Harvard President resigns

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01/02/2024 21:43

Subject: Harvard President resigns

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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.

Gay managed to avoid close scrutiny too often, going back to her first tenure track job and getting tenure. The peer reviewers were questioning the validity of her data and research even 20 years ago and asking for the data, which she refused to supply, and called it unverifiable. That alone should have been a warning flag. On a certain level I can understand why because universities were desperate to hire and promote black faculty, but on the other hand, there are accomplished black faculty with impeccable research and publications, so why was she allowed the benefit of doubt and allowed to elevate through the ranks of academia too seamlessly without scrutiny? What was so special about Claudine Gay for the Harvard board to reward her so handsomely? And this isn't even touching on other controversies in her history as a dean.

Which is why there's a strong stench of cronyism around Gay and the Harvard board that is hurting the school's brand so badly. The school may have made a step in having Gay resign but their troubles aren't over yet.