I’ve never been one of those “be true to your school” types. I feel no real allegiance or loyalty to Hamilton College or Harvard Law School. I never really fit in either place (a life pattern, it seems). Even if I had, I still wouldn’t understand the psychological grip that colleges have on alumni, it seems highly manipulated.
The only school-related place and people to whom I have allegiance are my childhood and high school friends, because “mentally and emotionally I’m still 17, it’s 1977.”
But enough about me.
Which brings me to Claudine Gay. She’s a real piece of work, we are finding out, as her plagiarism scandal unfolds. This from Wesley Yang is devastating and infuriating:
Carol Swain grew up in a shack without running water with 11 brothers and sisters. She was much feted in academia upon her emergence but quickly engaged in heterodoxies that got her blackballed and went on to become an evangelical Christian and a Trump supporter. That’s why her outraged demands for accountability for Claudine Gay stealing her work carry no weight with anyone that matters. She lacked the implicit knowledge of how to stay within the right-thinking consensus that Gay learned at Exeter and therefore became a pariah while Gay made a rapid ascent to the very pinnacle of all academic leadership.Roland Fryer was abandoned by his mother early and his abusive father was convicted for rape, leaving him to fend for himself in the streets as a teenager. He righted himself and became [one of] the youngest tenured professor in the history of Harvard University, a favorite of the then-President of Harvard Lawrence Summers, and one of the most productive scholars at Harvard University, studying subjects seeking to find ways to ameliorate the condition of the black underclass.Soon after publishing a study demonstrating that police officers were slightly more likely to shoot white suspects than black subjects, he became the subject of a sexual harassment investigation. He ended up suspended for a year and the lab where he studied ways to ameliorate the condition of the black underclass was shuttered — despite the fact that the female best friend of his accuser told investigators and went on the record with the press that his accuser was typically the instigator of the sexualized banter that occurred in Fryer’s lab.The dean of Harvard [Faculty of Arts and Sciences] who delivered this punishment was — Claudine Gay.Gay is the scioness of one of Haiti’s wealthiest families and a graduate of Exeter. She obtained tenure at Stanford on the strength of four published papers, and was poached by Harvard. She has gone on to publish a total of eleven research papers and no books — a record that a professor told me was easily in the bottom 5th percentile of all professors employed at peer institutions. Seven of those papers have been shown to have violated Harvard’s rules on academic citation.All of these professors are beneficiaries of affirmative action — Swain and Fryer overcame great adversity and disadvantage to do high level academic work that was generally regarded as of the first rank by their peers. They fulfilled the promise of that policy by taking opportunities granted to them on the basis of considerations beyond the strictly academic, given the diminished opportunities available to them in youth.Gay is a child of privilege who learned how to play the game among other elites — she stole from Swain and shut down Fryer on her path to the presidency.
I talked about the damage to the Harvard brand from the Claudine Gay scandal in an interview on NTD:
The president of Harvard University, Claudine Gay, found herself at the center of a plagiarism storm this week.But what is Claudine Gay accused of—inadequate citation, or something more serious? And how has this damaged Harvard’s reputation?NTD spoke to William Jacobson, a professor at Cornell Law School and the founder of The Equal Protection Project, to find out what effect the allegations could have on the Ivy League university.“I think it taints the Harvard brand,” he said. “The Harvard brand was ‘the best and the brightest’—[the] leading university in the world, perhaps.”“And they have somebody who’s at the head of the institution who has committed numerous … instances of plagiarism dating back to her doctoral dissertation.”
I don’t care about the “Harvard” brand, which signifies the smugness, classism, and elitism that makes me want to puke. It’s not just the Harvard brand under pressure, most of the ‘elite’ colleges and universities, particularly the Ivy League, are damaged by their reactions to Hamas’ October 7 massacre. How bad the damage is and how long it lasts remains to be seen, but it’s not a bad thing if it is deserved – and in most cases it is.
Academia has been corrupted and hollowed out by the rot caused by the DEI agenda, which elevates group identity over the individual, and skin color and physical appearance over merit. It’s also a part of why “The anti-American activists are the anti-Capitalist activists are the anti-Israel activists”.
The corruption and rot caused by DEI is on full display, and Claudine Gay has become its poster child. While on substance she should be gone, having her stay in place serves the function of keeping the focus on the DEI farce. The Harvard brand may have to fall so that a better academia can rise.
It’s important to Harvard that its brand survive Claudine Gay. It’s important to American that it doesn’t.
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