Jonatan Pallesen on X - "If we look at Claudine Gay's 2001 paper, there are some numbers that raises questions. This has been discussed on Econjobrumors. The thesis is that Black representatives make White people vote less. Looking at the the White Turnout in Clay's district it seems to be about middle of the pack: Image But if we look at the regression results in Table 3, Bill Clay is listed as having a highly significant effect of a 16.8% reduction in voter turnout: Image I took a look at her PhD thesis which looked at the same data. And here the coefficient is as expected for a data point in the middle of the pack: Image I checked that her thesis and the paper have the same number of data points, 2827, so it is looking at the same thing. So why did the result change so much between the thesis and the paper? A possibility is that is it caused by a change in control variables. But if the control variables are this crucial, then it is important whether they really should be included, or whether we risk a garden of forking paths. An impactful variable is the winning vote margin. But it has totally different impact in the different states. It seems kind of weird if people in Missouri strongly prefer to vote if the election is close, while the people in Tennessee strongly prefer to vote if the election is not close. I couldn't find any discussion about why this control variable was introduced, when it wasn't included originally. In any case Claudine Gay should release her data. Especially since there is such discrepancy between her two publicized results. Making the data public should be standard scientific practice to begin with."
Ian Miles Cheong on X - "Using Harvard’s diversity hire for a president and the fallout from that whole fiasco, more organizations should be wary about hiring anyone people on the basis of their race especially if it means having to overlook their shortcomings—this application of incredibly low standards for black people just about says it all, doesn’t it? All it shows is how one group of people can underperform and even cheat and get away with it. In the case of Harvard’s president, she is celebrated for her “duplicative scholarship” because it’s about all you can expect from a diversity hire. What’s next? President Kamala? Funny how one group of people is openly infantilized and given special treatment, but question it and you’re the bad guy."
Powerful donors managed to push out Harvard’s Claudine Gay. But at what cost?
"Left wing institutions are entitled to donors' money and donors must be forced to give money no matter what is done with it". Of course, if you point out that there is a targeted left wing campaign to defund Twitter of ad money...
I like that Robert Reich poisons the well and pretends that her plagiarism is made up by conservatives
Meme - "SORRY, WE MIGHT HAVE TO FIRE you..."
Claudine Gay: "Why?! 'Cuz I'm a BLACK WOMAN?!"
"What? No! THAT'S WHY WE HIRED you!"
Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ on X - "This is Claudine Gay's resignation letter. Rather than take responsibility for minimizing antisemitism, committing serial plagiarism, intimidating the free press, and damaging the institution, she calls her critics racist. This is the poison of DEI ideology. Glad she's gone."
Tom Elliott on X - "Gay's resignation letter includes zero apologies to all of the academics she ripped off to advance her own career, but more 3 dozen references to herself:
I: 17
Me: 7
My: 11
Myself: 1
She embodies everything wrong with academia today: So utterly self-absorbed by her own (unearned) biological traits, Gay cannot help but to interpret every external event through her own narrow prism of narcissism. Plagiarism is the cardinal sin of academia, and all she can think to do after getting caught red handed is to libel her critics as racist. When supposedly august institutions like @Harvard start ranking "equity" above excellence, it's perfectly predictable scam artists end up being elevated to the highest echelons in higher learning."
Meme - Western Lensman @WesternLensman: "The first individual grew up dirt poor, yet rose to become a pre-eminent legal mind and the second black person to serve as a Supreme Court Justice. The second grew up with wealth and privilege, plagiarized other scholars’ work, and just resigned in disgrace. The left hates the first, and celebrates the second. To the Marxist, ideological purity is all that matters.
*Clarence Thomas* *Claudine Gay*"
Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ on X - "The funniest outcome of the Claudine Gay saga is all of the academics coming out in defense of plagiarism and all of the journalists coming out against journalism. Dutiful to the regime, until the bitter end."
Wilfred Reilly on X - "An awkward reality, and part of the reason people cling hard to affirmative action, is that the objectively best-qualified candidate for a specific elite position would quite rarely be a Black woman. This isn't an "edgy" statement: Black women are 6% of the population, and 3-4% of most executive hiring pools (that I've seen) after you get into test scores. Eliminating 97% of all candidates before reviewing them is ~never the optimal way to pick a boss. It's interesting to compare these real figures - a "minority" group, almost by definition, generally will make up 5-15% of a national population - with the rate of minority appointments under Dem Presidents. Last I looked, Biden had appointed 49 white judges (from 61% of the pop., 75+% of the lawyers) and 44 Black judges (12%, ~5%)."
Logic Illustrated ππ€ππ€π on X - "Moreover, the 3-4% of black women who *do* truly excel on merit & are very qualified, will forever be looked down upon as "diversity hires". Racial segregation is a lose/lose situation. It benefits nobody but the losers."
Wilfred Reilly on X - "The idea that "white women benefit the most from AA" is a pure statistical artifact, btw. Half of the white population is female, so MORE people in empirical terms benefit/have benefitted from the 20pt edge that used to exist for women than from the 150pt edge that exists for Blacks y Latinos. But, obviously, the second is 7.5x bigger."
Ian on X - "If AA is about remedying any sort of inequity or injustice, the largest 'disadvantaged' group, white women, must necessarily reap the greatest aggregate benefits. Any other outcome would be gross systemic injustice."
Eli Steele on X - "Claudine Gay blames her resignation from Harvard on "racial animus." Not plagiarism. Not antisemitism. Not betraying Harvard's mission. We are done with this excuse. From anyone. Period."
Jennifer A. Frey on X - "One reason Gay is being forced to resign is on full display in her resignation letter: an unwillingness to acknowledge any failures on her part. She is simply distressed that people have criticized her."
Opinion | Claudine Gay and the Limits of Social Engineering at Harvard - The New York Times - "the important question for Harvard was never whether Gay should step down. It was why she was brought on in the first place, after one of the shortest presidential searches in Harvard’s recent history. How did someone with a scholarly record as thin as hers — she has not written a single book, has published only 11 journal articles in the past 26 years and made no seminal contributions to her field — reach the pinnacle of American academia? The answer, I think, is this: Where there used to be a pinnacle, there’s now a crater. It was created when the social-justice model of higher education, currently centered on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts — and heavily invested in the administrative side of the university — blew up the excellence model, centered on the ideal of intellectual merit and chiefly concerned with knowledge, discovery and the free and vigorous contest of ideas. Why did that change happen? I’ve seen arguments that it goes back to the 1978 Bakke decision, when the Supreme Court effectively greenlit affirmative action in the name of diversity. But the problem with Bakke isn’t that it allowed diversity to be a consideration in admissions decisions. It’s that university administrators turned an allowance into a requirement, so a kind of racial gerrymander now permeates nearly every aspect of academic life, from admissions decisions to faculty appointments to the racial makeup of contributors to essay collections. If affirmative action had been administered with a lighter hand — more nudge than mandate — it might have survived the court’s scrutiny last year. Instead, it became a pervasive regime that frequently got in the way of the universities’ higher goals, particularly the open exchange of ideas. In announcing Gay’s appointment, Harvard praised her leadership and scholarship. The work of a university president is also that of executive, fund-raiser and cheerleader for the institution, and maybe the Harvard Corporation thought she’d be good at that. But skin color was the first thing The Harvard Crimson noted in its story about her taking office, and her missteps and questions about her academic work gave ammunition to detractors who claimed she owed her position solely to her race. This is the poisoned pool in which Harvard now swims. Whenever it elevates someone like Gay, there’s an assumption by admirers and detractors alike that she’s a political symbol whose performance represents more than who she is as a person. The weight of expectations on her must have been crushing. But dehumanization is the price any institution pays when considerations of social engineering supplant those of individual achievement. It may take a generation after the end of affirmative action before someone like Gay can have the opportunity to be judged on her own merits, irrespective of her color. But the damage that the social-justice model has done to higher education will take longer to repair. In 2015, 57 percent of Americans expressed high confidence in higher education, according to a Gallup survey. Last year, the number had fallen to 36 percent, and that was before the wave of antisemitic campus outbursts. At Harvard, early admission applications fell by 17 percent last fall... One of the secrets of America’s postwar success wasn’t simply the caliber of U.S. universities. It was the respect they engendered among ordinary people who aspired to send their children to them. That respect is now being eroded to the point of being erased. For good reason... Two hundred thousand dollars or more is a lot to pay for lessons in how to be an anti-racist... the intellectual rot is pervasive and won’t stop spreading until universities return to the idea that their central purpose is to identify and nurture and liberate the best minds, not to engineer social utopias."
Meme - Colin Wright @SwipeWright: "PREDICTION: Harvard president Claudine Gay will resign, but she will not admit any wrongdoing. Instead, she will claim to be the victim of a racist Right-wing witch hunt that is impacting her mental health and causing a needless distraction for students and faculty."
racist: "racial animus"
impacting her mental health: "it has been distressing"
distraction for students and faculty: "resign so that our community can navigate this moment of extraordinary challenge with a focus on the institution rather than any individual"
Meme - AG @AGHamilton29: "Beyond parody..."
Rene Graham: "Accountability is not "cancel culture.""
Rene Graham @reneeygraham: "The anti-cancel culture folks are predictably quiet about what's happened to Claudine Gay. Of course."
Meme - The Rabbit Hole @TheRabbitHole84: "Criteria that matter:
- Black
- Woman
Criteria that do not matter:
- Merit
See the issue? We really need to stop undermining our institutions to appease Woke Bigots. “Racist” and “Sexist” are entirely reasonable descriptions for someone who wants Harvard to select Claudine Gay’s replacement as president on the bases of race and sex instead of considering merit."
Marc Lamont Hill: "The next president of Harvard University MUST be a Black woman."
Of course, left-wing logic is that if you don't hire based on race and sex, you are racist and sexist, and that this is just to correct discrimination so everyone is on an equal footing (even though "majorities" are outright excluded sometimes now)
AP admits widely panned story on Harvard plagiarism didn't meet standards - "The Associated Press updated a headline on Wednesday that deemed plagiarism a "new conservative weapon," following widespread backlash to the post on X, admitting the story did not meet the outlet's standards. "The story doesn’t meet our standards," Lauren Easton, the VP of AP Corporate Communications, told Fox News Digital. She said they were in the process of updating the headline. The AP's original headline read, "Harvard president’s resignation highlights new conservative weapon against colleges: plagiarism," which was widely mocked on social media, after Harvard President Claudine Gay announced she would be resigning from the position on Tuesday. "Plagiarism charges downed Harvard’s president. A conservative attack helped to fan the outrage," the AP's new headline reads. "American higher education has long viewed plagiarism as among the most serious of offenses. Accusations of plagiarism have ruined the careers of academics and undergraduates alike," the AP's updated lede reads... CNN political commentator Scott Jennings mocked the original AP headline and wrote that it was "remarkable" conservatives "had the time to invent the concept of plagiarism over the last couple months." Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle said the AP "buried the lede" and added, "the GOP stole this weapon from colleges, which for years punished people for plagiarism with little to no input from conservatives." Rep. Ralph Norman, R-S.C., wondered what the AP would have published if Gay was "a male, Asian, white, outspoken Christian, or Republican.""
BBC deletes post claiming Harvard's Claudine Gay was victim of 'culture wars' - "The BBC drew scorn after a headline about the resignation of Harvard president Claudine Gay declared she was a “casualty of campus culture wars” on social media. The post to the news division’s official X account, featuring the headline “Harvard’s Claudine Gay a casualty of campus culture wars,” neglected to mention that Gay quit after several instances of alleged plagiarism in her doctoral dissertation from the late 1990s surfaced... “You sure you’ve got this headline right? What brought her down was her inability to say that calling for a holocaust would be offensive to Jewish students,” Sopel wrote. He noted that Gay was “condemned by left and right” — adding that “calling it ‘culture wars’ is lazy and misleading methinks.”"
AP Criticized After Deeming Plagiarism Accusations a 'New Conservative Weapon' - "The X post from AP linking the article received a “community note” reading, “Plagiarism is a breach of rules for Harvard University. Claudine Gay was ultimately forced to resign for a series of breaches of this policy. Plagiarism - or application of the rules around plagiarism - therefore cannot be considered a ‘weapon.’...
How the Media Covered It: The backlash to the AP’s article was covered moderately in right-rated outlets and ignored in center-rated and left-rated outlets.”
Meme - Wilfred Reilly @wil_da_beast630: "Last on this, but: it's fascinating to see the Wokist quasi-religious frame operate here. Whether Gay actually did anything wrong - and she....obviously did- is irrelevant to her defenders. Everything that happens inside facially neutral systems of "order" and "law" is just a cover for racist power relations, after all. So, the REAL story is that a Black woman is being attacked just for being Black, her attackers must ipso facto be racist, and all right-thinking people must rally to her! Amazing to watch in the wild."
Ibram X. Kendi @ibramxk: "When a racist mob attacks a Black person, it finds a seemingly legitimate reason for the attack that allows for it to accrue popular support and credibility, and which allows the growing mob to deny they are attacking the person in this way because the person is Black. 1/4"
Readers added context they thought people might want to know: "Other presidents of elite universities (who are not black) lost their jobs for similar reasons in 2023:
Marc Tessier-Lavigne of Stanford resigned over research misconduct.
Liz Magill of Penn resigned over remarks regarding genocide that were substantially the same as Gay's."
Meme - The Rabbit Hole @TheRabbitHole84: "Claudine Gay plagiarized, aka "stole", other people's work. How is that not reinforcing negative stereotypes about Blacks?"
Ibram X. Kendi @ibramxk: "Racist mobs won't stop until they topple all Black people from positions of power and influence who are not reinforcing the structure of racism. What these racist mobs are doing should be obvious to any reporter who cares about truth or justice as opposed to conflicts and clicks."
Meme - Josh Barro @jbarro: "I'm astounded by how many academics are making an "everybody does it" argument. Not everybody does this! It's insulting to our intelligence to claim this is permitted or ordinary practice. Harvard requires undergrads who do this to withdraw."
Bradley Palmquist & Stephen Voss
Claudine Gay *over 90% identical*"
Claudine Gay wouldn't share data in 2001 paper when questioned - "Harvard University president Claudine Gay, who has come under fire over accusations of plagiarism and antisemitism, is now seeing her work further scrutinized after it was revealed two professors questioned a data method she used in a 2001 Stanford paper that often resulted in “logical inconsistencies” — and she refused to share her research with them. The 2001 study, titled “The Effect of Black Congressional Representation on Political Participation,” was one of four peer-reviewed articles that helped land Gay tenure at Stanford University, but its merit could not be properly reviewed by everyone, according to a post on the Dossier by Christopher Brunet. In 2002, Michael C. Herron, the Remsen 1943 professor of quantitative social science at Dartmouth, and Kenneth W. Shotts, the David S. and Ann M. Barlow professor of political economy at Stanford Graduate School of Business, claimed to debunk the very foundation of Gay’s research. At a conference of the Society for Political Methodology (PolMeth) that year, Herron and Shotts presented their research, finding inconsistencies in Gay’s paper where she concluded that the election of black Americans to Congress negatively affects white political involvement and rarely increases political engagement among black people... Herron told The Post Tuesday that he and Shotts have published multiple reports between 2000 and 2004 looking into how researchers used El-R and the type of results it can produce... Brunet also noted that the 2002 PolMeth program that included Herron and Shotts’ paper was missing from the conference’s website — despite all other programs from 1984 to 2021 being available. PolMeth did not respond to The Post’s request for comment on the missing year."
Oilfield Rando on X - "The left owns every university top to bottom. A slush fund network, a base for assault on all institutions, a massive pillar of unchallenged power. 99% of Republicans are scared to even trim their funding. Yet look how furious they are over losing ONE insignificant battle."
Oilfield Rando on X - "Imagine if the right were that fervent and and hell-bent on conquest"
Wajahat Ali on X - "Chris Rufo and bad faith right wing actors win again."
Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ on X - "This is how a child thinks, neatly dividing up the world into "good actors" and "bad actors," as in a Marvel film. If he were honest, Wajahat would simply say "people I don't like," rather than dressing up his preferences in fake moral terms. But yes, I did win again."
Kyle Smith on X - "Harvard’s current position: plagiarists can’t be president of the university but they can be full professors. She either committed plagiarism or she didn’t. If she didn’t, she should stay on as president! If she did, she has disqualified herself from ever serving on the faculty of any self-respecting uni. So which is it??? Plagiarism is a serious academic offense, not something that only counts against those in senior administrative posts."
Coleman Hughes on X - "Claudine Gay has no one to blame but herself. She chose to easy path of plagiarism—almost 50 times—over the hard path of writing original prose. It’s a pattern of serious fraud. Plain and simple. This moment is a useful litmus test. Anyone who is blaming Gay’s resignation on other factors—e.g., right-wingers or racism—is nuts and can safely be ignored for the rest of time."
Nate Silver on X - "There's an order of operations here. 1) Keep your own house in order. 2) Get it in order when good-faith critics tell you that you have a problem. If you've already failed 1 and 2, I have less than zero sympathy if it's bad-faith critics who force your hand."
Rudolph Troha πΊπ²π³️π on X - "I don't think any attempt to hold a powerful, esteemed organization accountable to its own supposed values is a bad-faith act, even if it comes from someone with a political lean you don't share. Integrity is a universal value and we should always demand it."
Joe Duarte π️ on X - "What exactly does "bad faith" mean here, and in general? Insincere? Bad person? It's a smear used almost exclusively by leftists to tag outsiders. There's nothing insincere or ignoble about being a conservative, libertarian, etc. Leftists don't seem to comprehend *disagreement*."
Small Metal Owl on X - "The problem with 2) is that, as far as they are concerned, there is not and can never be any such thing as a "good-faith critic" of person such as Ms. Gay."
Claudine Gay Made a Career of Attacking Black Scholars. Don't Defend Her for Being Black | Opinion - "Claudine Gay during her Harvard career has repeatedly targeted and disrupted the careers of prominent Black male professors? As Dean of the College, Gay terminated Ronald S. Sullivan, Jr. as Faculty Dean of the Winthrop House. Professor Sullivan, Jr., a graduate of Morehouse College and Harvard Law School, was the first Black faculty dean of a house in the history of Harvard College. What was Professor Sullivan's offense? Sullivan deigned to represent the disgraced movie producer Harvey Weinstein—an act of moral conscience, since all are entitled to legal representation in our legal system. Yet legal conscience mattered not to Claudine Gay, who terminated a race pioneer for doing his civic duty. You may excuse this heartless termination as a one-off. You would be wrong. Economics Professor Roland G. Fryer, Jr. was next in the sights of Dean Gay. Fryer was a top Black professor at Harvard. After having overcome all sorts of hardship and childhood deprivation, Professor Fryer joined the faculty at Harvard to become the second-youngest professor ever to be awarded tenure at Harvard, and went on to blaze a trail of distinction, including winning the MacArthur Fellowship and the John Bates Clark Medal. Yet when Fryer undertook research into the killings of unarmed Black men in Houston, Fryer's research found no racial disparities. He made the mistake of undercutting the racial narrative that the Left has adopted, and as a result, Gay did her best to remove all of his academic privileges, coordinating a witch hunt against him. Fryer survived Gay's crusade of discharge but Fryer's lab was shut down, his reputation tarnished. No one in good faith should defend President Gay because she is the first Black president of Harvard. Even if you don't agree with me that our racial struggle is in our past, someone who has targeted Black male professors has waived any benefit of the "first Black" defense."
Wilfred Reilly on X - "Yup. Just as with Hamas, Jordan Neeely, Jacob Blake, Jussie Smollett, Michael Brown, the BLM mansion scandals...Duke Lacrosse...OJ...Crown Heights...etc, every smart-ish leftist account really is going all-in on the Approved Narrative: Gay was ~fired because of "racism," for "being too Black and too good." It's amazing to watch mythogenesis take place in real time."
Ian Miller on X - "The entire Harvard scandal just reinforces the same lesson we learned during COVID — elite institutions are filled with deeply unimpressive people whose one qualification is a commitment to advance the tenets of current consensus progressive ideology And they will ALWAYS circle the wagons around protecting themselves instead of holding anyone in their political circle accountable"
Hugh Hewitt on X - "Attacks on @realchrisrufo were to be expected because Rufo is an extremely effective public intellectual and activist. Rufo is also, like Mark Levin, Mark Steyn, Peggy Noonan and many other conservative public intellectuals, a superb writer and communicator. He persuades people to consider ideas and to act in politics. Most academics are not widely read if read at all. Very few have impact beyond their faculty meetings. They have never been in anything resembling a real public debate that is decided on the merits. And many academics want no part of such debates and zero scrutiny of their “scholarship.” Anger at Rufo and Aaron Sibarium of the @FreeBeacon is at least in part the product of the fear that scrutiny will fall on their “work” and its merits or lack thereof. There is also no little jealousy behind the assaults on Rufo. I have not seen one critic of Rufo who has produced anything approaching the merits of Rufo’s intellectual history of the American left, “America’s Cultural Revolution,” a very fine and extremely well-researched book. The old cliche about flak when over the target applies here. Rufo will shrug it off but expect the attacks to continue. It is the way of the left and has been for decades."
Liz Wheeler on X - "I am loling. According to the left, @realchrisrufo is a: - Bigot (oldie but goodie) - Russian spy - Mafia - Mussolini - Fake Harvard grad All because the left won’t condemn Claudine Gay’s plagiarism because we all know she was a DEI hire. This is getting hilarious."
