118 Comments

Everyone dances around the “equity” badge she wears with honor, but hide the fact that Harvard lowered its standards to hire a black female for racial equity.

She would never have been in the running if it was merit based.

Equity is the race to the bottom of the barrel.

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The sad thing is there are black men and women who could fill the role honorably. The problem is racism - for the DEI crowd any black will do! How insulting.

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I agree. I’d be right miffed if I were one who was passed over for her.

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It’s like “The Emperor has no clothes!” Nothing would make me feel less proud than being a DEI hire. And Harvard looks like the fool, not her.

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They are both fools and grifters.

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I gotta agree.

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Until she testified before Congress I didn't know who she was. I don't understand why you say "Harvard lowered it's standards to hire a black female for racial equity". Were there others in running for the job that were more qualified?

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We’re there any candidates for Harvard President less qualified?

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She is 53, she has been in academia her whole career and she has 11 papers published. I am the same age, I left academia when I was 31 and by that time I had about the same number of papers published.

For comparison, Dr. Prasad has 409 papers.

https://vinayakkprasad.com/papers

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Why does publishing papers make one a good administrator? Presumably you need to be a good administrator to run a university.

It would be interesting to know whether Vinay or John Ioannidis think they would be good college presidents. I'm guessing not, but who knows.

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Publishing papers doesn't make one a good administrator or a good teacher, but it is a measure of how much work in a certain field one does. 11 papers over a span of about 25 years is way too little for someone to stay employed at a prestigious university and to get a chance to become a president.

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Maybe that's why she got promoted... They didn't want to fire her, but they couldn't keep her in that position?

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Agreed. I'd prefer to know how many grad students she graduated.

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And he is a slouch :)

Kidding

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Ouch...and, yes, about qualifications, hmmm? For the President of Harvard?

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It is ridiculous to suggest she shouldn’t be fired as a professor! She is academically and morally incompetent. This may not disqualify her for other jobs, but it should be a non-starter for any academic position.

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Be prepared for the next step, “plagiarism is merely a construct of white supremacy culture”. Just sayin.

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Interestingly enough, James O'Keefe just released IBM's view that "whiteness rigs the game." The tides seem to be turning though as he has been contacted by over 150 whistleblowers at IBM

https://youtu.be/vayqoO63m00?feature=shared

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It wasn't plagiarism. It was excessive use of "duplicative language without appropriate attribution.”

Only students do plagiarism. Professors and presidents merely use "duplicative language without appropriate attributition."

Big difference.

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Ha! Ha! 🤣🤣

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The Harvard Corporation board hired her and refuses to fire her. They are complicit and just as compromised as Gay: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/how-to-get-into-harvard-gay-bobo-corporation

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Harvard is the new Bud Lite of education.

A straight, white man would have been defenestrated in minutes with the existing Claudine Gay plagerism evidence.

Larry Summers was run out of town on a rail for citing an accurate, factually true study that ran counter-narrative.

This is a racial spoils game and as long as she stays in her job the game is rigged.

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Ding dong! The witch is dead!

Claudine resigned!

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I’ve been a high school teacher for 15+ years and worked in three separate school districts. In each school I have had students cheat on quizzes, tests and finals, and I’ve caught students plagiarizing on papers. In EVERY single case administrators have allowed students a redo. I have fought them but always lost the battles. I don’t want to sound negative but our systems are morally and ethically bankrupt.

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Wow!!!

We always got 0's on the assignment in those cases and you could be put on probation. I think that's also the case in my son's high school right now.

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I spoke with a former drug addict ( drug use disorder) two days ago about this issue. He had been attending Princeton University during a terrible crisis of addiction and even though he was flunking out of his classes and eventually needed to leave the University for one year he said that he never EVER would have cheated or plagiarized. He remembered his mother’s words when he was growing up: if you cheat, you are only cheating yourself.

It is time for reality.

This has nothing to do with the right wing or the left wing.

Just reality.

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We look at the testimony of the three university presidents and say,”Here’s the problem !” The truth is they very much represent the academic staff and boards of their respective institutions. The moral, academic, and political decay of these once-great universities took a long time to develop -- it will take a long time to fix.

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Um excuse me?! If I performed this level of academic dishonesty, I would be “fired as a medical student.” Which would be financially catastrophic and would alter not only my life but the life of my wife and children.

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Clearly, Vinay, this is pure racialism. Gay is given a pass because she is a black woman. This plagiarism was REPEATED. It is so clear and would not be tolerated in an undergraduate. The Harvard establishment (I am a proudly disaffected alumnus, class of 1970) will do everything to stand by Gay and hopefully the donors and applicants will speak loudly and clearly.

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You might be removing your self from the Harvard Alumni’s ‘roster’! 😉🤔

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To me, this is just another illustration of what happens when you are driven by affirmative action instead of merit.

This is a fairly minor (though symbolic) example but you can be sure that every day in many places around the west, bad decisions (with consequence) are being made by such appointments.

People appointed on merit can of course also mess up but why increase the incidence of that by pursuing affirmative action. Madness and stupidity.

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You note that she shouldn't be fired as a professor. Be that as it may, that take is simple capitulation to the fact that even our most elite (at least in name) universities do not even pretend to seek out and retain the best and brightest to teach our most promising (can we even say that anymore?) students.

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We cannot.

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Gina Kolata--Wellness Journalist for decades at the NYTimes-- plagiarized my words to her in letter and the New York Times never supported me. It seems these folks with big degrees get away with it.

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Question. I don't know anything about academic papers, but when I looked at the exact paragraphs with her alleged plagiarism, it seemed like sloppiness to me, rather than an attempt to pretend the work was her own. In at least one of the cases, while she had no quotation marks or footnotes, she did talk about the paper she got the info from in the same paragraph, so for me I felt I knew where the information she was presenting came from. So in the situation I am describing, does this rise to the level of plagiarism, or is it simply sloppy work?

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The rules for academic papers require proper citation of sources. Everyone knows what they are and the usual consequences for not following them.

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Exactly!! If you are a first year college student I could understand the confusion. But once you’re at Masters or PhD level? You are well aware of the expectations and I would be really embarrassed if I were her.

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In the BS field her academic work is, it is hard to discover something new, so they all just repeat the same.

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That is my take. She wasn’t pretending the research or ideas were her own. I her field, I’m not even sure what original research or ideas would look like and I doubt her advisor or committee expected any original research or ideas.

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I have the same question. I read all of the paragraphs where she committed plagiarism. It was more like she was pretending to be paraphrasing but just copied the sentences word for word. Is that really a case of plagiarism? It’s more like a case for those bits to be corrected with an apology. Because this is politically driven, it seems like a pretty weak accusation.

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We have a word for that; plagiarism. Even if you refuse to admit that, you want the president of an “elite” school to be that sloppy in her research?

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Sure, there are different shades of plagiarism. But she does not meet the higher standards for the president of an illustrious university.

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Get real. She couldn't have graduated from my Catholic high school.

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Let's be fair. Gail Swain, a black woman who came from a much poorer background, dropped out of public schools (as did her siblings) after eighth grade and then, step by step, got herself through through college and a doctorate. Her first book was well-received, and apparently sentences(and themes) were copied later by Claudine Gay for one of her scant publications. Swain's further books have been part of the national conversation, but Gay hasn't published a book of her own. I 'd much rather spend time with Swain than Gay ... but then, I'm a serious person.

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There is a political aspect, but her appointment was purely political to begin with.

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I don’t like that her appointment was political, and I am inclined to agree that it was plagiarism. I just feel like the case against her isn’t as rock solid as I would like it to be. I sent a Substack to my Harvard prof friend about the plagiarism, and she sent back an article defending her, quoting Gay’s thesis advisor.

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That is plagiarism

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Honestly, that was my take on the original allegations about her thesis. (I think she should've been fired over the hearing, so I'm not predisposed to defend her). But if this is showing up in multiple papers, that does seem like a more serious issue.

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Could be either but I think the take home message here is that she was a diversity hire and that has to stop.

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Both...

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It’s plagiarism and therefore sloppy work.

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It's all about ethics. She should apologize and step down. People need to stop making light of this because as you said this wouldn't be accepted of students.. will it in the future??

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Many universities stopped taking SAT and ACT scores into account for admission. When my son applied to UIUC, SAT or ACT score was optional, but declaring used pronouns and race was mandatory. He was accepted, but we were not happy to send him to a place like that and pay $38,000/year.

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Shoot from what I hear a 38K yearly tuition for university is a ‘bargain’ these days!

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It is a state university (University of Illinois) and we are residents. Other states give huge discounts to residents.

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I live in CA. The UC system (University of CA) offered no discounts to residents that I know of and the annual tuition is far more than 38K the last time I heard. Also Vinay works for the UCSF Medical System in San Francisco.

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My son is enrolled at University of Wisconsin, and pays less even as an out of state student.

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She should step down or be fired whether she has the scruples to apologize or not.

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