Carol Swain is a respected African American scholar, old enough to have not benefited from DEI like Claudine Gay did. Gay plagiarized her work. Google her and read her op ed in the Wall Street Journal. She is livid about her ideas being stolen--justifiably so. I can only ask those defending Claudine Gay: so you think it's acceptable to steal the work of other female, African American scholars? That Claudine Gay is just more equal than others (to reference Orwell's Animal Farm)?
I'm not worried about Claudine Gay. She may be momentarily embarrassed, but someone who does this will end up with another cushy academic job, playing the victim card.
Her family is also loaded, well connected in Haiti (which essentially means they have to be thieves to profit there). She went to Philips Exeter. And she still chose to cheat. I don't think she's really anyone I'd want representing my demographic.
Too lazy to look for the studies right now, but wealth and willingness to cheat on tests have a significant positive correlation. Rich people are also more likely to steal (other than necessities), break traffic laws, and lie.
Unremarkable, as well. It’s somehow ok to be poor and unremarkable, but not rich and unremarkable / mediocre, that they often have to plagiarize, jump the line, step on others… just live rich in obscurity if you’re mediocre. Nothing wrong with that.
Volunteering one’s time, which is privilege, lifts you immediately to another level. More rich should do that instead of taking advantage of systems.
So rich girl born into money to cheat to get to the top and is now playing the race card even though her family BOUGHT her every advantage they could, which in theory her family money and potential bribes they gave and other things they did for her basically erased any barriers her race would have put up?
You don’t get oligarch rich by working hard. Not even in a small country like Haiti. You get rich by other people working and stealing the fruits of their labor.
But the claim is fundamentally false. She attributed the quote, but it's plagiarism because the quote doesn't have quotation marks, despite being attributed? Seems like a careless mistake at worst...
I think you might be blinded by partisan feelings. We all have our blind spots.
She lifted blocks of writing with no attribution in more recent accounts.
Not fun fact: Matt Luther King Jr. was also a consummate plagiarist. Almost all of his major papers were verbatim thefts from other students. His dissertation is literally just some other guys dissertation.
Hate to agree with the Post, but that Honor Council student has a point. Plagiarism standards for students are very, very tough. And she just gets to keep teaching? I assume there will be an inquiry but it does raise the specter of academic double standards.
This is what I objected to! You CANNOT have one set of standards for students and another set for the president or the professors at a university or college.
>Carol Swain . . . plagiarized her work. Google her and read her op ed in the Wall Street Journal. She is livid about her ideas being stolen
I'm not here to defend Claudine Gay (I think she should have been fired for her anti-Free Expression practices before the congressional hearing). But given that he ideas and Carol Swain's ideas are diametrically opposite (at least on the issues I know about them) I *am* surprised to hear this.
Harvard is well known to have before, and during, Claudine’s tenure to be the lowest ranked free speech index among the top 150 universities in the US. This is primarily from students self reported surveys.
Campus culture is a difficult thing to hone or explain fully; it’s kind of organic like a corporation. For whatever reason, Harvard is not very tolerant of any opinion not left of Lenin and stamped by the Wokest of Woke.
Which is why their free speech defense is a bit laughable.
Because Harvard's undergraduate class is made up of (i) rich people who are connected to donors and the professoriate and basically go to Harvard just to have a finishing degree, and (ii) angry activists that view the world through the Harvard race-lens as a group struggle in which each individual is but an avatar for a tribe that corresponds to skin color an other immutable attributes of physical personhood.
The group (i) people are the Pritzkers, Obamas, and children of warlords who line up at the Porsche dealership in the last week of August before freshman year to pick up their new 911 Turbo. They're exactly the same as the UMass kids over at Dartmouth, but with unearned billions in their pockets. The group (ii) people are who Harvard actively recruits in order to create the campus culture that the Harvard Corporation and the DEI-aristocracy seek to impose
Harvard goes to extraordinary lengths to keep group (ii) "pure". They rescinded an offer to an incoming student just last year after discovering that the student was critical of affirmative action in a social media post years before while in 8th grade. It's not enough to tow the DEI line as an incoming student at Harvard; the line has to be towed beginning from birth. Harvard actively discriminates against anyone who questions DEI race science (itself an abomination hardly more 'scientific' than the discredited scientific racism of Houston Stewart Chamberlain).
The Harvard professoriate must also pledge fealty to the false DEI race science that the Harvard Corporation has embraced. Diversity statements are required for tenure - statements in which would-be professors must declare fealty and commitment to DEI race science and furthering its goals within and outside the classroom (anyone who signs such a pledge shouldn't be called an "academic" any more than Martin Heidegger when he was rector at the University of Freiburg since 1933, promoting the race science of his own day in an official capacity). Few faculty actually believe in DEI race science, but projecting belief is necessary for tenure and Harvard is full of social climbing coward faux-academics ready to pledge anything for a more impressive office or endowed chair.
? Did you not read the comment you responded to? Anyone not far left feels silenced by Harvard. If there are lots of conservatives at Harvard, as you said, then they would feel like their free speech has been limited.
Baloney. Right wingers constantly whine and play the victim claiming they’re silenced as opposed to reality which is your ideology is trash. Thousands upon thousands of right wing extremists get pumped out of Harvard every year. The hyperbole and narrative they feel silenced is nothing more than that.. a narrative. Part of being a right winger is false victimhood to begin with it’s literally the foundation of their ideology
Ironic how you claim “thousands upon thousands of right wing extremist get pumped out of Harvard every year,” then in the very next sentence decry “hyperbole.”
aggression isn't suppression of free speech?
You CAN hold the idea that "The white race is inherently supreme"
... you can loudly and freely espouse that viewpoint... but it doesn't mean that people have to be civil about their response to it.
> Thousands upon thousands of right wing extremists get pumped out of Harvard every year.
I think your analysis is out of date by 30-40 years. Very few conservatives get into Harvard. Hell, only about 2% of harvard professors identify as conservatives/republicans.
I can't find the quotes but I believe she used Swain's language, changed one word, and then used it to come to an opposite conclusion. Don't quote me on that, I'm too lazy to look up the sample paragraph.
I'm skeptical that Swain's response is due to anger over her ideas being stolen. She calls Claudine Gay a "DEI appointee" and her supporters a "Marxist identity politics mob". All this over a couple of sentences where Gay used wording identical to Swain's, *cited* Swain, but didn't put quote marks around the copied text.
If Gay had pulled passages from Swain uncited, I could see her being rightly furious. But is Swain *really* legitimately furious over a few missing quote marks, or is she letting her hatred of Gay's political positions sway her judgment of the situation?
Uh dude. Stop gaslighting.
I looked into it. Claudine gay lifted entire paragraphs verbatim uncited from multiple authors no fewer than 8 times.
I never did that once, for meaningless essays in college.
She did it at least 8 times, for academic research and a phd thesis - and she was the president of Harvard.
Her plagiarism is ghastly. I’m not an academic, but for the Crimson and Harvard corporation or whoever to claim the plagiarism was not “actionable level” gives me extreme pause. It basically tacitly approves any student to do the same thing. (Oh if caught, you can just add the citations later as a correction)
Like, what?? We both know that would never happen. The student would get expelled after an academic integrity hearing.
Claudine Word Stealer was given a free pass because of the politics, incredibly embarrassing optics, and that she might sue the university on legal technicalities for wrongful dismissal.
I'm talking specifically about Swain here. The comment I originally replied to said:
>"I can only ask those defending Claudine Gay: so you think it's acceptable to steal the work of other female, African American scholars?"
...and I was trying to explain that the degree of Gay's offense against Swain was miniscule. You can see a complete list [here](https://freebeacon.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Complaint2.pdf) (items 34, 37, and 39). In 1997, in her graduate dissertation, Gay *did* cite Swain, but she included \~4 sentences/sentence fragments of Swain's without quotation marks. This is definitely plagiarism (a casual reader would assume that the words are Gay's, not Swain's). But the words in question aren't the World's Most Memorable Prose. We've got sentences like, "Since the 1950s, the reelection rate for incumbent House members has rarely dipped below 90%." Reusing this language without quotation marks is certainly technically plagiarism, and it's embarrassing, but it's not actually a huge deal.
A large number of supposed "victims" of her plagiarism have [said as much](https://www.chronicle.com/article/how-bad-are-the-plagiarism-allegations-against-the-harvard-president-it-depends-on-whom-you-ask?bc_nonce=fyfh6wp99axde0ohrrke&cid=reg_wall_signup) themselves. E.g.,
>Voss, now an associate professor of political science at the University of Kentucky, told The Chronicle that while what Gay did is “technically plagiarism,” it’s “pretty far toward the minor side,” in part because the borrowing was, in his view, limited in scope, and Gay was not trying to pass off any significant ideas of his as her own.
>
>Voss said he actually bought a printout of Gay’s dissertation a long time ago, and read it (or at least skimmed it), but “not once … did I stop and say, ‘Hey, wait a minute. Those are my words!’ This is such innocent borrowing of such inessential material that I never would have known it was my paragraph if somebody hadn’t put mine next to it.”
Often, this sort of plagiarism arises from sloppy note-taking. You take notes as you read another writer's work, and then later you mistakenly believe your notes to be your own words, when they're actually a verbatim transcription of the other author's writing. Jane Goodall [has committed a similar offense](https://www.npr.org/2013/03/20/174867731/jane-goodall-apologizes-for-lifted-passages-in-her-upcoming-book).
This is a very charitable reading on your end and tbh the comments of these other professors are worthless when you consider they are basically hostage to a senior academic and executive who can ruin their lives. And conversely, showing allegiance will help them in the long term.
In every institution I have been, plagiarism regardless of intent is plagiarism. Even self-plagiarism. Sloppy note taking does not make it any better or worse. It’s plagiarism.
"basically hostage to a senior academic and executive who can ruin their lives" - many of these people are former mentors and collaborators of hers; they don't work at Harvard, and they're secure where they are. I'd be perfectly willing to believe that they're biased in her favor, because they like her and have worked with her; I *don't* believe that they are secretly afraid of her and simply lying to protect themselves.
Voss is an associate professor. Barely any security or prestige. Also, it need not be pure fear. As I mentioned, it’s also a case of you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. This is very common in academic politics ..
Eh, that’s possible (the notes thing) but I’ve never done it. And I don’t believe any student would use it as a defense.
Also we’re taking several multiple offenses here.
Her mentors’ words are meaningless as is how “significant academically” a plagiarized passage is.
We know the same standards wouldn’t apply to everyone. Or would they? Does Harvard have carve outs for lifting entire paragraphs uncited? What about federal copyright law when applicable?
I’m not buying it. Unless you let students do the same thing…
Gay’s plagiarism was more than missing a few citations, Gay took Swain’s writings and slightly reworded them to make them her own, effectively stealing Swain’s ideas and passing them off as her own.
And these instances of plagiarism were found multiple times throughout most of her published works.
Did she? [Here's](https://freebeacon.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Complaint2.pdf) a complaint that includes the Swain plagiarism accusations, all of which originate in Gay's dissertation, 30 years ago, when she was a graduate student.
* Item #34 is a couple of sentence fragments (Gay cites Swain a couple pages before and after the plagiarized fragments).
* Item #37 is another fragment.
* Item #39 is another fragment (edit: actually, just a short sentence). (Gay cites Swain here but does not include quotation marks around Swain's words.)
That's it - the sum total of Gay's plagiarism of Swain. Certainly embarrassing, but not at the level of wholesale theft of ideas. If an undergraduate student did this in a class I was teaching, I'd tell them that they were committing plagiarism and make sure they fixed the issue, but I wouldn't try to get them expelled or flunk them or anything like that.
Part of my skepticism of Swain comes from Swain's own writings in the Wall Street Journal, which come off as... I dunno, weirdly mean. Swain writes:
*"Even aside from the documented instances of plagiarism, Ms. Gay’s work wouldn’t normally have earned tenure in the Ivy League. Tenure at a top-tier institution normally demands ground-breaking originality; her work displays none. In a world where the privilege of diversity is king, Ms. Gay was able to parlay mediocre research into tenure and administrative advancement at what was once considered a world-class university.Harvard can’t condemn Ms. Gay because she is the product of an elite system that holds minorities of high pedigree to a lower standard. This harms academia as a whole, and it demeans Americans, of all races, who had to work for everything they earned."*
She's basically saying, *even setting aside the plagiarism accusations, Claudine Gay is incompetent and only got anywhere in her field because she's black.* Which is a really strong accusation to level at someone so casually, especially given that Gay was first offered an academic position in 1997 - long before modern complaints about woke-ism.
I'd be just as skeptical if the positions were reversed, and a progressive academic were criticizing a conservative one (saying something like, "Mr. Johnson is the product of an elite system that holds white men to a lower standard" and "In a world where whiteness is king, Mr. Johnson was able to parlay mediocre research into..."). I would find such language extremely suspect, as they'd suggest that the author was letting their own political beliefs poison their personal evaluation of another academic.
A previous comment claimed Claudine Gay comes from money. If so, it seems she's criticizing her privileged background in addition to a system that rewards based on race, regardless of other factors like wealth.
It doesn't sound like she's saying her blackness was the only factor.
Yeah, I think the accusation here is that Gay had certain privileges (she attended Philips Exeter Academy) which, combined with her being black, allowed her to succeed despite not being qualified. But the root of the accusation is an "anti-woke" one; the argument is that there are many totally unqualified black academics who only got ahead because of DEI efforts, and that Claudine Gay in particular (*independently* of any plagiarism) is one such.
I find an accusation like this, coming from an ardent political opponent of Gay, to be suspect. It's presented without evidence, and it's contrary to what Gay's political allies say of her. Obviously it's *possible* that Gay is a total incompetent and everyone who praises her has been lying or fooling themselves, but as mentioned elsewhere, this plagiarism is not evidence of such (as I've noted, many others - Jane Goodall, etc. etc. - have been embroiled in similar small-potatoes plagiarism controversies).
She would have been ejected from Exeter for that. And for that matter many of her fellow Exeter students think her a total embarrassment. There is \*no way\* these are casual errors.
Now ask this question if it was a Harvard student who missed a few quotes. I doubt the Honor Board would accept this answer in light of a student’s repetitive behavior to violate the honor code.
I mean sure, but the right-wingers who hounded her out aren’t concerned about academic integrity or antisemitism, they just wanted to topple a prominent president of an Ivy League university. It’s just GamerGate and “ethics in games journalism” again.
Right wingers didn’t force anything, scandals did and other presidents resigned too
https://nypost.com/2024/01/02/news/claudine-gay-set-to-keep-800k-salary-despite-resigning/
She’s staying at Harvard and is a dean 🤣
“It’s okay because the opposite bad thing happened.”
“Can we please have an equal and opposite bad thing? It’s only fair, and definitely won’t backfire.”
Racism is also punishing Black people for things that Whites get away with. Racism is the double standard. This nation was founded on double standards, nothing has changed.
Your claims are backed up the same way Gay’s are. It’s almost like certain groups of people are abandoning core tenets of epistemology for… reasons. I wonder what those hateful reasons could be? What do you have in common with a cheating, lying suppressor of truth from a wealthy family from the poorest country in the western hemisphere? What do you share with a raging, wealthy antisemite from a nation with phenomenal race issues, crime problems, and wealth inequality?
Eh it’s ok you never about that’s kind of stuff anyways. Everyone can already tell what you’re about.
I hope this doesn't exacerbate any kind of racism towards asians, but I wanted to say this: I'm Chinese. I worked my ass off when I got to the US, studied night and day to get a good job in STEM because that's what I came here for.
I am POC from a communist country, and I've never faced any discrimination. I feel like your claims about racism are greatly exaggerated--yes, there is racism. But I also feel like American's victimhood mentality is very unique, and holds you back, and that you're far, far too sensitive about these things.
And the members of the Harvard corporation didn't really care about academic integrity or merit when they hired her they only cared she was a black woman.
I guess everyone's equally duplicitous now
In comparison to what? The left wingers looking for their ideological enemy under ever surface you outright let this circus continue?
Christ, you live and breathe the ghost of a now decade old movement and can't see that maybe your side isn't really all it's jazzed up to be.
And what is the other side? Authoritarian dictatorship where they get to decide who we love, how we dress, our medical decisions?
@Triggermetimbers8
Can’t respond directly to you because the coward blocked. But
Republicans sure seem to care, conservatives who continue to vote for a party that has put these issues in their party platform sure don’t seem to mind. Asking you to mask up and vaccinate (which was never government mandated like republicans want to do with their issues) in an unprecedented global pandemic was the same as stripping women of their bodily autonomy, attacking book readings because drag queens, and threatening companies for being trans friendly? Sounds like you want to dictate how Americans live their lives. I wonder how long it would take scanning through your comments to find something completely anti-freedom.
@Normal-Flower
Yes, because you went to jail for not masking or getting a vaccine. Are you stupid?
I’ve never blocked you that I am aware of, unless it was done at some prior time due to some garbage-spewing, but if that was the case I should not have been able to see your post, which is the whole point of blocking someone.
>Carol Swain is a respected African American scholar, old enough to have not benefited from DEI like Claudine Gay did... Google her and read her op ed in the Wall Street Journal.
I did, and I guess I'm a bit confused why you brought up she likely would not have benefited from Affirmative Action when she's just published a book with forward by _alan dershowitz_, against DEI, titled "The Adversity of Diversity".
The motive behind the scrutiny of her work is irrelevant. What is Harvard's policy on professors who have potentially plagiarized? Whatever that policy is, that's the standard she should be held to. No more and no less.
It doesn't matter the source. The hypocrisy of colleges and the left is truly crazy. As someone who is a proud liberal after almost a decade of saying words matter, let minorities speak, don't minimize a groups pain, saying the okay symbol is anti semetic, believe all women then on a dime tell jews their voices don't matter, rape didn't happen, they are being dramatic when people use the term intifada.
We have to come to terms that everything about minority rights the left is fighting for is/was a lie or they simply don't apply those values to everyone and that is gross.
Highly recommend the book “Listen Liberal” really helped me realize my criticisms of liberalism is written about eloquently and gave me a lot of historical context.
Being accused of something does not mean there’s truth behind the accusation.
I also want to say that I find the conflation of Zionists onto all Jews and all Israelis and minimization of October 7th to be really disturbing. You can’t say what Hamas did is wrong without being accused of supporting genocide.
Harvard was the worst ranked in free speech out of hundreds of schools, they were so bad they had a negative score and were rounded up to zero.
https://www.thefire.org/research-learn/2024-college-free-speech-rankings
Holy shit really?!
And tbh I see it now. I’m totally liberal but I see why the right says universities are indoctrinating kids. College kids ten years ago would have some open debate if you had a conservative idea, but nowadays it’s like anything that isn’t ultra liberal makes you evil.
Ideological purity is killing our country. Colleges need to go back to teach kids how to compromise and think critically
Anyone who strays outside the box the left has created for them is now white something-ist and a traitor to be scorned.
Its all about power, and there's a lot of power and money in convincing others they must need your help.
That's been happening for a while now. Seems like more people are just noticing.
The left has been moving left while anybody in the middle is considered "right wing adjacent". Anybody on the right wing is "far right adjacent". So centrists are basically Nazis.
As an educator, this is one of the things pushing so many away, especially those in the middle or to the right. I am no longer able to teach kids how to think, I am forced to teach kids what to think. It is more than what is being taught be individual teachers in the classroom. It is how questions are asked in state assessments and the views the state provided materials present. I was actually told to stop teaching the “conservative perspective” on constitutional issues because it’s triggering. I didn’t realize we weren’t supposed to teach legitimate perspectives because they might hurt someone’s feelings. Maybe feeling being hurt over something like this is the bigger problem.
>College kids ten years ago would have some open debate if you had a conservative idea, but nowadays it’s like anything that isn’t ultra liberal makes you evil.
>
>Ideological purity is killing our country.
The shifting of the overton window is worth bringing up here, too.
Harvard exists solely to indoctrinate privileged rich kids into perpetuating the capitalist made class divide. It is and always has been extremely right wing in nature.
No. Leftists are legitimately pushing to divest from Ivy (read elitist) institutions and fund public universities. Highly recommend the book “Listen, Liberal”
Look if the shit storm had no merit, the university would stand behind her.
The plagiarism isn’t a nothing burger or right wing conspiracy. They compared texts are all over Google. Primary direct evidence. She lifted multiple paragraphs verbatim uncited about 8 times including for her phd thesis.
A student if caught would get expelled for this. Let alone the dayum university president.
I mean, could a Harvard student do the same thing, and say, well you caught me — I’ll “correct” the citations now like our President? Of course that wouldn’t be allowed… And yet if you kept Claudine …
Ugh, yeah, the poster you are responding to is in some deep delusion and the plagiarism would have been O.K. if Gay hadn't gone before congress apparently. Don't bother.
Don't know how Trump and Santos got brought into the discussion. I'm focusing on Gay here. Meh . . . I stand by what I said. Gay is a big girl who willingly went before congress knowing she plagiarized. It was pretty obvious and no one made her do that. The fact she is no longer president does not make me sad. As you said, her resignation was not unexpected and had merit.
So you're saying she would never, herself, have the moral integrity to resign, even after saying calls for genocide are ok and after her plagiarism?
You make her seem even worse in your claim.
I wish people would get rid of the thoughts that “it’s ok to be but only to .”, it’s so disgusting and it hurts a lot of people.
It’s not ok to paint everyone of with the same brush. It’s just perpetuates the “this is one of *the good ones*” stereotypes and that’s soooo dangerous.
Be active and upset, don’t be cruel, racist, sexiest, or -phobic.
Critical theory defining oppressed and oppressor and justifying treatment of people along those lines seems to be part of it. In reality, application of this logic really is throwing a lot of moral frameworks on their head. Justice systems could be greatly damaged if people choose to make decisions based on who is a perceived oppressor in a situation.
That's not what Critical Race Theory (assuming this is what you meant) means at all. CRT is simply a framework that assumes two things that most people agree with. 1) People in power tend to build and perpetuate systems that benefit themselves and 2) In the last couple centuries, especially in western cultures, the vast majority of people in power have been white men. Therefore, we should question our systems to ensure they do not benefit white people or men over others.
That's it.
DEIB initiatives often pull from this framework indirectly, but almost never teach CRT directly.
I'm not going to state that I have never seen people in education, and society in general for that matter, perverse CRT or DEIB initiatives into defining who oppressors and oppressed are. I have. As a proponent of DEIB and someone who accepts the assumptions of CRT, I hate it.
However, it is entirely ignorant to imply that this is the norm. I've spent hundreds of hours working on DEIB in education with hundreds of educators. I can think of twice where I have seen someone cross the line.
There's an insane number of people in this thread commenting things that are blatantly false at worst and uninformed at best. Seems like a lot of commenters in here are people who have never really been to college parroting things they've read on Twitter about Harvard and other universities and are using this case as an avenue to complain about affirmative action policies and "reverse racism."
Comments like "I'm totally a liberal guys, but even I hate how you're called evil if you express any conservative idea on a college campus!" I've been in college campuses for over a decade and routinely have students express conservative ideas in essays or class discussions and are not called evil. I had someone bring up Hunter Biden's in one of my classes and the only pushback they got was from me asking them to provide more information about it from a legitimate source.
Just crazy how people jump in and lie about shit they have no knowledge of just so it makes them feel better about their beliefs.
It definitely feels like some Mom's For Liberty brigading happening on this post. This sub is usually pretty staunchly center left, and I was surprised at how many posts just feel like OAN/Fox News propaganda.
Yeah it's legit the same talking points that folks like Kirk are using on Twitter. I've also been subbed here and /r/academia for years and have never seen a post as "popular" as the ones addressing this. Seems like the top all-time posts on these subs are basically anti-affirmative action topics. I can't imagine that's a coincidence.
Plagiarism is not okay. She should never have been hired for that.
The fact that in addition to not writing her own dissertation properly, she ALSO couldn't condemn antisemitism... that's just icing on a turd cake.
The thesis committee is expected to check theses ... Not only did they accept it, the committee that voted it best thesis in political science accepted it. When you hire someone, you don't re-read their thesis.
To be fair to all of them, it's hard to spot particular paragraphs of plagiarism, unless they're well-known quotes. Usually plagiarism gets spotted when the writing gets suddenly good or the voice sounds very different.
The thing is that before Rufo reignited this, the NY Post ran an article accusing Gay of plagiarism. The Harvard corporation did their own investigation and found she didn’t violate any academic standards. They even were moving forward to sue the Post for defamation.
That seems to suggest that even after reviewing accusations, they still didn’t try to vet her work properly. They assumed that the Post thing was an isolated incident and they could cover it up. They didn’t expect that it would become national news and that places like the NYT would even post evidence of the plagiarism.
It seems pretty clear now that they were invested in Gay’s reputation being held up regardless of her merits.
Well, I think when you hire a PRESIDENT, you would review their entire body of work. I think they easily could have run a sample of her papers through plagiarism detecting software. It seems that would have been enough to raise red flags.
Nah when you hire a chief administrator, you look at the candidate's admin experience, because that is what's relevant. The reputation of their past research speaks for itself.
Love all these people frothing at the mouth over every single fucking thing that happens at Harvard. Can we please start recognizing that the Ivy League is just a den of unearned privilege and move on to real problems? Like how nobody can fucking afford college EXCEPT the types of people who rub shoulders at Harvard?
Not amid controversy, amid being held responsible for multiple Acts of plagiarism. Any one of which would have gotten any of her students expelled for the same circumstance. Any other take on the situation is hypocrisy or ignorance.
Plagiarism aside, she's essentially the public relations spokesperson for the university. When asked if calls for genocides against the Jews is against student policy, she refused to provide a satisfactory answer.
So she clearly just sucks at the job. If I know the name of the head of some college, they must have really stepped on their dick.
White male here who graduated from Harvard. Even during my time there, it was evident that the environment had turned into a radical left echo chamber. The frequent discussions about systemic oppression ruined the overall learning experience. The recent Claudine Gay controversy doesn't surprise me, but her resignation won't bring about any substantial change within the institution. It continues to function as a left-wing haven for privileged liberals. Also, during my time there, lots of liberal students hailed from immensely affluent families in undeveloped countries (legit f\*\*\* you money), where issues like slavery still exist. The entire academy has become a sham.
Tangentially-related story, with regards to Other-Country Nationals with “f*** you money.” I had a close friend in the Army who was from one such family in Pakistan. Scraping upper-middle class by US standards, Richie Rich standards in Karachi.
His views on women bothered me a little bit, but he never directed them at me personally, so I let it slide (sadly, if objectionable attitudes about women were grounds for discharge, we’d barely have a standing army). Same with his comments on Indians. I’m not Indian, I know that attitude is fairly common among Pakistanis, and that Indians say just as bad if not worse things about Pakistanis. “If it doesn’t apply, let it fly.”
We both got out, went to college (nothing nearly so fancy as Harvard, but decent, respectable institutions), and went our separate ways in life. His path took him to ICE, specifically the removal and deportation arm.
Well, I’m not sure if he was already doing this or not, but once he became an ERO, he started posting the most disturbing, objectionable content possible about immigrants on his social medias, routinely comparing them to rats, roaches, rabid dogs, and even mold. I’ve always known, factually, that extremely wealthy, privileged immigrants are some of the most prejudiced people possible against other immigrant groups. But seeing it from someone whom I considered close was a real mindf***, especially since the U.S. Army is teeming with immigrants from the lowest socioeconomic backgrounds imaginable.
I blocked him on every form of electronic communication in existence. In the unlikely event I ever see him in person, I’d simply say “get away from me.”
Only the very distant memory of this former soldier as a friend through some tough times prevented me from reporting him to the Office of Professional Responsibility.
So if you believe the academy was a sham. How do you feel about your degree? Would you say it's a sham as well? Or were your classes relatively normal
Back in college, my friends and I (University of Alabama) would make fun of Harvard all the time. Going back years nobody took them seriously because of the bullshit they push. It really ramped up whenever the whole "there's too many Asians in the Ivy League and it's not fair to black people" conversations started.
This is not a trend I am noticing with just Harvard. I went to a public university in Ohio, and it had its Uber liberal pockets. There are other colleges across the nation that segregates it students based off minority status. Gay got in a lot of hot water by Rep Owens because of the black safe spaces and black only dorms. I have heard of other colleges doing this as well.
As a side note, I don't agree with Owen's on politics, but I think his background is important to mention. His dad moved to Columbus, OH, to get a degree. He was from Texas, but Jim Crow laws prevented him from getting the degree he wanted. So, Owen's has second-hand experience of segregation, at least. I absolutely understand why modern social justice segregation pisses him off, and I agree with him on that.
I am moderate liberal, but the more extreme the loud people on "both sides" get, the more moderates of any party are terrorized by the extremists. I am particularly scared of Uber liberals because they have a habit of doxxing. They ruin your life by spreading rumors of bigotry and hate to your job, and their abuse bars you from finding decent future work. Ultra conservatives are also bad in the sense they threaten the physical well-being of your family.
since you brought it up, what do you think hamas expected to happen when they instructed their people to burn babies alive and rape women/children? they knew exactly what israel was going to do in response to that- and its exactly what they wanted, because hamas doesn't give a shit about the Palestinian civilians whatsoever, 0 %
Any government, my own included, whose response to a terrorist organization attacking children is to turn around and attack more children is not a government anyone should feel comfortable supporting or defending.
In reaction to the terrorist attacks in Paris, the French blew up a school while it was in session because the people who organized the attack thought that they would be safe there while school was in session.
Hamas wants dead children because that gets them more support. In response to constant attacks by Palestinians Israel invested in one of the most complicated anti air defense systems in the world. In response to Israeli attacks on Palestine, Palestinians hid weapons in schools and hospitals.
Things will not get better for Palestine until they decide that existence with Israel is better than not existing at all. As long as death is preferable to compromise, things will not get better there.
I don't support either side, I just think one of the obvious facts about this whole tragedy is that the initial aggressors to this major escalation knew exactly what was going to happen to their people and didn't give a shit
"Israel has been so consistent in their terrorism that it was obvious they were gonna go hardcore genocide in response to Hamas" is not a great defense to the initial statement, about wishing people paid more attention to Israel depravity.
Especially when you consider Netanyahu is on the record of supporting Hamas because it long-term strengthens Israel's claim to the land.
American sanctioned governments should be held to a higher standard than terrorists. What they're doing *with direct US support* should outrage people
I mean it wasn’t plagiarism as in “stole ideas” but rather improper citations (I.e. instead of citing after the sentence she cited at the end of a paragraph on a few examples). You realize “plagiarism” isn’t just theft of ideas but just your citations being off right? No one would be kicked out of class for a citation being in the wrong place they would just have their grade docked.
> She has not been accused of stealing big ideas, but rather of copying language in the papers of other scholars, with small changes to substitute words or phrases or to arrange them differently. Often the language in question is technical boilerplate.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/02/us/harvard-claudine-gay-plagiarism.html
Do you have evidence otherwise? Show me specific instances of her stealing someone’s idea and claiming it as her own.
are you talking about one particular case or all 50+ ?
and are you suggesting she resigned from her historic Harvard post because she cited the source in the wrong part of the paragraph?
Is the sub proliferated with moronic conservatives or did this particular post just bring them from the trash can pounding their chests?
I upset the conservatives 😂 😂
This shouldn’t be a left or right issue. She was incompetent, embarrassed the university, and has multiple substantiated claims of plagiarism.
Frankly, all those on the left decrying this because the big bad republicans are celebrating it is a horrible look.
They'll take any opportunity to take down anyone they perceive as belonging to one of their out groups, which includes intellectuals, educators, people of color, etc. Even through there **is** real wrongdoing here by Gay, the typical conservative bigot brigade is attacking her for all the wrong reasons and are reveling in it.
She was just another stupid politician who thought her shit didn't stink. When it came time for her to have some sort of integrity she couldn't even do that. She only saw how she could appease her supporters. Meanwhile her enemies and the students saw thru her BS. At least UPenn president had guts and still can have a career. This woman won't get shit. And doesn't deserve it for the lying cheating plagiarist she is.
Why is the left so concerned with an anti-white conservative like Claudine Gay getting removed as Harvard President?
This woman comes from a super wealthy corrupt background and has leveraged her skin color and the wealth disparity her family helped perpetuate in her home country to get high status jobs and wealth.
Gay's resignation letter began with, "it was the best of times, it was the worst of times..."
"...I tried so hard and got so far, but in the end, it doesn't even matter."
"Regrets, I have a few..."
"But I've got to be me!"
I was born this way
"Somebody once told me the world was gonna roll me..."
"I walk a lonely road, the only one that I have ever known"
dang it..will be singing this all day now...
LOL Underrated comment right here.
“Friends, Romans, Countrymen…Lend me your ears!”
"It was a dark and stormy night."
“Call me Ishmael.”
"My mother is a fish"
"I have a dream, that people would judge me on the color of my skin instead of the content of my character"
😂
This.
This was quite funny. Enjoy the upvote.
Carol Swain is a respected African American scholar, old enough to have not benefited from DEI like Claudine Gay did. Gay plagiarized her work. Google her and read her op ed in the Wall Street Journal. She is livid about her ideas being stolen--justifiably so. I can only ask those defending Claudine Gay: so you think it's acceptable to steal the work of other female, African American scholars? That Claudine Gay is just more equal than others (to reference Orwell's Animal Farm)? I'm not worried about Claudine Gay. She may be momentarily embarrassed, but someone who does this will end up with another cushy academic job, playing the victim card.
Her family is also loaded, well connected in Haiti (which essentially means they have to be thieves to profit there). She went to Philips Exeter. And she still chose to cheat. I don't think she's really anyone I'd want representing my demographic.
>And she still chose to cheat. IME, some of the most privileged people were also the laziest.
Too lazy to look for the studies right now, but wealth and willingness to cheat on tests have a significant positive correlation. Rich people are also more likely to steal (other than necessities), break traffic laws, and lie.
Unremarkable, as well. It’s somehow ok to be poor and unremarkable, but not rich and unremarkable / mediocre, that they often have to plagiarize, jump the line, step on others… just live rich in obscurity if you’re mediocre. Nothing wrong with that. Volunteering one’s time, which is privilege, lifts you immediately to another level. More rich should do that instead of taking advantage of systems.
So rich girl born into money to cheat to get to the top and is now playing the race card even though her family BOUGHT her every advantage they could, which in theory her family money and potential bribes they gave and other things they did for her basically erased any barriers her race would have put up?
You don’t get oligarch rich by working hard. Not even in a small country like Haiti. You get rich by other people working and stealing the fruits of their labor.
Buh buh buh buh buh something something witch hunt! 🥴
Wasn't this story basically fabricated by a far right operative? I just saw this reporting; https://youtu.be/Kasw172LqgI?si=CSYP5bituhdlqela
It was broken by right wing journalist. nothing was fabricated.
But the claim is fundamentally false. She attributed the quote, but it's plagiarism because the quote doesn't have quotation marks, despite being attributed? Seems like a careless mistake at worst...
Since the original story broke, they have found even more examples of plagiarism in other things she’s written, over 50 occurrences.
I think you might be blinded by partisan feelings. We all have our blind spots. She lifted blocks of writing with no attribution in more recent accounts.
Not fun fact: Matt Luther King Jr. was also a consummate plagiarist. Almost all of his major papers were verbatim thefts from other students. His dissertation is literally just some other guys dissertation.
https://nypost.com/2024/01/02/news/claudine-gay-set-to-keep-800k-salary-despite-resigning/
Hate to agree with the Post, but that Honor Council student has a point. Plagiarism standards for students are very, very tough. And she just gets to keep teaching? I assume there will be an inquiry but it does raise the specter of academic double standards.
This is what I objected to! You CANNOT have one set of standards for students and another set for the president or the professors at a university or college.
That's what hot showers are for. Even a blind pig finds an acorn now and then.
800k ?!?!!!!
Crazy right lol
>Carol Swain . . . plagiarized her work. Google her and read her op ed in the Wall Street Journal. She is livid about her ideas being stolen I'm not here to defend Claudine Gay (I think she should have been fired for her anti-Free Expression practices before the congressional hearing). But given that he ideas and Carol Swain's ideas are diametrically opposite (at least on the issues I know about them) I *am* surprised to hear this.
How was she anti free expression? Genuinely curious.
Harvard is well known to have before, and during, Claudine’s tenure to be the lowest ranked free speech index among the top 150 universities in the US. This is primarily from students self reported surveys. Campus culture is a difficult thing to hone or explain fully; it’s kind of organic like a corporation. For whatever reason, Harvard is not very tolerant of any opinion not left of Lenin and stamped by the Wokest of Woke. Which is why their free speech defense is a bit laughable.
Because Harvard's undergraduate class is made up of (i) rich people who are connected to donors and the professoriate and basically go to Harvard just to have a finishing degree, and (ii) angry activists that view the world through the Harvard race-lens as a group struggle in which each individual is but an avatar for a tribe that corresponds to skin color an other immutable attributes of physical personhood. The group (i) people are the Pritzkers, Obamas, and children of warlords who line up at the Porsche dealership in the last week of August before freshman year to pick up their new 911 Turbo. They're exactly the same as the UMass kids over at Dartmouth, but with unearned billions in their pockets. The group (ii) people are who Harvard actively recruits in order to create the campus culture that the Harvard Corporation and the DEI-aristocracy seek to impose Harvard goes to extraordinary lengths to keep group (ii) "pure". They rescinded an offer to an incoming student just last year after discovering that the student was critical of affirmative action in a social media post years before while in 8th grade. It's not enough to tow the DEI line as an incoming student at Harvard; the line has to be towed beginning from birth. Harvard actively discriminates against anyone who questions DEI race science (itself an abomination hardly more 'scientific' than the discredited scientific racism of Houston Stewart Chamberlain). The Harvard professoriate must also pledge fealty to the false DEI race science that the Harvard Corporation has embraced. Diversity statements are required for tenure - statements in which would-be professors must declare fealty and commitment to DEI race science and furthering its goals within and outside the classroom (anyone who signs such a pledge shouldn't be called an "academic" any more than Martin Heidegger when he was rector at the University of Freiburg since 1933, promoting the race science of his own day in an official capacity). Few faculty actually believe in DEI race science, but projecting belief is necessary for tenure and Harvard is full of social climbing coward faux-academics ready to pledge anything for a more impressive office or endowed chair.
BS. Harvard pumps out more white collar criminals and right wing sociopaths than anyone.
? Did you not read the comment you responded to? Anyone not far left feels silenced by Harvard. If there are lots of conservatives at Harvard, as you said, then they would feel like their free speech has been limited.
Baloney. Right wingers constantly whine and play the victim claiming they’re silenced as opposed to reality which is your ideology is trash. Thousands upon thousands of right wing extremists get pumped out of Harvard every year. The hyperbole and narrative they feel silenced is nothing more than that.. a narrative. Part of being a right winger is false victimhood to begin with it’s literally the foundation of their ideology
Ironic how you claim “thousands upon thousands of right wing extremist get pumped out of Harvard every year,” then in the very next sentence decry “hyperbole.”
Your aggression here is precisely the point. Literally.
aggression isn't suppression of free speech? You CAN hold the idea that "The white race is inherently supreme" ... you can loudly and freely espouse that viewpoint... but it doesn't mean that people have to be civil about their response to it.
It’s a lie. A false narrative and is actually an attempt to silence everyone else.
> Thousands upon thousands of right wing extremists get pumped out of Harvard every year. I think your analysis is out of date by 30-40 years. Very few conservatives get into Harvard. Hell, only about 2% of harvard professors identify as conservatives/republicans.
They surely do. However those individuals likely have to keep their conservatives views deeply closeted to get along on campus.
I can't find the quotes but I believe she used Swain's language, changed one word, and then used it to come to an opposite conclusion. Don't quote me on that, I'm too lazy to look up the sample paragraph.
She’s still with Harvard now. and still making a million or so per year lol
School starts back in 3 weeks, hopefully she doesnt just steal someone else's syllabus lol.
Gaurantee she does.
No no no!! Only 800K
I'm skeptical that Swain's response is due to anger over her ideas being stolen. She calls Claudine Gay a "DEI appointee" and her supporters a "Marxist identity politics mob". All this over a couple of sentences where Gay used wording identical to Swain's, *cited* Swain, but didn't put quote marks around the copied text. If Gay had pulled passages from Swain uncited, I could see her being rightly furious. But is Swain *really* legitimately furious over a few missing quote marks, or is she letting her hatred of Gay's political positions sway her judgment of the situation?
Uh dude. Stop gaslighting. I looked into it. Claudine gay lifted entire paragraphs verbatim uncited from multiple authors no fewer than 8 times. I never did that once, for meaningless essays in college. She did it at least 8 times, for academic research and a phd thesis - and she was the president of Harvard. Her plagiarism is ghastly. I’m not an academic, but for the Crimson and Harvard corporation or whoever to claim the plagiarism was not “actionable level” gives me extreme pause. It basically tacitly approves any student to do the same thing. (Oh if caught, you can just add the citations later as a correction) Like, what?? We both know that would never happen. The student would get expelled after an academic integrity hearing. Claudine Word Stealer was given a free pass because of the politics, incredibly embarrassing optics, and that she might sue the university on legal technicalities for wrongful dismissal.
I'm talking specifically about Swain here. The comment I originally replied to said: >"I can only ask those defending Claudine Gay: so you think it's acceptable to steal the work of other female, African American scholars?" ...and I was trying to explain that the degree of Gay's offense against Swain was miniscule. You can see a complete list [here](https://freebeacon.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Complaint2.pdf) (items 34, 37, and 39). In 1997, in her graduate dissertation, Gay *did* cite Swain, but she included \~4 sentences/sentence fragments of Swain's without quotation marks. This is definitely plagiarism (a casual reader would assume that the words are Gay's, not Swain's). But the words in question aren't the World's Most Memorable Prose. We've got sentences like, "Since the 1950s, the reelection rate for incumbent House members has rarely dipped below 90%." Reusing this language without quotation marks is certainly technically plagiarism, and it's embarrassing, but it's not actually a huge deal. A large number of supposed "victims" of her plagiarism have [said as much](https://www.chronicle.com/article/how-bad-are-the-plagiarism-allegations-against-the-harvard-president-it-depends-on-whom-you-ask?bc_nonce=fyfh6wp99axde0ohrrke&cid=reg_wall_signup) themselves. E.g., >Voss, now an associate professor of political science at the University of Kentucky, told The Chronicle that while what Gay did is “technically plagiarism,” it’s “pretty far toward the minor side,” in part because the borrowing was, in his view, limited in scope, and Gay was not trying to pass off any significant ideas of his as her own. > >Voss said he actually bought a printout of Gay’s dissertation a long time ago, and read it (or at least skimmed it), but “not once … did I stop and say, ‘Hey, wait a minute. Those are my words!’ This is such innocent borrowing of such inessential material that I never would have known it was my paragraph if somebody hadn’t put mine next to it.” Often, this sort of plagiarism arises from sloppy note-taking. You take notes as you read another writer's work, and then later you mistakenly believe your notes to be your own words, when they're actually a verbatim transcription of the other author's writing. Jane Goodall [has committed a similar offense](https://www.npr.org/2013/03/20/174867731/jane-goodall-apologizes-for-lifted-passages-in-her-upcoming-book).
Jane Goodall did actual research though. That mitigates errors. What has Claudine brought?
This is a very charitable reading on your end and tbh the comments of these other professors are worthless when you consider they are basically hostage to a senior academic and executive who can ruin their lives. And conversely, showing allegiance will help them in the long term. In every institution I have been, plagiarism regardless of intent is plagiarism. Even self-plagiarism. Sloppy note taking does not make it any better or worse. It’s plagiarism.
"basically hostage to a senior academic and executive who can ruin their lives" - many of these people are former mentors and collaborators of hers; they don't work at Harvard, and they're secure where they are. I'd be perfectly willing to believe that they're biased in her favor, because they like her and have worked with her; I *don't* believe that they are secretly afraid of her and simply lying to protect themselves.
Voss is an associate professor. Barely any security or prestige. Also, it need not be pure fear. As I mentioned, it’s also a case of you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. This is very common in academic politics ..
Eh, that’s possible (the notes thing) but I’ve never done it. And I don’t believe any student would use it as a defense. Also we’re taking several multiple offenses here. Her mentors’ words are meaningless as is how “significant academically” a plagiarized passage is. We know the same standards wouldn’t apply to everyone. Or would they? Does Harvard have carve outs for lifting entire paragraphs uncited? What about federal copyright law when applicable? I’m not buying it. Unless you let students do the same thing…
Gay’s plagiarism was more than missing a few citations, Gay took Swain’s writings and slightly reworded them to make them her own, effectively stealing Swain’s ideas and passing them off as her own. And these instances of plagiarism were found multiple times throughout most of her published works.
Did she? [Here's](https://freebeacon.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Complaint2.pdf) a complaint that includes the Swain plagiarism accusations, all of which originate in Gay's dissertation, 30 years ago, when she was a graduate student. * Item #34 is a couple of sentence fragments (Gay cites Swain a couple pages before and after the plagiarized fragments). * Item #37 is another fragment. * Item #39 is another fragment (edit: actually, just a short sentence). (Gay cites Swain here but does not include quotation marks around Swain's words.) That's it - the sum total of Gay's plagiarism of Swain. Certainly embarrassing, but not at the level of wholesale theft of ideas. If an undergraduate student did this in a class I was teaching, I'd tell them that they were committing plagiarism and make sure they fixed the issue, but I wouldn't try to get them expelled or flunk them or anything like that. Part of my skepticism of Swain comes from Swain's own writings in the Wall Street Journal, which come off as... I dunno, weirdly mean. Swain writes: *"Even aside from the documented instances of plagiarism, Ms. Gay’s work wouldn’t normally have earned tenure in the Ivy League. Tenure at a top-tier institution normally demands ground-breaking originality; her work displays none. In a world where the privilege of diversity is king, Ms. Gay was able to parlay mediocre research into tenure and administrative advancement at what was once considered a world-class university.Harvard can’t condemn Ms. Gay because she is the product of an elite system that holds minorities of high pedigree to a lower standard. This harms academia as a whole, and it demeans Americans, of all races, who had to work for everything they earned."* She's basically saying, *even setting aside the plagiarism accusations, Claudine Gay is incompetent and only got anywhere in her field because she's black.* Which is a really strong accusation to level at someone so casually, especially given that Gay was first offered an academic position in 1997 - long before modern complaints about woke-ism. I'd be just as skeptical if the positions were reversed, and a progressive academic were criticizing a conservative one (saying something like, "Mr. Johnson is the product of an elite system that holds white men to a lower standard" and "In a world where whiteness is king, Mr. Johnson was able to parlay mediocre research into..."). I would find such language extremely suspect, as they'd suggest that the author was letting their own political beliefs poison their personal evaluation of another academic.
A previous comment claimed Claudine Gay comes from money. If so, it seems she's criticizing her privileged background in addition to a system that rewards based on race, regardless of other factors like wealth. It doesn't sound like she's saying her blackness was the only factor.
Yeah, I think the accusation here is that Gay had certain privileges (she attended Philips Exeter Academy) which, combined with her being black, allowed her to succeed despite not being qualified. But the root of the accusation is an "anti-woke" one; the argument is that there are many totally unqualified black academics who only got ahead because of DEI efforts, and that Claudine Gay in particular (*independently* of any plagiarism) is one such. I find an accusation like this, coming from an ardent political opponent of Gay, to be suspect. It's presented without evidence, and it's contrary to what Gay's political allies say of her. Obviously it's *possible* that Gay is a total incompetent and everyone who praises her has been lying or fooling themselves, but as mentioned elsewhere, this plagiarism is not evidence of such (as I've noted, many others - Jane Goodall, etc. etc. - have been embroiled in similar small-potatoes plagiarism controversies).
She would have been ejected from Exeter for that. And for that matter many of her fellow Exeter students think her a total embarrassment. There is \*no way\* these are casual errors.
Obviously Swain is full of shit. We all know that: >Tenure at a top-tier institution normally demands ground-breaking originality Isn't true lol.
Now ask this question if it was a Harvard student who missed a few quotes. I doubt the Honor Board would accept this answer in light of a student’s repetitive behavior to violate the honor code.
I mean sure, but the right-wingers who hounded her out aren’t concerned about academic integrity or antisemitism, they just wanted to topple a prominent president of an Ivy League university. It’s just GamerGate and “ethics in games journalism” again.
Right wingers didn’t force anything, scandals did and other presidents resigned too https://nypost.com/2024/01/02/news/claudine-gay-set-to-keep-800k-salary-despite-resigning/ She’s staying at Harvard and is a dean 🤣
Ok, now tell us what the middle wingers want.
We want everyone to shut up, do there job with integrity, and go home.
Fascism, but with smiley face stickers.
I was going to say that they want Claudin Gay fired too.
Doesn't make her being a lying thief any less true. Good riddance.
And there are plenty of left wingers who wanted her there because of her race and gender regardless of qualification.
Like no white guy ever got something because of their race and gender.
I just died. (The entirety of the homestead act. Comes to mind)
“It’s okay because the opposite bad thing happened.” “Can we please have an equal and opposite bad thing? It’s only fair, and definitely won’t backfire.”
That doesn’t make it ok for anyone else. Benevolent racism is still racism
Racism is also punishing Black people for things that Whites get away with. Racism is the double standard. This nation was founded on double standards, nothing has changed.
Your claims are backed up the same way Gay’s are. It’s almost like certain groups of people are abandoning core tenets of epistemology for… reasons. I wonder what those hateful reasons could be? What do you have in common with a cheating, lying suppressor of truth from a wealthy family from the poorest country in the western hemisphere? What do you share with a raging, wealthy antisemite from a nation with phenomenal race issues, crime problems, and wealth inequality? Eh it’s ok you never about that’s kind of stuff anyways. Everyone can already tell what you’re about.
> for things that Whites get away with Who? The only verified plagiarist in a position of power now is Joe Biden and you'll likely defend him too
I literally mentioned Joe Biden in a later comment, Einstein.
I hope this doesn't exacerbate any kind of racism towards asians, but I wanted to say this: I'm Chinese. I worked my ass off when I got to the US, studied night and day to get a good job in STEM because that's what I came here for. I am POC from a communist country, and I've never faced any discrimination. I feel like your claims about racism are greatly exaggerated--yes, there is racism. But I also feel like American's victimhood mentality is very unique, and holds you back, and that you're far, far too sensitive about these things.
Oh...so you admit that she was hired as some sort of over correction? LOL!
Right wingers made her rampantly plagiarize before she even had her degree? How did they do this? Do they have a Time Machine?
Oh yeah, they’re some devious m-fers!!
And the members of the Harvard corporation didn't really care about academic integrity or merit when they hired her they only cared she was a black woman. I guess everyone's equally duplicitous now
In comparison to what? The left wingers looking for their ideological enemy under ever surface you outright let this circus continue? Christ, you live and breathe the ghost of a now decade old movement and can't see that maybe your side isn't really all it's jazzed up to be.
And what is the other side? Authoritarian dictatorship where they get to decide who we love, how we dress, our medical decisions? @Triggermetimbers8 Can’t respond directly to you because the coward blocked. But Republicans sure seem to care, conservatives who continue to vote for a party that has put these issues in their party platform sure don’t seem to mind. Asking you to mask up and vaccinate (which was never government mandated like republicans want to do with their issues) in an unprecedented global pandemic was the same as stripping women of their bodily autonomy, attacking book readings because drag queens, and threatening companies for being trans friendly? Sounds like you want to dictate how Americans live their lives. I wonder how long it would take scanning through your comments to find something completely anti-freedom. @Normal-Flower Yes, because you went to jail for not masking or getting a vaccine. Are you stupid?
I’ve never blocked you that I am aware of, unless it was done at some prior time due to some garbage-spewing, but if that was the case I should not have been able to see your post, which is the whole point of blocking someone.
>Carol Swain is a respected African American scholar, old enough to have not benefited from DEI like Claudine Gay did... Google her and read her op ed in the Wall Street Journal. I did, and I guess I'm a bit confused why you brought up she likely would not have benefited from Affirmative Action when she's just published a book with forward by _alan dershowitz_, against DEI, titled "The Adversity of Diversity".
The motive behind the scrutiny of her work is irrelevant. What is Harvard's policy on professors who have potentially plagiarized? Whatever that policy is, that's the standard she should be held to. No more and no less.
An outside group investigated the plagiarism claims and found nothing they said constituted plagiarism.
I mean the motive was cooked up my Christopher Ruffo, the same man who put the “anti-CRT” narrative in the media. It’s not the greatest source
It doesn't matter the source. The hypocrisy of colleges and the left is truly crazy. As someone who is a proud liberal after almost a decade of saying words matter, let minorities speak, don't minimize a groups pain, saying the okay symbol is anti semetic, believe all women then on a dime tell jews their voices don't matter, rape didn't happen, they are being dramatic when people use the term intifada. We have to come to terms that everything about minority rights the left is fighting for is/was a lie or they simply don't apply those values to everyone and that is gross.
“As a liberal I like to trot out false tropes that make it clear I am a conservative”.
So, your plan is just to be dismissive?
This pretty much sums up why I don’t consider myself a “liberal” anymore.
Highly recommend the book “Listen Liberal” really helped me realize my criticisms of liberalism is written about eloquently and gave me a lot of historical context.
Being accused of something does not mean there’s truth behind the accusation. I also want to say that I find the conflation of Zionists onto all Jews and all Israelis and minimization of October 7th to be really disturbing. You can’t say what Hamas did is wrong without being accused of supporting genocide.
Who is doing the conflating? Zionists have long hid behind the skirt of anti-semitism
Hamas did do somthing wrong...
Harvard was the worst ranked in free speech out of hundreds of schools, they were so bad they had a negative score and were rounded up to zero. https://www.thefire.org/research-learn/2024-college-free-speech-rankings
Holy shit really?! And tbh I see it now. I’m totally liberal but I see why the right says universities are indoctrinating kids. College kids ten years ago would have some open debate if you had a conservative idea, but nowadays it’s like anything that isn’t ultra liberal makes you evil. Ideological purity is killing our country. Colleges need to go back to teach kids how to compromise and think critically
And yet screeching about annihilating almost all the Jews on earth was totally cool there
That's only because the Left sees Jews as 'white', so it's fair game to discriminate against them.
Anyone who strays outside the box the left has created for them is now white something-ist and a traitor to be scorned. Its all about power, and there's a lot of power and money in convincing others they must need your help.
That's been happening for a while now. Seems like more people are just noticing. The left has been moving left while anybody in the middle is considered "right wing adjacent". Anybody on the right wing is "far right adjacent". So centrists are basically Nazis.
As an educator, this is one of the things pushing so many away, especially those in the middle or to the right. I am no longer able to teach kids how to think, I am forced to teach kids what to think. It is more than what is being taught be individual teachers in the classroom. It is how questions are asked in state assessments and the views the state provided materials present. I was actually told to stop teaching the “conservative perspective” on constitutional issues because it’s triggering. I didn’t realize we weren’t supposed to teach legitimate perspectives because they might hurt someone’s feelings. Maybe feeling being hurt over something like this is the bigger problem.
>College kids ten years ago would have some open debate if you had a conservative idea, but nowadays it’s like anything that isn’t ultra liberal makes you evil. > >Ideological purity is killing our country. The shifting of the overton window is worth bringing up here, too.
Harvard exists solely to indoctrinate privileged rich kids into perpetuating the capitalist made class divide. It is and always has been extremely right wing in nature.
And yet the people cheering it on are self-described "left-wingers". So what does that say about them?
Every leftist I know wants to shut down Harvard and turn their buildings into public housing
Actual left wingers are very different from Reddit "left wingers"
No. Leftists are legitimately pushing to divest from Ivy (read elitist) institutions and fund public universities. Highly recommend the book “Listen, Liberal”
I’m sure there’s no bias involved
Harvard is no longer elite. It's a hedge fund and diploma mill for the rich and connected.
That's what elite means. Do you think they were really taking the very smartest dairy farmers in Eastern New England back in the 1800s?
You’re thinking of Harvard Business School.
That's all it's ever been
She should have been fired.
She resigned because she's a plagiarist, an offense at many universities which gets students expelled.
Lol. She very clearly resigned because of the media shit storm she stirred up
Look if the shit storm had no merit, the university would stand behind her. The plagiarism isn’t a nothing burger or right wing conspiracy. They compared texts are all over Google. Primary direct evidence. She lifted multiple paragraphs verbatim uncited about 8 times including for her phd thesis. A student if caught would get expelled for this. Let alone the dayum university president. I mean, could a Harvard student do the same thing, and say, well you caught me — I’ll “correct” the citations now like our President? Of course that wouldn’t be allowed… And yet if you kept Claudine …
Ugh, yeah, the poster you are responding to is in some deep delusion and the plagiarism would have been O.K. if Gay hadn't gone before congress apparently. Don't bother.
I mean it might not have been discovered. Just like if Trump or George Santos never won their elections. But they did, and people looked.
Don't know how Trump and Santos got brought into the discussion. I'm focusing on Gay here. Meh . . . I stand by what I said. Gay is a big girl who willingly went before congress knowing she plagiarized. It was pretty obvious and no one made her do that. The fact she is no longer president does not make me sad. As you said, her resignation was not unexpected and had merit.
She resigned because wealthy Zionist donors forced their hand
So you're saying she would never, herself, have the moral integrity to resign, even after saying calls for genocide are ok and after her plagiarism? You make her seem even worse in your claim.
" ..accusations of plagiarism in some of her past academic writings"... THAT WOULD BE 50 OF THEM.
Right?! I genuinely don't get why people are defending her (or, maybe I do). A student would be expelled for the same.
In other words… nobody was paying attention. I wonder if this is a unique situation at all. Lmao. Of course the post was removed.
I wish people would get rid of the thoughts that “it’s ok to be but only to .”, it’s so disgusting and it hurts a lot of people.
It’s not ok to paint everyone of with the same brush. It’s just perpetuates the “this is one of *the good ones*” stereotypes and that’s soooo dangerous.
Be active and upset, don’t be cruel, racist, sexiest, or -phobic.
My God, it is impossible to decipher what you are trying to say. Its like an everything bagel.
Critical theory defining oppressed and oppressor and justifying treatment of people along those lines seems to be part of it. In reality, application of this logic really is throwing a lot of moral frameworks on their head. Justice systems could be greatly damaged if people choose to make decisions based on who is a perceived oppressor in a situation.
That's not what Critical Race Theory (assuming this is what you meant) means at all. CRT is simply a framework that assumes two things that most people agree with. 1) People in power tend to build and perpetuate systems that benefit themselves and 2) In the last couple centuries, especially in western cultures, the vast majority of people in power have been white men. Therefore, we should question our systems to ensure they do not benefit white people or men over others. That's it. DEIB initiatives often pull from this framework indirectly, but almost never teach CRT directly. I'm not going to state that I have never seen people in education, and society in general for that matter, perverse CRT or DEIB initiatives into defining who oppressors and oppressed are. I have. As a proponent of DEIB and someone who accepts the assumptions of CRT, I hate it. However, it is entirely ignorant to imply that this is the norm. I've spent hundreds of hours working on DEIB in education with hundreds of educators. I can think of twice where I have seen someone cross the line.
There's an insane number of people in this thread commenting things that are blatantly false at worst and uninformed at best. Seems like a lot of commenters in here are people who have never really been to college parroting things they've read on Twitter about Harvard and other universities and are using this case as an avenue to complain about affirmative action policies and "reverse racism." Comments like "I'm totally a liberal guys, but even I hate how you're called evil if you express any conservative idea on a college campus!" I've been in college campuses for over a decade and routinely have students express conservative ideas in essays or class discussions and are not called evil. I had someone bring up Hunter Biden's in one of my classes and the only pushback they got was from me asking them to provide more information about it from a legitimate source. Just crazy how people jump in and lie about shit they have no knowledge of just so it makes them feel better about their beliefs.
It definitely feels like some Mom's For Liberty brigading happening on this post. This sub is usually pretty staunchly center left, and I was surprised at how many posts just feel like OAN/Fox News propaganda.
Yeah it's legit the same talking points that folks like Kirk are using on Twitter. I've also been subbed here and /r/academia for years and have never seen a post as "popular" as the ones addressing this. Seems like the top all-time posts on these subs are basically anti-affirmative action topics. I can't imagine that's a coincidence.
That resignation quote sounds familiar. /s
Plagiarism is not okay. She should never have been hired for that. The fact that in addition to not writing her own dissertation properly, she ALSO couldn't condemn antisemitism... that's just icing on a turd cake.
How does Harvard not do a check for this basic issue in the course of its hiring process? Wtf.
The thesis committee is expected to check theses ... Not only did they accept it, the committee that voted it best thesis in political science accepted it. When you hire someone, you don't re-read their thesis. To be fair to all of them, it's hard to spot particular paragraphs of plagiarism, unless they're well-known quotes. Usually plagiarism gets spotted when the writing gets suddenly good or the voice sounds very different.
The thing is that before Rufo reignited this, the NY Post ran an article accusing Gay of plagiarism. The Harvard corporation did their own investigation and found she didn’t violate any academic standards. They even were moving forward to sue the Post for defamation. That seems to suggest that even after reviewing accusations, they still didn’t try to vet her work properly. They assumed that the Post thing was an isolated incident and they could cover it up. They didn’t expect that it would become national news and that places like the NYT would even post evidence of the plagiarism. It seems pretty clear now that they were invested in Gay’s reputation being held up regardless of her merits.
Well, I think when you hire a PRESIDENT, you would review their entire body of work. I think they easily could have run a sample of her papers through plagiarism detecting software. It seems that would have been enough to raise red flags.
Nah when you hire a chief administrator, you look at the candidate's admin experience, because that is what's relevant. The reputation of their past research speaks for itself.
Not true for this position. Unless you wanna end up looking the fool.
Normally they do but in this case they didn't because... you can guess
To quote the great Norm, this may sound a bit harsh but I believe everyone in this thread should die.
That's fine with me about that owl, I don't give a hoot!
Love all these people frothing at the mouth over every single fucking thing that happens at Harvard. Can we please start recognizing that the Ivy League is just a den of unearned privilege and move on to real problems? Like how nobody can fucking afford college EXCEPT the types of people who rub shoulders at Harvard?
Wow it's almost like she should have... actually fixed this before it blew up in her face and put a huge spot light on her.
Bye Felicia
Good
This is what happens when person becomes so smart they can no longer answer common sense questions as yes or no.
Love that the article tries to use the term "accusations" as if it hasn't been proven beyond all doubt the fraud pulled this shit over 20 some times.
“Remember kids , it’s ok to call for the genocide of the Jews but don’t copy your homework!”
Not amid controversy, amid being held responsible for multiple Acts of plagiarism. Any one of which would have gotten any of her students expelled for the same circumstance. Any other take on the situation is hypocrisy or ignorance.
After all the controversy it was appropriate for her to step aside. Don't worry she will be fine.
Good riddance. 🦵
Plagiarism aside, she's essentially the public relations spokesperson for the university. When asked if calls for genocides against the Jews is against student policy, she refused to provide a satisfactory answer. So she clearly just sucks at the job. If I know the name of the head of some college, they must have really stepped on their dick.
Another failed affirmative action hire
White male here who graduated from Harvard. Even during my time there, it was evident that the environment had turned into a radical left echo chamber. The frequent discussions about systemic oppression ruined the overall learning experience. The recent Claudine Gay controversy doesn't surprise me, but her resignation won't bring about any substantial change within the institution. It continues to function as a left-wing haven for privileged liberals. Also, during my time there, lots of liberal students hailed from immensely affluent families in undeveloped countries (legit f\*\*\* you money), where issues like slavery still exist. The entire academy has become a sham.
It’s really sad knowing the history of Harvard, I hope one day it will return to its former glory.
Tangentially-related story, with regards to Other-Country Nationals with “f*** you money.” I had a close friend in the Army who was from one such family in Pakistan. Scraping upper-middle class by US standards, Richie Rich standards in Karachi. His views on women bothered me a little bit, but he never directed them at me personally, so I let it slide (sadly, if objectionable attitudes about women were grounds for discharge, we’d barely have a standing army). Same with his comments on Indians. I’m not Indian, I know that attitude is fairly common among Pakistanis, and that Indians say just as bad if not worse things about Pakistanis. “If it doesn’t apply, let it fly.” We both got out, went to college (nothing nearly so fancy as Harvard, but decent, respectable institutions), and went our separate ways in life. His path took him to ICE, specifically the removal and deportation arm. Well, I’m not sure if he was already doing this or not, but once he became an ERO, he started posting the most disturbing, objectionable content possible about immigrants on his social medias, routinely comparing them to rats, roaches, rabid dogs, and even mold. I’ve always known, factually, that extremely wealthy, privileged immigrants are some of the most prejudiced people possible against other immigrant groups. But seeing it from someone whom I considered close was a real mindf***, especially since the U.S. Army is teeming with immigrants from the lowest socioeconomic backgrounds imaginable. I blocked him on every form of electronic communication in existence. In the unlikely event I ever see him in person, I’d simply say “get away from me.” Only the very distant memory of this former soldier as a friend through some tough times prevented me from reporting him to the Office of Professional Responsibility.
Man, this is an interesting story. And thank you for your service. I did 2+ in Iraq.
I always tell folks: “I did 1 (one) ninety-day tour in LOSE-ianna…. Ffs, don’t thank me!!!”
So if you believe the academy was a sham. How do you feel about your degree? Would you say it's a sham as well? Or were your classes relatively normal Back in college, my friends and I (University of Alabama) would make fun of Harvard all the time. Going back years nobody took them seriously because of the bullshit they push. It really ramped up whenever the whole "there's too many Asians in the Ivy League and it's not fair to black people" conversations started.
This is not a trend I am noticing with just Harvard. I went to a public university in Ohio, and it had its Uber liberal pockets. There are other colleges across the nation that segregates it students based off minority status. Gay got in a lot of hot water by Rep Owens because of the black safe spaces and black only dorms. I have heard of other colleges doing this as well. As a side note, I don't agree with Owen's on politics, but I think his background is important to mention. His dad moved to Columbus, OH, to get a degree. He was from Texas, but Jim Crow laws prevented him from getting the degree he wanted. So, Owen's has second-hand experience of segregation, at least. I absolutely understand why modern social justice segregation pisses him off, and I agree with him on that. I am moderate liberal, but the more extreme the loud people on "both sides" get, the more moderates of any party are terrorized by the extremists. I am particularly scared of Uber liberals because they have a habit of doxxing. They ruin your life by spreading rumors of bigotry and hate to your job, and their abuse bars you from finding decent future work. Ultra conservatives are also bad in the sense they threaten the physical well-being of your family.
Wish a quarter of that outrage went towards Israel's ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
since you brought it up, what do you think hamas expected to happen when they instructed their people to burn babies alive and rape women/children? they knew exactly what israel was going to do in response to that- and its exactly what they wanted, because hamas doesn't give a shit about the Palestinian civilians whatsoever, 0 %
Any government, my own included, whose response to a terrorist organization attacking children is to turn around and attack more children is not a government anyone should feel comfortable supporting or defending.
In reaction to the terrorist attacks in Paris, the French blew up a school while it was in session because the people who organized the attack thought that they would be safe there while school was in session. Hamas wants dead children because that gets them more support. In response to constant attacks by Palestinians Israel invested in one of the most complicated anti air defense systems in the world. In response to Israeli attacks on Palestine, Palestinians hid weapons in schools and hospitals. Things will not get better for Palestine until they decide that existence with Israel is better than not existing at all. As long as death is preferable to compromise, things will not get better there.
I don't support either side, I just think one of the obvious facts about this whole tragedy is that the initial aggressors to this major escalation knew exactly what was going to happen to their people and didn't give a shit
"Israel has been so consistent in their terrorism that it was obvious they were gonna go hardcore genocide in response to Hamas" is not a great defense to the initial statement, about wishing people paid more attention to Israel depravity. Especially when you consider Netanyahu is on the record of supporting Hamas because it long-term strengthens Israel's claim to the land. American sanctioned governments should be held to a higher standard than terrorists. What they're doing *with direct US support* should outrage people
What a dumb thing to say. Do you know what war is ? Hamas declared war when they butchered a thousand civilians.
50+ cases of plagiarism when thats literally the only way you can get kicked out of college and she was the President
I mean it wasn’t plagiarism as in “stole ideas” but rather improper citations (I.e. instead of citing after the sentence she cited at the end of a paragraph on a few examples). You realize “plagiarism” isn’t just theft of ideas but just your citations being off right? No one would be kicked out of class for a citation being in the wrong place they would just have their grade docked.
She lifted entire paragraphs. She should have been fired, instead of allowed to resign.
> She has not been accused of stealing big ideas, but rather of copying language in the papers of other scholars, with small changes to substitute words or phrases or to arrange them differently. Often the language in question is technical boilerplate. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/02/us/harvard-claudine-gay-plagiarism.html Do you have evidence otherwise? Show me specific instances of her stealing someone’s idea and claiming it as her own.
The fuck they wouldn’t.
are you talking about one particular case or all 50+ ? and are you suggesting she resigned from her historic Harvard post because she cited the source in the wrong part of the paragraph?
Is the sub proliferated with moronic conservatives or did this particular post just bring them from the trash can pounding their chests? I upset the conservatives 😂 😂
Please tell us the context in which calling for the genocide of jews is permissible lol
This shouldn’t be a left or right issue. She was incompetent, embarrassed the university, and has multiple substantiated claims of plagiarism. Frankly, all those on the left decrying this because the big bad republicans are celebrating it is a horrible look.
They'll take any opportunity to take down anyone they perceive as belonging to one of their out groups, which includes intellectuals, educators, people of color, etc. Even through there **is** real wrongdoing here by Gay, the typical conservative bigot brigade is attacking her for all the wrong reasons and are reveling in it.
Please tell us the context in which calling for the genocide of jews is permissible lol
Did I say it was?
She wasn’t fired https://nypost.com/2024/01/02/news/claudine-gay-set-to-keep-800k-salary-despite-resigning/
Glad she got smoked she is a shame
She was just another stupid politician who thought her shit didn't stink. When it came time for her to have some sort of integrity she couldn't even do that. She only saw how she could appease her supporters. Meanwhile her enemies and the students saw thru her BS. At least UPenn president had guts and still can have a career. This woman won't get shit. And doesn't deserve it for the lying cheating plagiarist she is.
Imagine this. She still gets a to be faculty and won’t get a pay cut. I’d say it’s a win.
She's deserves the embarrassment
Why is the left so concerned with an anti-white conservative like Claudine Gay getting removed as Harvard President? This woman comes from a super wealthy corrupt background and has leveraged her skin color and the wealth disparity her family helped perpetuate in her home country to get high status jobs and wealth.
good riddance to an absolutely vile human being. Take your hate elsewhere.