culture on campus that is corroding the institutions and corroding a lot.""
Former Harvard Corporation Head William Lee ’72 Helped Prepare Gay Ahead of Testimony, Highlighting Complex Dual Roles - "Former Harvard Corporation Senior Fellow William F. Lee ’72 and a team of lawyers from his firm, WilmerHale, played a major role in prepping University President Claudine Gay ahead of her disastrous congressional testimony, according to three people familiar with the situation. In turning to Lee — whose role has not been previously reported — and other WilmerHale lawyers, Harvard sidelined their outside public relations consultants and crisis communications experts. The firm’s nearly singular involvement raises new questions about the leadup to the congressional hearing that went so poorly it nearly ended Gay’s presidency less than six months after it began... Public relations giant Edelman, crisis communications firm Risa Heller, and media strategy company A.H. Levy & Co were engaged by Harvard Public Affairs and Communications — the University’s public relations arm — to support the University amid backlash over its initial response to the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel. But the firms were shut out of the congressional hearing preparation... while two senior staff from HPAC attended meetings prior to the hearing, a person familiar with the process said, they were overshadowed by the lawyers. WilmerHale’s role in the hearing preparation suggests that a reliance on lawyerly advice contributed to the highly legalistic responses Gay and two other presidents offered when asked if calls for the genocide of Jews would violate their school’s policies on bullying and harrassment... Lee’s involvement in Gay’s preparation suggests that — since stepping down from the Corporation in June 2022 — he has continued to exert significant influence among Harvard’s top leadership, including senior administrators, members of the Corporation, and his successor Senior Fellow Penny S. Pritzker ’81. Lee’s dual role — acting simultaneously as lawyer and senior fellow, and his continuing legal work for the University — blurs lines in the relationship between counsel and client. His involvement in Gay’s preparation, alongside firm partner Felicia H. Ellsworth, was almost certainly due to Lee’s long-standing relationship with the University’s top governing board. His role in the leadup to the congressional hearing also pushes the former leader of the Corporation to the center of Harvard’s most serious leadership crisis in nearly two decades... After the hearing, Gay even faced criticism from Harvard Law School professor Laurence H. Tribe, one of the University’s most well-known liberal faculty members."
The DEI cosa nostra: Why Claudine Gay will survive Harvard’s antisemitism scandal - "In Gay’s time as an academic administrator at Harvard, that university has plunged to dead last (238th) on FIRE’s free speech rankings of U.S. universities. Surveys show that many Harvard students fear to say what they think, perhaps because of what they see happening to their professors. FIRE reports that in recent years, Harvard sanctioned four scholars for their views and terminated three of them. Rumors suggest that many more have been fired or had their careers damaged. Were I her employee, I would probably have joined the 700-plus Harvard professors signing a petition supporting Gay out of fear, just as my Sicilian ancestors once publicly praised the Mafia’s “men of honor.” I picture Harvard administrators threatening faculty, saying, “Nice professorship you’ve got there — shame if something were to happen to it.” Where speaking freely brings danger, the sensible don’t dare question the powerful. We political scientists know this all too well. As John Gaventa details in his classic Power and Powerlessness, power includes observable events such as when its governing body, the Harvard Corporation expressed confidence in President Gay. Power also includes measurable resources, such as Harvard’s $53 billion endowment and armies of lawyers, influential alumni, and scholarly journals—including one that might never again publish my research after this essay appears. (I hope my doctoral students escape collateral damage.) Yet power also has hidden dimensions. It makes people stay silent to avoid retribution, because they have seen the powerful punish dissenters. In recent years, I have noticed a disturbing pattern of behavior which seemingly started in elite institutions. Leaders weaponize their vast bureaucracies to selectively enforce rules against those whose ideas they oppose. As one Ivy League professor groused: “Many professors are punished for their findings, and this is kept under the radar. It’s common for deans to tell professors they are fired, the professor says they will go public, so then the university pays them to go away.” Some of what appears above the radar is not pretty. After tenured Professor Joshua Katz criticized his university’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) policies, Princeton’s president reopened an investigation into a 15-year old Title IX complaint for which Katz had already been punished, forcing his resignation. At Harvard, when star economist Roland Fryer faced accusations of inappropriate sexual banter with subordinates, then-dean Gay reportedly overruled university guidelines limiting Fryer’s punishment to sensitivity training. She instead attempting to fire the tenured professor before imposing a costly suspension. Many believe Fryer’s real crime was publishing empirical articles with conservative findings — a hanging offense, in part because Fryer is Black. By taking down Fryer, the most productive scholar on the planet, Gay sent a “Sicilian message,” demonstrating that no one is safe. Power does not live by fear alone: ideology and group solidarity help reinforce the powerful. In embracing fashionable, identity-based causes, from Hamas to DEI, some university leaders have built constituencies they can engage when under attack, simultaneously playing the race card and the alumni card. I know a Jewish intellectual who fears that criticism of Gay could end up increasing hatred of Jews, by triggering both DEI backers and loyal Harvard alumni... Having enemies like Stefanik and fellow Ivy Leaguer Trump (Penn, class of ‘68) will enable President Gay to rally her base and keep her post. In this holiday season, I hope Gay experiences a road-to-Damascus conversion and stands by her congressional testimony in support of free expression. With charm, intelligence, and bureaucratic savvy, Gay could make an amazing ally. I would invite her to take part in a forum on challenges to free expression at the next American Political Science Association Meeting. But whatever her strategic decisions, the rest of us could leverage this moment to reform elite education, in at least three ways. With more than its share of Ivy League alumni, the mainstream press has under-reported and even misreported the free speech recession. Now is the time for reporters to stop dismissing the critics of higher education and instead engage in real investigative journalism to see if we are right. Second, Harvard’s leaders apologized for their institution’s supposed history of racism, promising one fifth of 1 percent of Harvard’s $53 billion endowment to set things right. Congress can make cheap virtue-signaling a lot more expensive by taxing huge endowments to strengthen under-resourced institutions, such as historically Black colleges and universities, only one of which has an endowment approaching one billion dollars. Let’s spread the power. Third, we should test Gay’s support for free speech by offering to speak and debate at Harvard. Droves of conservative and libertarian prospective students and professors should apply to Harvard, peacefully crashing the gates with ideological diversity. If it is to mean anything, then diversity and inclusion must include everyone."
Luckily, she didn't
Harvard rabbi calls out Ivy League’s ‘history of antisemitism:’ ‘Time to admit it, confront it and overcome it - "A visiting scholar at Harvard’s Divinity School has called out the prestigious university for its "history of antisemitism," encouraging the university to "admit it, confront it and overcome it."... Wolpe, who made headlines earlier in December after he stepped down from Harvard’s antisemitism advisory group, said that the outrage Jewish people generate is "oddly disproportionate."... Israel is the only nation that is continually targeted for eradication... "One can demand a Palestinian state without globalizing the intifada — the term for a protest that previously resulted in over 110 suicide bombings that targeted buses, cafes, and malls," Wolpe argued. "If we cannot learn to argue civilly at Harvard, how can we have hope for the civility of other places in the world?" Wolpe wrote in the school's paper... "This has created a climate of intimidation," Wolpe told Bill Hemmer. "When students can't study, when they're afraid, when they don't want to go to their classroom, that's not anymore a question of free speech, not at university. If you want to express yourself in a paper, or you want to say something publicly at a rally, nobody thinks that that's illegitimate, but that isn't what's going on here." "What is going on here is that a certain group is being systematically targeted over and over and over again: supporters of Israel and particularly Jews""
Steve Guest on X - "Bonkers explanation from CNN reporter Matt Egan on the Harvard plagiarism scandal: "We should note that Claudine Gay has not been accused of stealing anyone's ideas in any of her writings. She has been accused of sort of more like copying other peoples writings without attribution. So it's been more sloppy attribution than stealing anyone's ideas." This guy is apparently a journalist..."
Libs of TikTok on X - "If only there was a word for “copying other peoples writings without attribution”…"
Harvard has ‘never been weaker,’ ex-Facebook exec warns - "The Harvard brand, one of the most prestigious among all universities, took nearly 400 years to build. But it’s taken just three months to call that brand very much into question... One such Harvard graduate, venture capitalist and former Facebook executive Sam Lessin, told CNN he believes the university has “never been weaker” — and he’s pointing the finger at the very top. “The Harvard brand is deeply embattled,” Lessin said in a phone interview. “Gay has demonstrated extreme weakness as an administrator and as a leader. The Harvard Corporation has not communicated well with the outside world.” Lessin, who worked at Facebook from 2010 to 2014 before co-founding San Francisco-based Slow Ventures, is hoping to fix Harvard by getting elected to the university’s powerful Board of Overseers. He’s scrambling to gather enough signatures to get on the ballot, a tall task made more plausible by growing dissatisfaction among rank-and-file alumni. To make his case, Lessin pointed to a drop in early applications to Harvard that its rivals did not experience, as well as conversations with parents who say top students are rethinking whether they even want to go to the Ivy League school. “It’s really sad,” he said. “I believe in Harvard. I love Harvard. But the university is clearly in a weak spot.” Lessin described a culture of fear where some associated with the university are unwilling to speak out publicly. “Everyone is terrified. It’s not a free-speech culture,” he said. “The irony is Gay is speaking about free speech but there is anything but free speech at Harvard.”... Lessin, the former Facebook exec, called the plagiarism charges “pretty serious” and “very embarrassing” for Harvard. He questioned why the Harvard Corporation did not uncover the plagiarism issue before hiring Gay just over a year ago. “This is a real failure of the Corporation,” he said. “Their fate is very tied up with Gay’s, given the fact they did a search and selected her.” Lessin compared the situation to that of the investors and celebrities who failed to thoroughly vet FTX, the crypto exchange that collapsed in November 2022. “People just didn’t do their homework. It’s pretty clear the [Harvard] Corporation and the Overseers skipped a step,” Lessin said.
Harvard students call for Gay’s resignation in editorial - "The editorial board said the members still have faith in their leader and they oppose her resignation because “we are not blind to what has driven this news cycle — a national outrage manufactured by conservative activists intent on discrediting higher education.”"
A top university defending a serial plagiarist doesn't discredit higher education. But criticising the serial plagiarist does.
Dissent: For Harvard’s Sake, It’s Time to Let Gay Go | Opinion | The Harvard Crimson - "Harvard’s presidency is no mere empty honor; it is a deeply challenging managerial job with deeply challenging duties, not least of which is navigating national outcry. In each of these respects, Gay has failed. The Harvard Corporation must find a leader who can do better... One doesn’t need to look far to see that Harvard isn’t running smoothly — these scandals disrupt teaching and research, Harvard’s core missions. As students, we are exhausted. We are tired of reading about Harvard’s failures every time we check the news. We are sick of reporters hassling us for interviews in the Yard. We don’t want to return home for break and get pestered by friends and family, asking what is happening on campus or how we’re holding up in this awful environment. Our classes and our studying should not be interrupted by noisemakers and megaphones. Signing an affirmation that we will follow the Harvard College Honor Code before we take our final exams should not feel like a farce."
Claudine Gay Turmoil Forces Harvard’s Secretive ‘Corporation’ Into Spotlight - The New York Times - "The secretive, powerful group that runs Harvard, known as the Harvard Corporation, has projected unity amid the unyielding turmoil around Dr. Gay. The board’s Dec. 12 announcement to stand by Dr. Gay, who is also a member, was followed by silence, even in the wake of rising demands for her removal by powerful donors, alumni and media figures. Yet private conversations with donors, professors and others indicate that there are signs of tensions among board members. Some members have conceded they need to address the billowing storms, people involved in those conversations have said. Critics and sympathizers who have tried to privately counsel the board say members have shown little concrete impetus toward changing their approach... The board members seemed aware of mounting disapproval. One toted a folder of news articles critical of the university, a Harvard spokesman confirmed. The overall message, relayed Dr. Pinker, was that “they kind of agreed with us” that the corporation had helped create some of the problems it now needed to solve. Ms. Palandjian told the dinner group, leaders of a Harvard council on academic freedom, that replacing the university’s president might not be going far enough to get Harvard back on course. Harvard required “generational change,” she said... the body discussed but opted against releasing a detailed, public independent review in the style of Stanford University, whose president resigned this summer... “The corporation should have done their homework, and apparently they did not,” said Avi Loeb, a Harvard science professor who has been publicly critical of the school’s response after the Hamas attack on Israel in which about 1,200 people were killed. “They don’t engage in criticism the way they should,” Mr. Loeb said of the corporation. “They don’t want the people who disagree with them to speak with them.”... The board’s secretive approach and opacity has made even those who earlier rallied around Dr. Gay uncomfortable. That is in part because the corporation did not disclose that it had been quietly investigating Dr. Gay’s academic work since October, when it was first contacted by a New York Post reporter about plagiarism allegations against her. Faculty and donors say the board members, by declining to be more open, have left important questions hanging over the school and Dr. Gay. Among the most persistent: Why didn’t they disclose the investigation earlier, and when, exactly, did the corporation — and Harvard’s top administrators — first hear of the plagiarism allegations against Dr. Gay? How did a small group of conservative activists seem to know more about Dr. Gay’s scholarship than the governing body responsible for vetting her selection?... “It would be wise to take actions that could rebuild trust,” said Omar Sultan Haque, a lecturer on global health at Harvard Medical School. “Admit mistakes, avoid shadowy declarations, and open up the corporation’s evidence and adjudication process so any outcome is able to be understood by all, step by step, including timelines for what was known when and by whom.” Dr. Pinker, the Harvard psychologist who attended the dinner with corporation members, and has been critical of Harvard, said the board’s fiduciary duty “is to safeguard the reputation of the university over the long term, and under their watch that has not happened.” “There are deep problems,” he added, “and they are the corporation’s problems.”"
Opinion | Danielle Allen: How to regain mutual respect on college campuses - The Washington Post - "Foxx questioned the health of universities generally and called attention to “a grave danger inherent in assenting to the race-based ideology of the radical left,” arguing that we are at “an inflection point” requiring a reshaping of “the future for all of academia.” The chairwoman’s theme was not antisemitism alone but whether the diversity, equity and inclusion efforts of college campuses have been a wrong turn for America’s intellectual culture. While I stand by the goals of inclusion and belonging for college campuses — and consider those goals valuable for America writ large — I agree with Foxx that we have lost our way in pursuing them. We have gotten lost both in the thicket of debates about the First Amendment and in the swamps of particular tenets of anti-racism. How do we find our way back?... how should we handle a protest in the classroom? This is straightforward — or should be. Any form of protest that disrupts the conduct of a class violates basic prohibitions against interference with the normal duties and activities of the university. I wish my own campus, Harvard, were clear on this policy. Some individual schools at the university are. Some aren’t. Work to change that, as you might imagine, is underway. Protecting the classroom from protest is necessary to protecting academic freedom — the right of those in the classroom to conduct the very activities of teaching and learning protected by academic freedom. What about protests when speakers come to campus? Free-speech policies on many campuses do a reasonably good job of distinguishing between acceptable protest and substantial disruption that will be subject to sanction. After a lot of recent trial and error, campuses have learned to handle this specific case reasonably well. So far, so good. But generalized intimidation or a culture of intimidation — the challenge Stefanik sought to pinpoint with her question — is a different matter... Regardless of what initial intentions student protesters might have for chants such as “globalize the intifada,” or any of the other slogans associated with eliminating Jewish people from Israel’s land, they can no longer pretend not to know that their use causes many people a reasonably felt sense of intimidation. On this matter, the Age of Innocence is behind us. If college campuses regularly had groups of kids chanting “White power,” I would not be comfortable sending my children there, even if those chanters never took a “targeted” action against a specific person... academic freedom does not protect people from intellectual correction... We have been focused so much on academic freedom and free speech that we have neglected to set standards for a culture of mutual respect... I was one of three co-chairs of Harvard’s Presidential Task Force on Inclusion and Belonging... three themes in our report went largely overlooked by university administrators as they began to pursue implementation — our focus on academic freedom, on the need to make space for religious identity and on the need for greater political diversity on our campus. Older paradigms that focused only on some groups as marginalized, as opposed to all groups as sources of potential and perspective, came back to the fore. Only on Sept. 1 of this year did the university release new nondiscrimination and bullying policies that used our very broad categorizations for diversity. They have not yet fully made their way into our campus culture. Second, and even more important, the 2020 murder of George Floyd and intense surge of anti-racism work that followed it led to the adoption of vocabularies and frameworks that made it difficult for a forward-looking pluralism to make headway."
Clearly the co-chair of Harvard’s 2018 presidential taskforce on Inclusion and Belonging knows nothing about diversity and is just a racist, sexist, transphobic, homophobic right wing hack
Too bad the left don't believe in academic freedom and free speech when they disagree with it, and they claim mutual respect is neutrality which benefits the "oppressor" (i.e. whoever they disagree with and hate)
A Heartfelt Letter to Harvard’s President, Claudine Gay | by Avi Loeb - "my grandfather decided to leave Germany. 65 members of the Loeb family stayed there, arguing that they could always take the last train. And, so they did. But this last train led to the concentration camps where they joined the six million Jews who were killed systematically in a mass genocide. Today, there is a street in Waldeck-Netze named in honor of my grandfather, “The Albert Loeb Weg.” You see, this is why we Jews are very sensitive to the word genocide. We vowed: never again... what happened after October 7 at Harvard made me wonder whether I made a mistake since academia is not guided by the principles I had hoped for. Currently, we are all embedded in an Orwellian reality shaped by social media, where the party slogan contradicts the principles it wishes to promote, akin to “War is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength.”... a coalition of 34 Harvard students organizations said they “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.”... The subsequent rise in antisemitism globally and on Harvard’s campus added a question mark to the rationale underlying Israel’s existence: never again? So, this is where I come from. The response to existential threats was not context dependent for my grandfather, nor is it for me. Harvard is my home. I am proud of spending thirty years of my life as an educator and a researcher at Harvard. So why am I emotional about your testimony at the US Congress? Because it feels too close to home on all three levels of my identity: as a Jew, an Israeli-born American and a Harvard professor."
Richard Hanania on X - "This profile of Claudine Gay in the Harvard Crimson from January reads like it was written for Kim Jung Un. What an embarrassment the entire Harvard community is."
Eli Steele on X - "To understand Claudine Gay one must understand that she is an imposter victim. She didn’t suffer slavery or segregation, yet she cloaked herself with their victimization as she walked one of the most privileged and protected paths of diversity (later DEI) to power. This identity politics version of black power is her power. That is why when she, an ideologically-driven being, was confronted with the horrific and undeniable victimization of the Jews she lacked the morals to treat everyone by the same standard. To do that and to truly embrace the victimization of the Jews would mean admitting that her life’s path was wrong. Her only aim is to protect the black power that greased her path to the top despite her profound mediocrity and immorality."
J.D. Haltigan, PhD 🏒👨💻 on X - "Everything that ills our culture, from the commoditization of victimhood, trauma, & therapeutic; the lack of rigor & the devaluing of standards is reflected in the avatar of Gay scandal. The DEI industry divides & inflames. It is corrupt. Power at the expense of truth."
David Roberts on X - "So Rufo ginned up this Claudine Gay plagiarism scandal out of nothing, as part of a (self-described!) campaign to destroy the academy, and literally the entire US journalistic establishment obediently chased after the ball he threw, blotting out all other news stories."
Wilfred Reilly on X - "They really do just believe the reverse of reality."
Christina Buttons on X - "So you’re saying Chris Rufo invented a Time Machine, traveled back in time, and removed quotations from Claudine Gay’s academic papers so she’d get busted for plagiarism? And just for good measure, he did this 40 times?"
Bill Ackman on X - ".@Harvard misled and threatened the @nypost with litigation to get it to kill an article which alleged that President Gay had committed plagiarism. This reflects very poorly on the Corporation board, and anyone else in Harvard’s administration who was behind this effort. This is yet another Hunter-Biden-laptop-like suppression of the NY Post, and further evidence of Harvard’s rejection of speech that does not fit the favored and dominant narrative"
Megan McArdle on X - "I'm almost as astonished at folks asking "Why do you care that the President of Harvard is a plagiarist, if the thefts were minor" as I was at folks asking "Why do you care if the President of the United States is threatening to arrest journalists, if he hasn't actually done it?""
Dr. Genevieve Guenther on X - "One of the most powerful English professors of the past 40 years stole an argument I made in a seminar presentation, turning it into the core of his next book. The week after my presentation, he came into the classroom and... 1/n"
James Lindsay, anti-Fascist on X - "This thread is some of the hardest evidence I've seen that Leftism is a cult."
Charles Murray on X - "The “everyone does it” threads regarding plagiarism are irritating. I could easily list dozens of scholars from left and right who I am certain have never “duplicated” a single sentence. So let’s put it to the test. Check out the most famous scholars you would most like to take down. Tell me who you caught."
Jill McBain on X - "We’re at the “it’s not that big of a deal” phase of the damage control effort that is always employed by the left. How long til we get to “okay it happened, and it’s GOOD that it did”?"
Not to mention how normally we are told "Everyone does it" is not an excuse
Pedro Domingos on X - "We live in a time when the president of Harvard is a serial plagiarist and 700 of its faculty think that’s OK."
