Meanwhile on the International front....

I don't believe Ackman here any more than any other story that starts "I learned from someone. . . " but doesn't specify the someone.

 

Indeed.

 

Sure.

But to be fair, we'd have to look at the last 200 years of university president plagiarizers and Ivy League resume fakes to make any sort of determination about who's been treated fairly and who hasn't.

 

A couple things. First -- I have plenty of issues with DEI and particularly the antisemitic hypocrites on the far left and this whole ridiculous bullshit "decolonization" framework that looks at complex overseas conflicts through a simplistic and irrelevant U.S. racial lens (not to mention the ignorance of characterizing the war in Gaza as "white" Israel massacring "Black and brown people" to paraphrase Hamas's useful idiots in the U.S.). And he makes that point eloquently. But that doesn't mean there isn't structural racism in our society or that there really is equality of opportunity. So a lot of the rest of his lengthy post is gaslighting at its finest.

And second -- why don't you provide examples of careers that Claudine Gay supposedly "destroyed?" Without getting into any specific detail, I've spent time with her and she's an intelligent and awesome person who is anything but an antisemite or the McCarthyite monster you're lampooning her as. She's someone who was adjusting to the most high profile and demanding job in academia (I've mentioned before that I've known one of her predecessors my entire life) and didn't have the PR chops to respond to 100-mph fastballs suddenly being thrown at her in every direction following October 7 (not to mention that anyone who has ever spent time on a college campus knows that you could probably do a pretty good Immaculate Grid with the 20 or 30 or so student radicals who collectively comprise the 30 or so groups that signed the antisemitic statement at Harvard after the attacks). And this whole thing smacks of a witch hunt. As a Jewish person, I'm convinced this whole episode is going to make things a lot worse for us in the big picture. The optics are horrendous. Wealthy Jewish donors in finance working hand-in-hand with white supremacists like Rufo (who DON'T have the best interests of Jews at heart) orchestrating a character assassination campaign -- with technically accurate but largely overblown plagiarism accusations of the type that would nail probably 85 percent of academics if they were suddenly put under that level of scrutiny using modern-day detection tools -- to push out Harvard's first black female president because she wasn't sufficiently vocally pro-Israel? What could possibly go wrong?

It's just awesome having so many of the self-hating JVP types working with the Stalinists to whip up antisemitism from the left under the guise of "anti-Zionism" while having jackasses like Ackman (not to mention Stephen Miller, et al.) working with the Nazis on the right under the guise of being antiwoke. Exactly what my grandparents must have dreamed of when they fled the pogroms.

 

I neither know nor care if Harvard's former president tried to pass someone else's work as her own or made honest/careless mistakes.
I know college academics care waaaaaaay too much about citations. I refuse to read anything written in APA. It's like you are reading a bunch of citations with a dab of information sprinkled in for good measure.
Heck, when my wife was getting her doctorate she got flagged for plagiarizing herself.

 

All Dr. Gay had to say was that Harvard would not tolerate calls for the genocide of any group. Period. End of story. She failed to do that. It doesn't make her anti-Jewish, but it does call her fitness to be Harvard President. Also, what she did was plagiarism. That many of the people going after her were despicable and many were racist doesn't change the fact that she is at fault for having to resign.

 

She should have sued herself for damages.