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

Anonymous wrote:Wokes like Kendi are shouting racism

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

Anonymous wrote:Good God.

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.

Anonymous wrote:It's about time.

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.

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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.