Harvard President resigns

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:B.U., just across the river, recently hired its first woman president--she also happens to be black. Will her body of research work be scrutinized as well to dig up instances of improper citation?

Everyone's body of research is supposed to withstand scrutiny. I have really mixed feelings about the entire Claudine Gay situation but your research is supposed to be reproducible and faultlessly documented. That's how you support your scholarly argument, not with mere Colbertian "truthiness".

Well, then, going forward I would expect the complete body of work of each prospective Harvard president to be given the same scrutiny. The fact that Gay's plagiarism was brought to light in the context of efforts to oust her due to her congressional testimony re: campus anti-semitism makes it seem that more was at stake than just the comments she made--or didn't make--during her testimony.

The allegations aren't new. They were around for a while. When Gay's rumored selection as the next president emerged, it was not without controversy and for good reasons. Her academic background was extremely weak and the some of the plagiarism claims were sent to the board. The Harvard board refused to entertain these allegations seriously and do a due diligence into the rest of her publications. The board is the entity that is mostly at fault even if Gay is no innocent victim either. There were powerful figures on the board, particularly a woman named Penny Pritzker, a former Obama official and donor, who had mentored Gay and who pushed her for the job instead of opening the search to other options.

University presidents have resigned due to plagiarism. Stanford's president resigned in 2023 over his lab falsifying data. In 2021, the president of the University of South Carolina resigned for plagiarizing a single speech. Both were white men.

But what the Gay incident has exposed is the cult of DEI in facilitating the elevation and promotion of some people into tenured roles and leadership without proper qualification or vetting their scholarship. Gay is not alone. There are others out there. People know this too clearly now and it is casting a shadow over all of academia, but particularly elite academia.

So who facilitated the elevation and promotion of the two white men you refer to? If the "cult of DEI" is promoting unqualified individuals of color, who is promoting unqualified white men?

NP here. I didn't follow the Stanford or South Carolina cases closely, although they were also hugely fraught and embarassing for those schools. But it's clear that Claudine Gay was far less qualified for her current role as compared to her predecessors, who came in as very well-respected academics and leaders - and as compared to the increasing nunber of incredibly impressive academic leaders who happen to be women and people of color like the new BU president that someone mentioned upthread.

Fwiw Gay's career is completely inexplicable to those of us who know academia. Tenure in political science at almost any school is generally understood to require at least one sole-authored book published by a serious academic press, along with a bunch of articles in obscure but highly respected academic journals. Full professor takes a lot more. Gay appears to have been fast-tracked for these promotions - which basically mean a job for life - and for various dean roles without a single book and on the basis of very little actual scholarship or output. At Stanford and Harvard, the most prestigious schools in the country!

I'm not surprised by the PP's statement about controversy when Gay was selected as president since her career is out-of-whack with what most academics experience - especially in a world where there are fewer and fewer tenured positions and more reliance on adjuncts or short-term contracts. Add to all of this the evidence that her small corpus of academic publishing was - at best - more sloppy than an undergraduate would be permitted to submit, and there was no way for her to succeed in her current role. It's a shame all around tbh.

Isn't peer review still a part of publishing academic work before getting tenure. Did they just let the plagiarism slide or not even look up her citations? Grad students get the boot for this sort of thing and it embarrases their advisor. Or at least it used to.... Had no idea the lowered standards in K-12 reached into our university system.

[Anonymous]

OMG I love how people are trying to make it like she was ousted bc she’s black. She never would have gotten the job or kept it these past 6 weeks if she HADN’T been black. Being black kept her the job; it didn’t lose her the job.

What lost her the job was the cowardly, terrifyingly absurd congressional testimony that triggered an investigation into her plagiarism.

[Anonymous]

It's 2024. Not 1924.

There are millions of very accomplished people who aren't white, middle aged men. And we are far enough along that it's not even an issue. Talent is talent.

But Harvard elevated a fairly mediocre woman of color to project some kind of virtue signaling. And it hit them hard. The damage to Harvard's reputation is pretty severe. No doubt they'll bounce back - depending, of course, on who the Board selects as the next president.

We'll see how things go going forward. Think organizations - whether corporate, academic, or NGOs - are kind of sort of recognizing that elevating people simply for DEI reasons doesn't work.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It's 2024. Not 1924.

There are millions of very accomplished people who aren't white, middle aged men. And we are far enough along that it's not even an issue. Talent is talent.

But Harvard elevated a fairly mediocre woman of color to project some kind of virtue signaling. And it hit them hard. The damage to Harvard's reputation is pretty severe. No doubt they'll bounce back - depending, of course, on who the Board selects as the next president.

We'll see how things go going forward. Think organizations - whether corporate, academic, or NGOs - are kind of sort of recognizing that elevating people simply for DEI reasons doesn't work.

Actually the corporate world is pulling back because some class actions are in the works due to race based hiring and racial quotas in hiring or layoffs. They are particularly targeting major law firms that generally only hire from schools like Harvard and Yale.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It's about time.

+1
Good.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:More charges of plagiarism over the weekend.
Essentially half of her published works have been shown to be plagiarized.
This would not be tolerated from a student.

Good grief. How hard would it be to simply give credit to the authors whose work she is passing off as her own?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Good God.

From the comments:

“copying other peoples writings without attribution” - if only we had a word for this

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I thought her apology was very sincere after the questioning and her responses (unlike the other two presidents), but I can see why it's best that she resigned.

Gay's suggestion that criticism of her plagiarism was racially motivated undid any goodwill that her resignation statement may have created. Playing the victim and the race card -- not classy at all.

PP here. I was referring to her apology soon after Stefanik's questioning of her and the other two female university presidents..

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The pattern of Gay's failing upward goes back to her earliest days. She made tenure at elite universities on astonishingly weak academic output, including data that couldn't be replicated nor would she release them when once asked for it. Then as a dean and university administrator, she established a controversial history of badly treating professors who differed from her ideologically, including a black Harvard professor whose research contradicted certain "woke" beliefs about the police treatment of black Americans.

The real failure here isn't Gay, who simply took advantage of the opportunities given to her, but the people who gave her those opportunities in the first place. That's the scandal. And that is not going anywhere soon.

Well said. The left is entirely to blame for the idiocy that is now revealing itself. Let's hope that sanity returns soon. Seems to be heading in that direction, with many companies getting rid of DEI positions.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Great. Now replace her with someone Jewish so all the people crying antisemitism can shut up and go back to trying to buy their kids' way in.

No. They need to do an extensive search and hire someone based on MERIT.
No more hiring people due to inherent or arbitrary attributes.

Her “inherent and arbitrary attribute” was:

- she has been extremely oppressed her entire life. Her writings - even the plagiarized ones - all focus on how oppressed any and every Black person is, and especially if they are female.

Look what she presided over at Harvard: this is from the mandatory Title IX introduction for all entering Harvard freshmen:



Do you find that chart as ridiculous as I do?

But, it is not a joke, nor are these ideas exclusive to Harvard.

DP. This kind of nonsense has got to stop. "Victimhood" has become big business.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Why should I give two shits about this?

yet here you are.

The nature of the Internet results in me reading lots of stuff that I don't really care about.

And yet you're *still* here, "not caring" so very vehemently.
DP

[Anonymous]

Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, Harvard-grad Elise Stefanik is claiming personal victory in this cultural battle:

Stefanik, who took the lead on questioning the elite university leaders, sent out a press statement on Gay’s resignation, claiming victory in the fight.
“I will always deliver results,” Stefanik said. “The resignation of Harvard’s antisemitic plagiarist president is long overdue. Claudine Gay’s morally bankrupt answers to my questions made history as the most viewed Congressional testimony in the history of the U.S. Congress.

“Her answers were absolutely pathetic and devoid of the moral leadership and academic integrity required of the President of Harvard,” she continued. “This is just the beginning of what will be the greatest scandal of any college or university in history.”

[Anonymous]

PP here.

Forgot link to article:

https://thehill.com/homenews/4385227-stefanik-takes-victory-lap-over-harvard-presidents-exit/

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Wokes like Kendi are shouting racism

That guy.....why is he still relevant?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:No longer President but still a professor. Hopefully no one signs up for any of her classes.

Oh, I'm sure her classes will be full of dopes who want to hear her tales of woe and "victimization." The same dopes who are pro-Hamas.