"Advancing an agenda of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion — which is to say, of replacing competent white people, or men of any race, wherever they are to be found in American business and media — is merely how the Party effectively pursues the same “grow or die” imperative that faces any human organization." Yep, that about sums us up.
I don't care too much about Harvard's fate. What bothers me is to see how well your words describe what's happened to the state university campus where I taught physics as an adjunct for the better part of the years from 2002-2019. When I started there it was a middling school with a good fraction of hard working students whose parents probably didn't attend a college. Roughly 50% male/female (back when those were the only two SEXES available ("gender" being a grammatical term). It had its share of frat bozos and drunken athletes. It had some really brilliant men and women. It had variety.
After 2015 they did away with SATs as a requirement for entrance. And the calibre of the students started to plunge. It started to smell like..Harvard. DEI taking over a building, students of indeterminate sex, relentless pursuit of boosting black enrollment..despite there being a pretty decent HBCU twenty miles down the highway. My generation were "freaks" but it was a big middle finger to The Authorities. These kids are freaks but all in compliance with the expectations of The Authorities. And the administrative staff gradually feminized. Female presidents, and when male, might as well have been female. The last one let his wife answer emails from faculty who challenged him on his policies.
Brian, this is easily the best assessment of these shenanigans.
As a professional academic (I know…) whose work has been plagiarised from the get-go, I don't like 'plagiarism', but you point to *the* core issue here, which is arguably way, way worse than any personal misconduct (however egregious it might be).
"This is not to say that all that mattered was her sex and race."
Indeed if she was conservative she would not have been hired. Having the correct ideology was the 3rd criteria.
In that sense, it is odd for her to have to resign, as none of these three pillars have collapsed. I was initially surprised they did not just give everybody the finger. In a week or two this would have been forgotten, and in a year or two a moderator could have changed her wikipedia page to claim that no evidence ever was found that she "deliberately" committed fraud or something like that.
I suspect what in the end was too much, was a larger wider audience of donors, alumni, sponsors and similar orbital figures around Harvard that agree or at least are agnostics with the politics, but do still cling to the image of prestige of it being an elite university. Likely because this facade gives themselves some status - at least in their minds. Gay was simply too much the emperor without clothes for them to sit this one out I suspect. By letting her go, they can pretend to themselves and their inner circles (especially donors) merit and honesty still carry some weight around there. In a way, firing her is a way of resolving everybody's cognitive dissonance.
We had the same in Ottawa two years ago when Justin threw his tantrum and imposed the Emergencies Act. It was going well until bank accounts were frozen and foreign depositors looked elsewhere. It would be of considerable interest to review the flight records of various banksters' corporate jets from Toronto to Ottawa that week.
Thank you for this and for including Mr. Bill Ackman's Twitter statement which I would not normally have seen.
"It was also that the scions on the Harvard board returned to the Real World™️—Aspen, Miami, probably Palm Beach—over the holidays, only to learn that their fellow elites had lost faith in Gay."
“what led to the demise of the first Black president of Harvard was that she had become an embarrassment among people whom the Harvard Corporation respects.”
Even if her sloppy "scholarship" is commonplace, it still is useful for her to suffer consequences. Maybe it will cause others to be a little more careful in their citations, even if they are citing other worthless scholarship.
It would have been better for her to fall because of her tacit endorsement of antisemitism, as laid bare in the congressional testimony, but Harvard board was seemingly happy to ignore that.
Per Kendi, where is there evidence that she had to be better or work harder to achieve her position? It seems like the opposite is true.
I was reading her Wikipedia page and it referenced some positive fiscal results she was able to bring as dean. Perhaps there was some substance to her selection beyond the obvious racial "first".
Maybe one answer is simply to push standards higher with rigourous open and closed peer review that also covers the raw data. But the situation is now akin to a giant lucrative ponzi scheme that can not be allowed to fail.
Even before the latest debacle, the pointless coercive student vaxx mandates showed the administrations are unable or even unwilling to reason their way out of a wet paper bag, or merely find and contact those with the necessary skills to help them.
I disagree. You downplay her “alleged” plagiarism by saying it doesn’t matter because the ripped ideas aren’t facts of reality as such. Plagiarism has nothing to do with the veridicality of whatever it is that you lifted. Simply copying prose (ideas) without citing where you got it is the only sufficiency.
I mean more that plagiarism is presenting someone else's "work" as one's own. Just leaving out citations doesn't actually meet this standard. For example, ChatGPT doesn't cite anything, because otherwise there would be accountability for IP and royalties, etc. But the work of stringing together a presentation of claims for every query, something that coherently addresses a topic, is still taking place within ChatGPT. Considering the problem backwards, ChatGPT shows how superficial writing based on secondary sources is to begin with. Putting in a bunch of citations doesn't change that. Only if the writer is participating in critiquing their own work as they write do citations really matter.
TLDR; her work was already clearly not "scholarship" by a definition that would have applied before 1990. It was fluff and dogma. Citations wouldn't help this.
If you leave out citations, how would we know it belongs to another, unless we’re familiar with literature and jargon of the field? In other words, work with no citations looks the same as pilfered work. I will grant that not all the examples presented are equally egregious. But if we’re talking about “academic rigor” as Claudine put it, then that point is moot.
I would agree that it would not be practical for ChatGPT to cite everything it spits out, but surely you wouldn’t just take its output and present it as your thesis. Surely not. So that example is not relevant. ChatGPT probably gets away under the fair-use standard.
I do love your analysis of how the elite continues to propagandize: To pretend they do not understand how corrupt and failed they are... and you should know, since numerous people in your life have given you the tools to distinguish between Communism and Fascism, and it wasn't the color of the people's hair who voted for it.
You also know better, but you have your particulary fetid post-collapse barbarist fantasies in mind. I'm sure there's no reason your preferred voter wants to treat premenstrual dysphoria disorder with hormone replacement and sex dysphoria with talk therapy... No, I am, but if you're pretending there isn't I am too.
What a sad waste of a prodigious intellect, and with not one word about how credentials of oppression and credentials of education fit in with the general credentialization and guildification of the economy, which you will again call communist, because you have the same contempt for our intelligence Dr. Gay has.
Interesting take Brian. I listened to Bret and Heather's recent podcast while at work where they castigated Gay for her plagiarism, but personally I couldn't figure out exactly what warranted that degree of castigation. Sure, maybe she copied words or didn't cite the origins of those remarks, but as Tardigrade mentions below what's relevant is whether the comments are substantiated by evidence or just opinion pieces.
She does seem to be highly reflective of the overall rot in academia where many of the people comprising the upper echelons of colleges and universities probably aren't aboveboard with their work. The fact that there's a huge replication crisis, where everyone just chooses to come up with their own theories and yet not back it up with evidence, or the fact that most research even in STEM isn't critiqued just shows that Gay is part of a larger issue in science and academics.
I think I became disillusioned a few years back when doing research and finding out that review articles may just be a rabbit hole of citing one another without getting near the actual study, and when you find the actual study it may not be what has been made out from other citations. It points to the fact that a lot of researchers may just be attempting to reach some citation threshold and citing things without spending time looking into it.
I covered the fact that one pivotal bit of research in the field of Alzheimer's seems to have been comprised of fraudulent data, leading people to speculate if they are even looking at the right proteins. And yet the study was heavily cited and became the norm for research with most developed therapeutics attempting to target these proteins. Anyone who deviates from the amyloid hypothesis was also shut down- you won't get any funding for coming up with alternative hypotheses. So here there was a huge shake up where some scientists were saying that the whole field may need to be reevaluated, and yet has anything really come from all of that talk?
One example among vaccine skeptics is the vaccine shedding hypothesis and the fact that hypothesis was published. I criticized the hypothesis because there was no real evidence of vaccine shedding being cited, and one of the citations for nanoparticles I believe referenced aerosolized environmental pollutants such as things that come from cars- certainly nothing relevant to the vaccine, and yet so many people were just ready to accept the hypothesis as fact because apparently getting your hypothesis published means that the hypothesis has to be true- a claim being taken as fact.
Funnily enough, that recent vaccine integration paper had this citation within the supplementary material:
"Additionally, Lehrer et al. discovered a 117-base pair sequence from the SARS-CoV-2 orf1b
gene within the NTNG1 gene on human chromosome 1, raising intriguing questions about the
relationship between SARS-CoV-2 genetic material and schizophrenia-related genes (2)."
This led a lot of people to speculate based on this excerpt, with some people weirdly thinking that this acts as some explanation for the cognitive impairments seen in vaccinated people even though orf1b isn't part of the spike... All the citation points to is the fact that the authors were noting homology between orf1b and the human gene, which again would be a weird citation to include since it just seems to be more evidence that there was no actual integration of the vaccine and may just be some human sequence that was amplified. It just seems like another example of some of the dangers with citations.
Plenty of examples, yes. I could have used OAS, the stupid spike is "prion-like" paper, a million cases of truly bad work laundered by the citation machine
Thank you for this comment. I also commented on this story.
Internally, I am very uncomfortable with the "look at this incompetent DEI appointment" take, which is mean and nasty and ignores the fact that Dr. Gay comes from a very wealthy family and was just fine, until supporters of the right wing government of a certain Mideast country decided to cancel her academic standing.
Emphasis on DEI is unwholesome, in my opinion.
The liberal press whining about evil "conservatives," who supposedly are behind cancellation of Dr. Gay, is also false.
But "emphasis on DEI" is explicitly what Gay's administrative agenda was all about. It's not that she is a DEI hire, but that she was promoted for advancing DEI. And green-lighting harassment of Jewish students by students with more "needs" on the DEI hierarchy was almost certainly something she thought advanced the "being of the place we want to being" of Harvard. So there's no ignoring it.
Most right-wingers want to lie for their truth to pursue narrative just as hard as the fake-left.
And no, those people who were happy to have their water carried on diversity hiring (just so long as we retain all the other sinecures and fiddles they grew fat on that wern't about Id-Pol but are about as meritocratic) were instrumental in turning over Dr. Gay.
She would not have been fired if it wasn't for Neoconservatives. That they're in unholy allance with Likudniks doesn't make them innocent or even less-guilty. They were here becasue they want to pretend that all the other Neoliberalism was working fine until we started with this woke* shit.
*Social Neoliberalism: A managerial-focused Hegelian Synthesis of Social Democracy and Neoliberalism.
This is a great look at the actual import of L'affaire Gay. Of course, plagiarism was the very convenient excuse for her dismissal, and it helps that it was true. She was actually dismissed because she annoyed some very rich and powerful Jews.
I found myself amused by the endless stream of blackademics who bemoaned on Twitter how they "have to work twice as hard to get half as much," which is a literal inversion of reality. But they were ALL on the same bandwagon. I would guess that blackademics look with bemused amazement at their white and Asian counterparts and how hard they work, while the blacks coast along on shoddy work and drastically lower standards, garnering accolades and promotions the whole way. Do they really believe their own endless moan of oppression? I think they do.
I’m not sure how you go about cleaning up a place like Harvard. You are completely right- she’s just the cherry on top, how do you throw out the cake ingredients and bake a different cake? To get into Harvard, you still need to be vaccinated (this is actually true- it’s the last Ivey League requiring it). There is real irony to that because Martin Kulldorff was on their staff during all of Covid and yet they completely censored him. He’s on leave right now. Requiring vaccines means 1)only people buying into the vaccine BS will apply ; 2)it’s a middle finger to Kulldorff who specifically recommended no jabs to the kids and 3)It’s just completely illogical to require something that gives no benefit and in fact a net negative to young people- thereby proving your idea that they think it’s a fact that it saves lives, but haven’t researched it to see that it isn’t a fact at all.
Curious to see how Bill Ackman’s AI search of all the heads of the schools and their published papers goes...
Gay and Harvard show no signs of any self-awaremess after this episode. I think the only way to reform Harvard et.al. is for them to suffer substantial loss of prestige. For organizations not to want to hire grads and students not to want to go. But how? Reality matters little. It's prestigious because it's prestigious. A brand that's hard to tarnish, but episodes like this help chip away that invulnerability.
'America is trapped at the ending moment of “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, wherein (it may surprise the reader) nothing actually changes once the people realize the emperor is naked, for he and his retinue simply pretend to still believe differently.'
Good points. Regarding Gay, my impression is people are getting sick of DEI, and the plagiarism was only an excuse to get rid of her.
Revealing my prejudices here, plagiarism of what sounds like bullshit is just more bullshit. Who cares. (which may be what you meant by "…for the kind of writing Gay was doing, and the kind of reading Gay’s readers were doing, citation was pointless.")
Outstanding piece. So much of what passes for scholarship is echo chamber nonsense. It's the death of logic. What you wrote below is profound. Modern academia is no longer able to make a distinction between a claim of a fact and an (actual) fact.
In such a condition, when no one is any longer reading anyone else’s work skeptically or critically, what good is a citation? In fact, the reader interested in what is actually true might be better off heeding the opposite advice: Beware the openly borrowed claim.
"Advancing an agenda of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion — which is to say, of replacing competent white people, or men of any race, wherever they are to be found in American business and media — is merely how the Party effectively pursues the same “grow or die” imperative that faces any human organization." Yep, that about sums us up.
I don't care too much about Harvard's fate. What bothers me is to see how well your words describe what's happened to the state university campus where I taught physics as an adjunct for the better part of the years from 2002-2019. When I started there it was a middling school with a good fraction of hard working students whose parents probably didn't attend a college. Roughly 50% male/female (back when those were the only two SEXES available ("gender" being a grammatical term). It had its share of frat bozos and drunken athletes. It had some really brilliant men and women. It had variety.
After 2015 they did away with SATs as a requirement for entrance. And the calibre of the students started to plunge. It started to smell like..Harvard. DEI taking over a building, students of indeterminate sex, relentless pursuit of boosting black enrollment..despite there being a pretty decent HBCU twenty miles down the highway. My generation were "freaks" but it was a big middle finger to The Authorities. These kids are freaks but all in compliance with the expectations of The Authorities. And the administrative staff gradually feminized. Female presidents, and when male, might as well have been female. The last one let his wife answer emails from faculty who challenged him on his policies.
Brian, this is easily the best assessment of these shenanigans.
As a professional academic (I know…) whose work has been plagiarised from the get-go, I don't like 'plagiarism', but you point to *the* core issue here, which is arguably way, way worse than any personal misconduct (however egregious it might be).
Thank you for this one.
"This is not to say that all that mattered was her sex and race."
Indeed if she was conservative she would not have been hired. Having the correct ideology was the 3rd criteria.
In that sense, it is odd for her to have to resign, as none of these three pillars have collapsed. I was initially surprised they did not just give everybody the finger. In a week or two this would have been forgotten, and in a year or two a moderator could have changed her wikipedia page to claim that no evidence ever was found that she "deliberately" committed fraud or something like that.
I suspect what in the end was too much, was a larger wider audience of donors, alumni, sponsors and similar orbital figures around Harvard that agree or at least are agnostics with the politics, but do still cling to the image of prestige of it being an elite university. Likely because this facade gives themselves some status - at least in their minds. Gay was simply too much the emperor without clothes for them to sit this one out I suspect. By letting her go, they can pretend to themselves and their inner circles (especially donors) merit and honesty still carry some weight around there. In a way, firing her is a way of resolving everybody's cognitive dissonance.
A compelling theory
Peter's third paragraph nails it. The donors.
Money talks, BS walks.
We had the same in Ottawa two years ago when Justin threw his tantrum and imposed the Emergencies Act. It was going well until bank accounts were frozen and foreign depositors looked elsewhere. It would be of considerable interest to review the flight records of various banksters' corporate jets from Toronto to Ottawa that week.
Thank you for this and for including Mr. Bill Ackman's Twitter statement which I would not normally have seen.
Seems NYT also supports this theory:
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1743682140468904115.html
"It was also that the scions on the Harvard board returned to the Real World™️—Aspen, Miami, probably Palm Beach—over the holidays, only to learn that their fellow elites had lost faith in Gay."
“what led to the demise of the first Black president of Harvard was that she had become an embarrassment among people whom the Harvard Corporation respects.”
nitter.net
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Very nice
Even if her sloppy "scholarship" is commonplace, it still is useful for her to suffer consequences. Maybe it will cause others to be a little more careful in their citations, even if they are citing other worthless scholarship.
It would have been better for her to fall because of her tacit endorsement of antisemitism, as laid bare in the congressional testimony, but Harvard board was seemingly happy to ignore that.
Per Kendi, where is there evidence that she had to be better or work harder to achieve her position? It seems like the opposite is true.
I was reading her Wikipedia page and it referenced some positive fiscal results she was able to bring as dean. Perhaps there was some substance to her selection beyond the obvious racial "first".
Great article as always. :-)
Maybe one answer is simply to push standards higher with rigourous open and closed peer review that also covers the raw data. But the situation is now akin to a giant lucrative ponzi scheme that can not be allowed to fail.
Even before the latest debacle, the pointless coercive student vaxx mandates showed the administrations are unable or even unwilling to reason their way out of a wet paper bag, or merely find and contact those with the necessary skills to help them.
Thanks! I can't even remember if I ever had a strong position on university mandates. The decision-making was too opaque to take an interest in
Long analysis needed?
Say the obvious: she cheated to the top.
Toss her. Expose all frauds at the top everywhere.
Case closed.
It's not "cheating" if her degree was already a meaningless token. That is what the real point is.
She was dean of FAS for five years, so like I said Harvard must have been pleased with her leadership to begin with.
I disagree. You downplay her “alleged” plagiarism by saying it doesn’t matter because the ripped ideas aren’t facts of reality as such. Plagiarism has nothing to do with the veridicality of whatever it is that you lifted. Simply copying prose (ideas) without citing where you got it is the only sufficiency.
I mean more that plagiarism is presenting someone else's "work" as one's own. Just leaving out citations doesn't actually meet this standard. For example, ChatGPT doesn't cite anything, because otherwise there would be accountability for IP and royalties, etc. But the work of stringing together a presentation of claims for every query, something that coherently addresses a topic, is still taking place within ChatGPT. Considering the problem backwards, ChatGPT shows how superficial writing based on secondary sources is to begin with. Putting in a bunch of citations doesn't change that. Only if the writer is participating in critiquing their own work as they write do citations really matter.
TLDR; her work was already clearly not "scholarship" by a definition that would have applied before 1990. It was fluff and dogma. Citations wouldn't help this.
If you leave out citations, how would we know it belongs to another, unless we’re familiar with literature and jargon of the field? In other words, work with no citations looks the same as pilfered work. I will grant that not all the examples presented are equally egregious. But if we’re talking about “academic rigor” as Claudine put it, then that point is moot.
I would agree that it would not be practical for ChatGPT to cite everything it spits out, but surely you wouldn’t just take its output and present it as your thesis. Surely not. So that example is not relevant. ChatGPT probably gets away under the fair-use standard.
I do love your analysis of how the elite continues to propagandize: To pretend they do not understand how corrupt and failed they are... and you should know, since numerous people in your life have given you the tools to distinguish between Communism and Fascism, and it wasn't the color of the people's hair who voted for it.
You also know better, but you have your particulary fetid post-collapse barbarist fantasies in mind. I'm sure there's no reason your preferred voter wants to treat premenstrual dysphoria disorder with hormone replacement and sex dysphoria with talk therapy... No, I am, but if you're pretending there isn't I am too.
What a sad waste of a prodigious intellect, and with not one word about how credentials of oppression and credentials of education fit in with the general credentialization and guildification of the economy, which you will again call communist, because you have the same contempt for our intelligence Dr. Gay has.
Interesting take Brian. I listened to Bret and Heather's recent podcast while at work where they castigated Gay for her plagiarism, but personally I couldn't figure out exactly what warranted that degree of castigation. Sure, maybe she copied words or didn't cite the origins of those remarks, but as Tardigrade mentions below what's relevant is whether the comments are substantiated by evidence or just opinion pieces.
She does seem to be highly reflective of the overall rot in academia where many of the people comprising the upper echelons of colleges and universities probably aren't aboveboard with their work. The fact that there's a huge replication crisis, where everyone just chooses to come up with their own theories and yet not back it up with evidence, or the fact that most research even in STEM isn't critiqued just shows that Gay is part of a larger issue in science and academics.
I think I became disillusioned a few years back when doing research and finding out that review articles may just be a rabbit hole of citing one another without getting near the actual study, and when you find the actual study it may not be what has been made out from other citations. It points to the fact that a lot of researchers may just be attempting to reach some citation threshold and citing things without spending time looking into it.
I covered the fact that one pivotal bit of research in the field of Alzheimer's seems to have been comprised of fraudulent data, leading people to speculate if they are even looking at the right proteins. And yet the study was heavily cited and became the norm for research with most developed therapeutics attempting to target these proteins. Anyone who deviates from the amyloid hypothesis was also shut down- you won't get any funding for coming up with alternative hypotheses. So here there was a huge shake up where some scientists were saying that the whole field may need to be reevaluated, and yet has anything really come from all of that talk?
One example among vaccine skeptics is the vaccine shedding hypothesis and the fact that hypothesis was published. I criticized the hypothesis because there was no real evidence of vaccine shedding being cited, and one of the citations for nanoparticles I believe referenced aerosolized environmental pollutants such as things that come from cars- certainly nothing relevant to the vaccine, and yet so many people were just ready to accept the hypothesis as fact because apparently getting your hypothesis published means that the hypothesis has to be true- a claim being taken as fact.
Funnily enough, that recent vaccine integration paper had this citation within the supplementary material:
"Additionally, Lehrer et al. discovered a 117-base pair sequence from the SARS-CoV-2 orf1b
gene within the NTNG1 gene on human chromosome 1, raising intriguing questions about the
relationship between SARS-CoV-2 genetic material and schizophrenia-related genes (2)."
This led a lot of people to speculate based on this excerpt, with some people weirdly thinking that this acts as some explanation for the cognitive impairments seen in vaccinated people even though orf1b isn't part of the spike... All the citation points to is the fact that the authors were noting homology between orf1b and the human gene, which again would be a weird citation to include since it just seems to be more evidence that there was no actual integration of the vaccine and may just be some human sequence that was amplified. It just seems like another example of some of the dangers with citations.
Plenty of examples, yes. I could have used OAS, the stupid spike is "prion-like" paper, a million cases of truly bad work laundered by the citation machine
It's something that certainly has made me feel more cynical. It feels like much of science is just based on tenuous claims.
Thank you for this comment. I also commented on this story.
Internally, I am very uncomfortable with the "look at this incompetent DEI appointment" take, which is mean and nasty and ignores the fact that Dr. Gay comes from a very wealthy family and was just fine, until supporters of the right wing government of a certain Mideast country decided to cancel her academic standing.
Emphasis on DEI is unwholesome, in my opinion.
The liberal press whining about evil "conservatives," who supposedly are behind cancellation of Dr. Gay, is also false.
I mentioned and linked your piece.
But "emphasis on DEI" is explicitly what Gay's administrative agenda was all about. It's not that she is a DEI hire, but that she was promoted for advancing DEI. And green-lighting harassment of Jewish students by students with more "needs" on the DEI hierarchy was almost certainly something she thought advanced the "being of the place we want to being" of Harvard. So there's no ignoring it.
I love the shit that hit the fan
Most right-wingers want to lie for their truth to pursue narrative just as hard as the fake-left.
And no, those people who were happy to have their water carried on diversity hiring (just so long as we retain all the other sinecures and fiddles they grew fat on that wern't about Id-Pol but are about as meritocratic) were instrumental in turning over Dr. Gay.
She would not have been fired if it wasn't for Neoconservatives. That they're in unholy allance with Likudniks doesn't make them innocent or even less-guilty. They were here becasue they want to pretend that all the other Neoliberalism was working fine until we started with this woke* shit.
*Social Neoliberalism: A managerial-focused Hegelian Synthesis of Social Democracy and Neoliberalism.
This is a great look at the actual import of L'affaire Gay. Of course, plagiarism was the very convenient excuse for her dismissal, and it helps that it was true. She was actually dismissed because she annoyed some very rich and powerful Jews.
I found myself amused by the endless stream of blackademics who bemoaned on Twitter how they "have to work twice as hard to get half as much," which is a literal inversion of reality. But they were ALL on the same bandwagon. I would guess that blackademics look with bemused amazement at their white and Asian counterparts and how hard they work, while the blacks coast along on shoddy work and drastically lower standards, garnering accolades and promotions the whole way. Do they really believe their own endless moan of oppression? I think they do.
You mis-spelled Likud-Zionists there. Lots of them aren't Jewish, but that's not-convenient to another culture war narrative, is it?
I’m not sure how you go about cleaning up a place like Harvard. You are completely right- she’s just the cherry on top, how do you throw out the cake ingredients and bake a different cake? To get into Harvard, you still need to be vaccinated (this is actually true- it’s the last Ivey League requiring it). There is real irony to that because Martin Kulldorff was on their staff during all of Covid and yet they completely censored him. He’s on leave right now. Requiring vaccines means 1)only people buying into the vaccine BS will apply ; 2)it’s a middle finger to Kulldorff who specifically recommended no jabs to the kids and 3)It’s just completely illogical to require something that gives no benefit and in fact a net negative to young people- thereby proving your idea that they think it’s a fact that it saves lives, but haven’t researched it to see that it isn’t a fact at all.
Curious to see how Bill Ackman’s AI search of all the heads of the schools and their published papers goes...
Gay and Harvard show no signs of any self-awaremess after this episode. I think the only way to reform Harvard et.al. is for them to suffer substantial loss of prestige. For organizations not to want to hire grads and students not to want to go. But how? Reality matters little. It's prestigious because it's prestigious. A brand that's hard to tarnish, but episodes like this help chip away that invulnerability.
'America is trapped at the ending moment of “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, wherein (it may surprise the reader) nothing actually changes once the people realize the emperor is naked, for he and his retinue simply pretend to still believe differently.'
Never thought of that!
Good points. Regarding Gay, my impression is people are getting sick of DEI, and the plagiarism was only an excuse to get rid of her.
Revealing my prejudices here, plagiarism of what sounds like bullshit is just more bullshit. Who cares. (which may be what you meant by "…for the kind of writing Gay was doing, and the kind of reading Gay’s readers were doing, citation was pointless.")
Outstanding piece. So much of what passes for scholarship is echo chamber nonsense. It's the death of logic. What you wrote below is profound. Modern academia is no longer able to make a distinction between a claim of a fact and an (actual) fact.
In such a condition, when no one is any longer reading anyone else’s work skeptically or critically, what good is a citation? In fact, the reader interested in what is actually true might be better off heeding the opposite advice: Beware the openly borrowed claim.