Anonymous wrote: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.
Exactly.
Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:So Stefanik et al’s hearing was never about anti-semitism. It was really about dismantling DEI. Let’s see who they go after next.
If U Chicago is "where fun goes to die", maybe Harvard is where the excesses of DEI finally die. The university should be embarrassed that it appointed a president with such a thin scholarly record. Unfortunately the sorry Gay saga hurts far more meritorious diverse peers. It's hard to see how Gay sticks around Cambridge in a tenured role. She would do Harvard and academia a favor by quietly leaving the faculty also.
Harvard’s new slogan:
Where DEI goes to DIE.
Plagiarism!!
That's what Florida said.
Isn’t it ironic, don’t you think?
A little toooooo ironic.
And who would've thought, it figures
Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:So Stefanik et al’s hearing was never about anti-semitism. It was really about dismantling DEI. Let’s see who they go after next.
If U Chicago is "where fun goes to die", maybe Harvard is where the excesses of DEI finally die. The university should be embarrassed that it appointed a president with such a thin scholarly record. Unfortunately the sorry Gay saga hurts far more meritorious diverse peers. It's hard to see how Gay sticks around Cambridge in a tenured role. She would do Harvard and academia a favor by quietly leaving the faculty also.
Harvard’s new slogan:
Where DEI goes to DIE.
Plagiarism!!
That's what Florida said.
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.
Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:So Stefanik et al’s hearing was never about anti-semitism. It was really about dismantling DEI. Let’s see who they go after next.
If U Chicago is "where fun goes to die", maybe Harvard is where the excesses of DEI finally die. The university should be embarrassed that it appointed a president with such a thin scholarly record. Unfortunately the sorry Gay saga hurts far more meritorious diverse peers. It's hard to see how Gay sticks around Cambridge in a tenured role. She would do Harvard and academia a favor by quietly leaving the faculty also.
Anonymous wrote:GOP goes after Black woman. It's what they do.
Anonymous wrote:That guy.....why is he still relevant?Anonymous wrote:Wokes like Kendi are shouting racism
Anonymous wrote: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 wrote:
She was making outrageous monetary demands of UNC and was rightly rebuffed. Then she made it a racial thing. The truth is she never had the scholarly chops to be offered the role at UNC in the first place. The 1619 Project was shoddy academic work, but decent propaganda.
Anonymous wrote: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.