Should we even bother with the normal bullet points? Because it’s mostly about Claudine Gay. And the media’s embarrassing reaction to Gay’s “duplicative phrasing” and “attribution issues.” And what this says about the rot in academia. And something about a Disney Plus show. And ladies who live in trees. And how Kmele’s ice has to be colder than Welch’s ice. And a generation of dumb intellectuals. Enjoy.
"President Gay Plagiarized, but . . . " begins an actual headline to an Editorial Board op-ed from the Harvard Crimson. Also from that piece: "We also oppose President Gay’s resignation because we are not blind to what has driven this news cycle — a national outrage manufactured by conservative activists intent on discrediting higher education."
In other words, the head of the university repeatedly broke some of the most sacred and historically important rules, but we will let it slide because firing her will give conservatives glee. It seems to be lost on these students that nonsense like this does more damage to the credibility of higher education than any conservative activist ever could.
One of Harvard's lawyers said this gem, "if it came from some other quarter, I might be granting it some credence, but not from these people." It's like, unless you think Chris Rufo went and manipulated every copy of Claudine Gay's work, the source of the accusation doesn't really matter.
That reminds me of once I sent a comment to a fundamentalist Christian web site informing them that they had a made a mistake in an attribution. They didn't respond and deleted the comment.
Then a few years later I am looking at the site again and I see that "a source they trusted" told them the exact same thing I did and they made the correction.
It's easy to think your always right when you are open to any criticism, as long as it doesn't come from your critics, because they are too biased to be trusted.
There is a part of me that really really wants Harvard to become the East Coast Evergreen. No grades, take some classes in Taylor Swift and vegan leather tanning, and for those Harvard MBAs, why you can do an inquiry-based project on starting an organic farm/yoga retreat in an impoverished third-world country.
Danielle Allen, a highly respected Harvard Political Science Professor, interviewed for the presidency in 2022. She did not make it past the second round.
Not only did Allen have a much more impressive CV than Gay:
- published 8 books
- 50+ scholarly paper
- Allen has TWO PhD's . One from Harvard. one from Cambridge.
- Stint as Humanities Dean at University of Chicago.
- No errors in citations, odd use of quotation marks & the ability to say
Thank You without stealing other academics work.
Allen is also black woman (unfortunately Hetro but still meets main criteria).
So why did Gay get the gig and was Allen denied the role ?
1. Did Allen have too much merit, (she could think for herself) & not bent the knee sufficiently to the DEI cabal (the Obama crowd did not support her) ?
2. Was Allen an American patriot (in one of her books she seems almost pro- America) ?
3. Was Allen's biggest problem her father was a conservative, who had served in the Reagan Administration ?
When narrowing a pool of applicants by immutable characteristic's, one assumes the most competent of that pool would get the job. Yet, again and again one sees that assumption is false.
I do not know why the less qualified, less competent, Claudine Gay was chosen over Danielle Allen but the selection process at Harvard seems a tad less transparent than one would expect of the finest academic institution on earth.
For now we will have to satisfy ourselves with the debate about what constitutes a real Harvard degree and why Chris Rufo’s is not real.
At least nobody is talking about why Jeffery Epstein had an office on the Harvard campus until 2018 at the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics ? Or why Harvard accepted millions from Epstein or why Evolutionary Dynamics was shuttered in 2021?
I've been harsh on Harvard about the Claudine Gay situation, but in the New Year, I've decided to be more charitable in my judgments. I'm going to stop criticizing them for taking so long to act. Given the apparent academic standards there, it might've just taken them this long to sound out all the words.
Thanks for an excellent discussion about the disheartening debacle at Harvard, gentlemen. As a life-long denizen of the left side of the political spectrum, the response of so many "progressives" has left me feeling homeless. President Gay's academic misconduct doesn't matter? As a retired instructor (only a M.S.) I failed some number of students for plagiarism that wasn't as extensive as Dr. Gay's. A couple were dismissed from the school. This at a technical college in Appalachia. I once failed 11 out of 21 in my Ornithology course. Gave a C to the daughter of the college president. When she complained to me, I told her she could take the course again. To his credit, her father never said a word, to me or my dean. Maybe it's good that I retired 8 years ago, apparently today standards are fascistic or something.
It's funny that most of my life I lived in regret, and even a little shame, that the circumstances of my life never allowed me to pursue one of the academic disciplines I loved. Now in middle-age, looking back, I am increasingly realizing that most likely I never would have survived academia. The environment wouldn't have been conducive for my sensitivities. Far from being allowed to be immersed in the life of the mind, you seem to be immersed in the life of the mob.
I LOVE academia. Love it. For all the bullshit and theft (I mean, come on, how many students' writings have been stolen by professors over the years?), it is really fantastic to be around heavy thinking. Not that there are other avenues, certainly, but shit, there have definitely been times in my life that I've wondered how things would've gone for me had I stayed on the East Coast and taken that MA/PhD in linguistics path at BC that I was offered.
100% my thoughts. I spent most of my childhood and early twenties with everyone assuming I wild be an academic, and when I failed to make that happen I felt like a huge failure for a decade.
But looking back it was a good thing, I make more money now, have more freedom, and would never have been able to keep my mouth shut and parrot the required catechisms.
Ironic in retrospect since I now often get hired to clean up the professional messes of people with wildly better academic credentials than me who seem to be incompetent do nothings.
I am just pleased that I have a new example to add to my plagiarism quiz for the first day of class. I wonder if any of the 20 year olds will notice...
My high school kids were SHOCKED when I pulled up ChatGPT on the big screen and, using my boss' (that would be the principal) letter of recommendation he actually wrote for a student trying to get a USNA nomination, created almost the exact same letter on the Chat. It was (about to use an overused word here, but it fits this time) epic. And hilarious. Hopefully, one of mine gets to you someday and can tell the story.
**The kid did not allow the submission, obviously. Thank GOD I got ahold of it first and shut it down. Unbelievable.**
I’m sure we’ll soon discover Dr. Gay has been secretly living with an undiagnosed learning disability in written expression since 1997(ish). She couldn’t risk public exposure, so clearly plagiarism was her only option.
Crazy that she'd have to resign the presidency for being caught as a fraud, yet gets to retain her near-million-dollar salary. Hopefully, keeping her on staff means Harvard still having to answer before Congress. I'd be curious to hear an under-oath testimony about why it's appropriate not to revoke her doctorate, or at the very least why her data from said doctoral thesis can't be shared with researchers. Kendi coming to her rescue after having also been uncovered as a fraud is just plain hilarious. I'm not a conservative, nor at all a fan of Chris Rufo's. Sure wish they'd quit making it so fucking easy for him to get a W without even having to appear the slightest bit unreasonable.
Yeah. Isn't academic fraud fireable even for tenured professors? C'mon. Such bullshit. Gay shouldn't never be able to work anywhere ever again, but not ever being able to work in academia again seems a fitting punishment for her misdeeds.
At least Temple University had the decency to revoke Bill Cosby's doctorate, albeit an honorary one. I wonder how many of the academics supporting her are doing so out of fear of their own theses being checked. I'd bet it's a shitload. It'd be great to purge the lot of them before AI advances to the point of supplanting "duplicatative phrasing" as the principal method for fraudulently acquiring a degree.
Exactly! As much as I enjoy seeing pompous people getting self-owned, I like higher ed in principle. I think the idea is important. But I would like those in higher education to stick to their mission and principles, rather than playing politics which they've proven to be particularly bad at.
The most ridiculous part of this whole thing – well, maybe not, but it's personally noteable – is that when Claudine Gay was inexplicably promoted to dean and later to president, there was already "another* more famous, much more brilliant, much better-spoken, much more intellectually curious Black woman on Harvard's Political Science faculty – Danielle Allen. She's one of the smartest people I've ever met, but she's interested in uncool things like classics, so compared to a mediocre racial agitator, she had no hope. Naturally, I have no idea whether she would have wanted an administrative role, but it's just absurd that you don't even need to cast a wide net to find better people than Dr Gay, even within the same sex and race and university.
They could have literally stayed in the same family and gotten a more notable and accomplished person. I'm not a big fan of Roxane Gay or anything, but at least she's written some books.
"Leadership is lonely. And then, when you're there, and you're by yourself, in the sense there aren't many people that look like you, or hold the same values as you..."
What planet is this woman from, where academics do not hold the same values?!
Yeah I mean if Claudine Gay is getting this much support after being outed as a plagiarist, how bad could it have been when she was just the President of Harvard?
I've had this theory in my mind for awhile now that the majority of human beings need something to have faith in, i.e. something that falls outside the bounds of reality. For most of human history, that has been "God", whether monotheistic/polytheistic/whatever. As time has progressed, having faith in what some people characterize as an intergalactic spaghetti monster (not me, BTW, but a lot of people I know) has undoubtedly become more challenging, as well as less fashionable. But that urge for faith is still there, so you as an academic coalesce amongst your tribe in academia and come up with a communal dogma. And just like the administration of the Catholic Church, when the power is threatened, you pull out all of the stops to convince yourself and your brethren that you are indeed correct in your faith, and it's 'the other' that are wrong.
I am convinced the universities are in a monasteries crica 1600 situation and while they do a lot of good things, ultimately have outlived their usefulness and need to be replaced as the main generators of knowledge.
Yeah that was the line that stood out in the whole thing. The fucking delusion of it all.
Reminds me of when I was applying to grad programs from a undergrad atudent body that was 80% white/asian males and 100% white/asian males at the tip top of performance, but somehow the grad school acceptance was 40% women and 30% minorities.
Of course there was supposedly no “affirmative action”, but they did ask your race and gender and there with a big section of the application about the “adversity” you faced (which I grew up in a housing project, but I was a white male so that’s not real diversity).
But yeah women and minorities have it so hard in academia. No one takes them seriously! I wonder why…
Listening to the Kendi clip and hearing him repeat "do this work" just like all the DEI staff at my previous employer, it strikes me that the DEI enterprise relies heavily on this kind of religious refrain (to STEAL a McWhorter idea). Many of the activists and practitioners even speak with the same cadence as preachers (Kendi is doing it a bit too).
While I suspect the academic culture around critical race theory was less dogmatic when Gay was doing some of her plagiarizing 20-30 years ago, it's perhaps unsurprising that we find so much copying of language in her work. The phrase "without fear or favor" that she copies from another author's Acknowledgments page is a good example. (The longer passages she copies, of course, are not really akin to religious phrases but I thought it was an interesting parallel nonetheless.)
So for the last six years we have seen the political Right abandon any principles they claimed to have to support the continuing power of Donald Trump.
Now the academic left has decided that they will refuse to hold any transgressor responsible for their actual transgressions because it might provide aid and comfort to their enemies.
So who's up for writing the eulogy for principles?
"He who floats with the current, who does not guide himself according to higher principles, who has no ideal, no convictions--such a man is a mere article of the world’s furniture--a thing moved, instead of a living and moving being--an echo, not a voice."
I think away to explain the preposterous nature of Claudine Gay’s, and Harvard’s matter is... we are seeing both of them play out a deal they made with each other to avoid Claudine Gay suing Harvard:
- Gay gets to write an Op-Ed in the NYT, admit no wrongdoing, and blame racism and a political hit job - not Harvard for forcing her out.
- She gets to keep her salary and stay on the faculty.
- Harvard gets to force her resignation.
- Harvard gets to appease donors
- Harvard gets to avoid a lawsuit that keeps them in the public eye that uncovers the flimsy vetting process of their president and would end up costing them way more than 900k / year.
For all the pundits falling for this HR nonsense? I got nothing. Happy Friday!
... otherwise if you take all the noise at face value, then for me the headline is: “Harvard - 50B endowment can’t buy them courage to stand up to racism and right-wing political hit jobs.”
So what you're saying is Harvard is a flaccid dick that uses donor Viagra because they're addicted to getting choked out in flagrante by recent high school graduates. I see.
"President Gay Plagiarized, but . . . " begins an actual headline to an Editorial Board op-ed from the Harvard Crimson. Also from that piece: "We also oppose President Gay’s resignation because we are not blind to what has driven this news cycle — a national outrage manufactured by conservative activists intent on discrediting higher education."
In other words, the head of the university repeatedly broke some of the most sacred and historically important rules, but we will let it slide because firing her will give conservatives glee. It seems to be lost on these students that nonsense like this does more damage to the credibility of higher education than any conservative activist ever could.
One of Harvard's lawyers said this gem, "if it came from some other quarter, I might be granting it some credence, but not from these people." It's like, unless you think Chris Rufo went and manipulated every copy of Claudine Gay's work, the source of the accusation doesn't really matter.
That reminds me of once I sent a comment to a fundamentalist Christian web site informing them that they had a made a mistake in an attribution. They didn't respond and deleted the comment.
Then a few years later I am looking at the site again and I see that "a source they trusted" told them the exact same thing I did and they made the correction.
It's easy to think your always right when you are open to any criticism, as long as it doesn't come from your critics, because they are too biased to be trusted.
to the credentialed, it's all that matters, apart from the team of the accused.
Exactly.
I read in The Boston Globe that Harvard has a class on Taylor Swift. Now there is some “Higher Education”! I really hope there isn’t any plagiarism.
Talk about pandering to trends. Can you imagine Harvard having a class on Madonna in 1990? Me neither. And it would've been weird, not cool.
I agree a Madonna class would have been absurd. It is very funny that such a ridiculous class is at Harvard, considering the Gay issue and all.
There is a part of me that really really wants Harvard to become the East Coast Evergreen. No grades, take some classes in Taylor Swift and vegan leather tanning, and for those Harvard MBAs, why you can do an inquiry-based project on starting an organic farm/yoga retreat in an impoverished third-world country.
Isn’t it like that now? Everyone gets an A and you can plagiarize.
Yep. 👍
Danielle Allen, a highly respected Harvard Political Science Professor, interviewed for the presidency in 2022. She did not make it past the second round.
Not only did Allen have a much more impressive CV than Gay:
- published 8 books
- 50+ scholarly paper
- Allen has TWO PhD's . One from Harvard. one from Cambridge.
- Stint as Humanities Dean at University of Chicago.
- No errors in citations, odd use of quotation marks & the ability to say
Thank You without stealing other academics work.
Allen is also black woman (unfortunately Hetro but still meets main criteria).
So why did Gay get the gig and was Allen denied the role ?
1. Did Allen have too much merit, (she could think for herself) & not bent the knee sufficiently to the DEI cabal (the Obama crowd did not support her) ?
2. Was Allen an American patriot (in one of her books she seems almost pro- America) ?
3. Was Allen's biggest problem her father was a conservative, who had served in the Reagan Administration ?
When narrowing a pool of applicants by immutable characteristic's, one assumes the most competent of that pool would get the job. Yet, again and again one sees that assumption is false.
I do not know why the less qualified, less competent, Claudine Gay was chosen over Danielle Allen but the selection process at Harvard seems a tad less transparent than one would expect of the finest academic institution on earth.
For now we will have to satisfy ourselves with the debate about what constitutes a real Harvard degree and why Chris Rufo’s is not real.
At least nobody is talking about why Jeffery Epstein had an office on the Harvard campus until 2018 at the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics ? Or why Harvard accepted millions from Epstein or why Evolutionary Dynamics was shuttered in 2021?
I've been harsh on Harvard about the Claudine Gay situation, but in the New Year, I've decided to be more charitable in my judgments. I'm going to stop criticizing them for taking so long to act. Given the apparent academic standards there, it might've just taken them this long to sound out all the words.
Thanks for an excellent discussion about the disheartening debacle at Harvard, gentlemen. As a life-long denizen of the left side of the political spectrum, the response of so many "progressives" has left me feeling homeless. President Gay's academic misconduct doesn't matter? As a retired instructor (only a M.S.) I failed some number of students for plagiarism that wasn't as extensive as Dr. Gay's. A couple were dismissed from the school. This at a technical college in Appalachia. I once failed 11 out of 21 in my Ornithology course. Gave a C to the daughter of the college president. When she complained to me, I told her she could take the course again. To his credit, her father never said a word, to me or my dean. Maybe it's good that I retired 8 years ago, apparently today standards are fascistic or something.
It's funny that most of my life I lived in regret, and even a little shame, that the circumstances of my life never allowed me to pursue one of the academic disciplines I loved. Now in middle-age, looking back, I am increasingly realizing that most likely I never would have survived academia. The environment wouldn't have been conducive for my sensitivities. Far from being allowed to be immersed in the life of the mind, you seem to be immersed in the life of the mob.
I LOVE academia. Love it. For all the bullshit and theft (I mean, come on, how many students' writings have been stolen by professors over the years?), it is really fantastic to be around heavy thinking. Not that there are other avenues, certainly, but shit, there have definitely been times in my life that I've wondered how things would've gone for me had I stayed on the East Coast and taken that MA/PhD in linguistics path at BC that I was offered.
100% my thoughts. I spent most of my childhood and early twenties with everyone assuming I wild be an academic, and when I failed to make that happen I felt like a huge failure for a decade.
But looking back it was a good thing, I make more money now, have more freedom, and would never have been able to keep my mouth shut and parrot the required catechisms.
Ironic in retrospect since I now often get hired to clean up the professional messes of people with wildly better academic credentials than me who seem to be incompetent do nothings.
It's shocking that they're still supporting her.
I am just pleased that I have a new example to add to my plagiarism quiz for the first day of class. I wonder if any of the 20 year olds will notice...
My high school kids were SHOCKED when I pulled up ChatGPT on the big screen and, using my boss' (that would be the principal) letter of recommendation he actually wrote for a student trying to get a USNA nomination, created almost the exact same letter on the Chat. It was (about to use an overused word here, but it fits this time) epic. And hilarious. Hopefully, one of mine gets to you someday and can tell the story.
**The kid did not allow the submission, obviously. Thank GOD I got ahold of it first and shut it down. Unbelievable.**
You madlad! 😎
Delightful!
Kmele, you said “conclusion”.
There was NO stutter, Kmele, NONE!
And agreeing with Matt here, I too want Diversity, Equity, and Conclusion to last forever.
It was the best accidental statement. We need a shirt with this. Or a giant flag on someone's 4x in Alabama.
That he did!!
That’s a mispronunciation. Drink.
There is so much illegal (or at least unethical) shit going on in universities with regard to explicit racial preferences in hiring.
I learned about this only a few days ago, although the story broke in October. https://www.washington.edu/news/2023/10/31/university-takes-action-after-faculty-hiring-process-inappropriately-used-race-as-a-factor/
That’s a summary. If you work at a university I urge you to read the full report, which is at the very bottom of the press release.
I’m sure we’ll soon discover Dr. Gay has been secretly living with an undiagnosed learning disability in written expression since 1997(ish). She couldn’t risk public exposure, so clearly plagiarism was her only option.
That collective “Mmmm” from the Kendi audience is so funny.
Especially when what Kendi said was so creepy and stupid. Nobody who "looks like" him should criticize? I'm amazed by this.
Absolutely absurd. Agree 👍
He is his own algorithm. He only speaks to people who will Hmmmm along.
I’m surprised they don’t snap their fingers like a bunch of lousy Beatniks
Crazy that she'd have to resign the presidency for being caught as a fraud, yet gets to retain her near-million-dollar salary. Hopefully, keeping her on staff means Harvard still having to answer before Congress. I'd be curious to hear an under-oath testimony about why it's appropriate not to revoke her doctorate, or at the very least why her data from said doctoral thesis can't be shared with researchers. Kendi coming to her rescue after having also been uncovered as a fraud is just plain hilarious. I'm not a conservative, nor at all a fan of Chris Rufo's. Sure wish they'd quit making it so fucking easy for him to get a W without even having to appear the slightest bit unreasonable.
Yeah. Isn't academic fraud fireable even for tenured professors? C'mon. Such bullshit. Gay shouldn't never be able to work anywhere ever again, but not ever being able to work in academia again seems a fitting punishment for her misdeeds.
Yes. But it needs to be very well prove.
Also from Harvard https://www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-takes/2023/08/29/harvard-considers-revoking-tenure-dishonesty-researcher
At least Temple University had the decency to revoke Bill Cosby's doctorate, albeit an honorary one. I wonder how many of the academics supporting her are doing so out of fear of their own theses being checked. I'd bet it's a shitload. It'd be great to purge the lot of them before AI advances to the point of supplanting "duplicatative phrasing" as the principal method for fraudulently acquiring a degree.
Exactly! As much as I enjoy seeing pompous people getting self-owned, I like higher ed in principle. I think the idea is important. But I would like those in higher education to stick to their mission and principles, rather than playing politics which they've proven to be particularly bad at.
The most ridiculous part of this whole thing – well, maybe not, but it's personally noteable – is that when Claudine Gay was inexplicably promoted to dean and later to president, there was already "another* more famous, much more brilliant, much better-spoken, much more intellectually curious Black woman on Harvard's Political Science faculty – Danielle Allen. She's one of the smartest people I've ever met, but she's interested in uncool things like classics, so compared to a mediocre racial agitator, she had no hope. Naturally, I have no idea whether she would have wanted an administrative role, but it's just absurd that you don't even need to cast a wide net to find better people than Dr Gay, even within the same sex and race and university.
They could have literally stayed in the same family and gotten a more notable and accomplished person. I'm not a big fan of Roxane Gay or anything, but at least she's written some books.
Aaaand an hour in, you also name 5 interesting Black scholars at Harvard. 🙃
Laughed for a solid five seconds at the title, bravo gentlemen. I haven’t even heard it yet and I know I’m gonna love this episode.
Meanwhile, over here it took me a second to get it. I blame our shitty water.
The next president of Harvard MUST be a polyamorous Palestinian paraplegic.
With they/them pronouns. How did Gay even get the job identifying as 'she'?
Wouldn't a queer Qatari quadriplegic be one better?
"Leadership is lonely. And then, when you're there, and you're by yourself, in the sense there aren't many people that look like you, or hold the same values as you..."
What planet is this woman from, where academics do not hold the same values?!
It’s a fictional world she and others have created in their minds, and which they inhabit only when an excuse is needed.
Yeah I mean if Claudine Gay is getting this much support after being outed as a plagiarist, how bad could it have been when she was just the President of Harvard?
I've had this theory in my mind for awhile now that the majority of human beings need something to have faith in, i.e. something that falls outside the bounds of reality. For most of human history, that has been "God", whether monotheistic/polytheistic/whatever. As time has progressed, having faith in what some people characterize as an intergalactic spaghetti monster (not me, BTW, but a lot of people I know) has undoubtedly become more challenging, as well as less fashionable. But that urge for faith is still there, so you as an academic coalesce amongst your tribe in academia and come up with a communal dogma. And just like the administration of the Catholic Church, when the power is threatened, you pull out all of the stops to convince yourself and your brethren that you are indeed correct in your faith, and it's 'the other' that are wrong.
I am convinced the universities are in a monasteries crica 1600 situation and while they do a lot of good things, ultimately have outlived their usefulness and need to be replaced as the main generators of knowledge.
Yeah that was the line that stood out in the whole thing. The fucking delusion of it all.
Reminds me of when I was applying to grad programs from a undergrad atudent body that was 80% white/asian males and 100% white/asian males at the tip top of performance, but somehow the grad school acceptance was 40% women and 30% minorities.
Of course there was supposedly no “affirmative action”, but they did ask your race and gender and there with a big section of the application about the “adversity” you faced (which I grew up in a housing project, but I was a white male so that’s not real diversity).
But yeah women and minorities have it so hard in academia. No one takes them seriously! I wonder why…
Listening to the Kendi clip and hearing him repeat "do this work" just like all the DEI staff at my previous employer, it strikes me that the DEI enterprise relies heavily on this kind of religious refrain (to STEAL a McWhorter idea). Many of the activists and practitioners even speak with the same cadence as preachers (Kendi is doing it a bit too).
While I suspect the academic culture around critical race theory was less dogmatic when Gay was doing some of her plagiarizing 20-30 years ago, it's perhaps unsurprising that we find so much copying of language in her work. The phrase "without fear or favor" that she copies from another author's Acknowledgments page is a good example. (The longer passages she copies, of course, are not really akin to religious phrases but I thought it was an interesting parallel nonetheless.)
There are a lot of strange parallels to moral majority era Christian fundamentalist trends.
So for the last six years we have seen the political Right abandon any principles they claimed to have to support the continuing power of Donald Trump.
Now the academic left has decided that they will refuse to hold any transgressor responsible for their actual transgressions because it might provide aid and comfort to their enemies.
So who's up for writing the eulogy for principles?
It’s a little late for eulogies. Principles were dead and buried in 2020.
Sad as they are, thems the facts.
Probably never a better time for a centrist to launch an independent bid.
"He who floats with the current, who does not guide himself according to higher principles, who has no ideal, no convictions--such a man is a mere article of the world’s furniture--a thing moved, instead of a living and moving being--an echo, not a voice."
- Claudine Gay
I think away to explain the preposterous nature of Claudine Gay’s, and Harvard’s matter is... we are seeing both of them play out a deal they made with each other to avoid Claudine Gay suing Harvard:
- Gay gets to write an Op-Ed in the NYT, admit no wrongdoing, and blame racism and a political hit job - not Harvard for forcing her out.
- She gets to keep her salary and stay on the faculty.
- Harvard gets to force her resignation.
- Harvard gets to appease donors
- Harvard gets to avoid a lawsuit that keeps them in the public eye that uncovers the flimsy vetting process of their president and would end up costing them way more than 900k / year.
For all the pundits falling for this HR nonsense? I got nothing. Happy Friday!
... otherwise if you take all the noise at face value, then for me the headline is: “Harvard - 50B endowment can’t buy them courage to stand up to racism and right-wing political hit jobs.”
So what you're saying is Harvard is a flaccid dick that uses donor Viagra because they're addicted to getting choked out in flagrante by recent high school graduates. I see.
Ahhhh, you're bringing me back to my youth.