Claudine Gay out at Harvard
January 3, 2024 7:32 AM Subscribe

Harvard President Resigns After Mounting Plagiarism Accusations. Gay, a political scientist, was the first black woman to be the president of Harvard. Her tenure lasted six months.

After congressional testimony about antisemitism, Gay was accused of plagiarism. She was also the target of a barrage of death threats and personal attacks from the right-wing hit machine, lead by Christopher Rufo.

The plagiarism report, with examples, is here.

al-Jazeer has a primer.

Many on the left have said that Rufo's successful campaign to punish Gay for being insufficiently pro-Israel will embolden similar tactics elsewhere.

Some of the authors of the work that was allegedly plagiarized by Gay deny that anything wrong was done.

posted by MisantropicPainforest (349 comments total) 15 users marked this as a favorite

And of course a large part of this comes down to the media getting willingly played by Rufo and Stefanik. Though academia also has its own ration of blame here for not pushing back on the ratfucking.

That said, Balloon Juice purveyor John Cole had a good point on this as well:

Talked to my mother today and she was mad about the President of Harvard resigning because Rep. Stefanik was doing a victory lap, and thought I would be upset, too. And I am not upset because I am a horrible person and have come to grips with that. No, I hate that Rep. Stefanik is thrilled- fuck her. But after what I have been through the last year with the bullshit at WVU, there will be no rending of garments in this household when anyone in college administration gets fucked over. Claudine Gay may be a delightful person and splendid neighbor, but she’s a college President and wouldn’t hesitate one minute to fuck me or any other faculty or staff member over and then hand everything off to the team of lawyers, so fuck her. My solidarity ends at the admin.

posted by NoxAeternum at 7:39 AM on January 3 [37 favorites]

People really, really, really need to stop falling for the right-wing, bad-faith outrage machine that is exclusively deployed to take down progressives and POC.
posted by mrjohnmuller at 7:40 AM on January 3 [77 favorites]

Not to be overlooked, the Congressional panel was led by Harvard Alumni Rep. Elise Stefanik, who after the testimonies X/Tweeted/Shweeted "One down. Two to go..."
posted by From Bklyn at 7:41 AM on January 3 [11 favorites]

Claudine Gay may be a delightful person and splendid neighbor, but she’s a college President and wouldn’t hesitate one minute to fuck me or any other faculty or staff member over and then hand everything off to the team of lawyers, so fuck her. My solidarity ends at the admin.

Something bad didn't just happen to her. She didn't trip and fall. Something bad happened to her AND to higher education and US politics. Whoever comes after her will still be a university president. You don't have to feel bad for her, she's fine. But the structural impact will be quite bad.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 7:57 AM on January 3 [32 favorites]

When the big buck endowments started to back out...and there ya go.
posted by Czjewel at 7:59 AM on January 3 [1 favorite]

My sympathy here is limited. How fucking difficult is it, when asked the question "Would calling for Jewish genocide violate your student conduct?", to say "Of course it does, you tool, and if this isn't explicitly clear when I leave here and go read the code, which of course I don't have memorized, there's going to be some revisions for clarity made"?
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 7:59 AM on January 3 [65 favorites]

can we not use the nytimes for this? how many op-eds did they publish on this? how many butter emails type "news" stories did they publish for this?

especially after rufo explicitly stated this was his goal publicly? and continues to do so?

nah, fam. fuck the nytimes, the gray lady is as complicit as lady macbeth.

especially since this is an ongoing pattern with that shit:
- fan the flames of anti-trans moral panic, and then publish an article wondering why so many laws banning trans care
- repeat baselessly the claims of yellowcake and then handwring over iraq war 2
- give credence to project veritas/o'keefe's lies about acorn and then get shocked when acorn gets shut down
- and so many more!

if, as an institution, you keep getting snowed by bad faith right-wing noise, maybe you should reconsider how the fuck you approach your purported raison d'être.

"we're all trying to find the guy who did this" dot em pee four
posted by i used to be someone else at 8:01 AM on January 3 [100 favorites]

So I read the plagiarism examples and they seemed to be clearly plagiarism to me, I can't comment on whether it warrants resignation or what the appropriate remedy might be, but perhaps someone who's more familiar with these matters can explain why her level of copying is or isn't plagiarism, and if it is, if it's egregious?
posted by sid at 8:02 AM on January 3 [16 favorites]

i used to be someone else, the Times has also spent at least three columns wondering aloud how Columbia's president managed to avoid this. Almost like they're still trying to follow Ray Stantz's plan and "get 'er".
posted by Captaintripps at 8:03 AM on January 3 [2 favorites]

and this is before we even consider that of course this doesn't matter re: reports around white dude republicans, who are still just fucking skating by. pretending this doesn't have a racial factor at all, especially given the oeuvre of the ringleaders of this scalping that should have been part of the capital-d discourse from the very beginning for everyone who wasn't poc, but of course it wasn't.
posted by i used to be someone else at 8:05 AM on January 3 [3 favorites]

Steven Thrasher has a must read thread about this (link to nitter), here's a key quote but really read the whole thing:

...we should *not* stop at "she was a black woman and they treated her poorly." this is not untrue, and sadly, getting the black woman president of harvard will make life hell for black women throughout academia.

however—

gay herself tried to play a game where she could crack the skulls of dissidents, thinking she could win. she did the bidding of rufo's ilk, then she was dismissed herself.

so a final lesson/question i have, for now, of uni presidents & would-be overseers...

the war machine will come for anyone. in gaza, they kill uni presidents. in america, you can be like gay, denounce "from the river to the sea," ignore black students & they'll *still* fire you.

so uni admin: do you think your silence will protect you?

posted by overglow at 8:07 AM on January 3 [17 favorites]

Any self-proclaimed "liberal" who genuinely buys that any of this was about "plagiarism" or "antisemitism on campus" is so stupid I'd be frankly surprised they made it in this far in life without accidentally drinking bleach or something. This was about chilling campus protests over Gaza and humiliating a high status black woman, literally nothing else, plain and simple.
posted by windbox at 8:08 AM on January 3 [59 favorites]

someone who's more familiar with these matters can explain why her level of copying is or isn't plagiarism, and if it is, if it's egregious?

Its driving 5 miles per hour above the speed limit.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 8:16 AM on January 3 [20 favorites]

because (as a former reporter) you *know* what the gotchas are going to be.

with all respect, how many university presidents would imagine themselves to be facing a congressional hearing during a genocide and being asked tendentious questions by hostile parties whose sole purpose is to destroy them?

it all seems like a Kafka nightmare, I'm not too sure about the armchair/hindsight kinds of perspectives at this point
posted by elkevelvet at 8:24 AM on January 3 [7 favorites]

The problem, outgrown_hobnail, is that the answer she gave to the question was actually correct - it depends.

She wasn't asked if it should be a violation. She wasn't even asked if it could be. She wasn't asked if people calling for the genocide were awful people/annoying edge-lords. She was asked if it was a violation.

When it comes to constitutional freedom of speech (which is not the issue here, but is at least analogous), there are usually two possible answers to "Is X protected speech?"

* Absolutely yes
* Maybe. It depends on the context.

A straight-up "no" without any further questions is almost always wrong. So much of it depends on the details. I realize this sounds an awful lot like "well achsually", but that's kind of how things go.

The student conduct rules are probably the same. Was calling for the genocide a hypothetical (plenty of people have opined that the world would be a better place without religion. That does not constitute a call for genocide of religious people)? Does saying that all the Jews should leave Israel count as genocide? Was the discussion in public? Private? A private discussion in a group that normally debates current events where things get pretty heated?

She could have been better prepared for the answer, but, ultimately, the answer she gave was correct - it depends.
posted by It's Never Lurgi at 8:31 AM on January 3 [29 favorites]

you can't do nuanced free speech hair-splitting with reporters, or with Republicans who smell blood in the water, ffs.

It's foolish to do nuanced free speech hair-splitting when regardless of the context there is a single explicit question to respond to, and I quote:

"STEFANIK: Dr. Gay, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules on bullying and harassment?"

There is no context which justifies any answer other than "Yes. it violates Harvard's rules." No matter how bad-faith the trail and context of the question is, the answer is always "Yes" to a question like this. Because the bad-faith trail of questioning on the part of Stefanik was inevitably going to lead to assertions that advocating for the freedom and self-determination of Palestinians is a call for genocide, you respond to that question when it comes up, you don't try to head off future assertions that "X is a call for genocide" by not even answering the question asked:

"GAY: The rules around bullying and harassment are quite specific. And if the context in which that language is used amounts to bullying and harassment, then we take we take action against it."

I don't think Dr. Gay should have resigned over a moment of foolish stupidity like this, but splitting hairs on such a question was an unambiguously, incredibly stupid thing to do.
posted by tclark at 8:31 AM on January 3 [35 favorites]

There is no doubt that she plagiarized, as the term is defined in academia generally and at Harvard in particular. Harvard students who plagiarize in the manner that she did are "generally required to withdraw — i.e., suspended — from the College for two semesters."

It's certainly arguable that such punishments are too severe, but I don't think the standard for the President of the University should be more lenient than for students and other faculty.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 8:33 AM on January 3 [20 favorites]

Right. I've been commenting on the so called plagiarism issue in a couple of places on the web and here is my summary. As a former academic whose area of expertise was the social and historical study of academic knowledge production and circulation in society, here is my 2 cents.

If these quoted examples (some clearer examples shown here) are plagiarism, then every academic currently alive and publishing is equally guilt. If an author either had to avoid using any words used by a previous source to describe the same phenomena, or had to include every citation of anyone who'd ever used those exact words before, it would be impossible to write anything!

My god, methods sections would be unbearable! Not to mention inaccurate. There are usually only one or two words you can use in one or two ways to accurately say the exact same technical thing, if you want to say it accurately.

And the theoretical part in my own discipline would be even more of a headache to read that it already is. Each sentence would have so many citations, the word count would include more authors' names and page numbers than actual original text. It would be a total mess.

When academics get upset about plagiarism, we get upset about the misattribution of ideas and arguments.Not people reusing words and phrases when it is obvious that they are trying to describe someone else's work or a technical concept as accurately as possible. There is no evidence that the professor was using words in a similar - or even the same! - order in an attempt to steal someone else's ideas.

She was clearly describing other people's work, and trying to do so as accurately and eloquently as possible. Even the original authors recognize this. Which strongly suggests that this is a completely insincere attack, whipped up by non-academics to discredit a female, black president of a university.

I'm irritated that no journalist has brought this up further along in the reporting. But I wonder if this is also a fall out from the way we academics teach undergraduate classes. Plagiarism as a concept has been reduced to "copying other people's words exactly" because that's something that can be easily spotted and checked when you are grading, especially with computers and now AI.*

But the plagiarism academics care about is not word for word copying, its misattribution of ideas or passing off someone else's project as your own. When I was an undergrad, I had a conversation about my undergrad dissertation with a PhD student at a party and she then wrote a research grant that was basically an exact copy of my dissertation idea. *That* was plagiarism, even though she didn't read or copy a word of the dissertation! (Don't worry - she did get in a lot of trouble.) She copied the idea, not the words.

Most of the public only experience academic writing through undergrad courses, so they assume the standards that apply in their college classrooms are the same ones that hold in academic and scientific writing, when in fact there is very little in common between the two.

I'm assuming the right-wing critics actually found these examples by running them through the same kind of text-recognition software that are used by some professors to check student papers. People in the US with a college degree look at these examples and think: oh right, that does look like the kind of thing my college professor told me not to do. She must be guilt. Because college work in the US is somehow represented as being similar to academic/scientific work, given they take place in the same location, which it absolutely is not.**

Ok so what are the take away points:
1) The accusations of plagiarism have no basis at all.
2) But someone has put considerable effort into figuring out how to attack this woman in a way that will be very very convincing to most people with a college degree.
3) Dictatorships always seek to control institutions of higher education first. These are often the main targets and the main means of control.***

* An interesting Metafilter comparison comment here btw
**Now I'm a therapist rather than an academic, I spend rather a lot of time working with PhD students discovering this for the first time. Really wish this was something explained properly to college students who think going into academic is going to be like being in college forever, when in fact its a totally different thing thats nothing like college at all.
*** Chile is the perfect example of this. The Universities were the first sites of control at the very beginning of the dictatorship: The army literally marched in and took over the campus. And the very last laws enacted before Pinochet was forced out of power locked in his education policy so firmly that they are still trying to overturn it now, decades later. Think about that. The dictator is long dead but even decades of democracy later they still haven't been able to free the universities from his influence. This CAN and IS happening here.
posted by EllaEm at 8:34 AM on January 3 [118 favorites]

All of the presidents in that shitshow of a hearing should have resigned immediately, not for any given answer but for the fact that they were clearly woefully unprepared for it. They did a very poor job of representing their schools which is a central part of their jobs.

What those answers should have been depends greatly upon whether you believe universities are places that keep kids safe or places to prepare young adults for what they’re going to face in the real world.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 8:39 AM on January 3 [8 favorites]

As a university admin she is responsible for the fact that the standards that undergrads are held to in regard to plagiarism are both different and more onerous than what postgrads are held to. So, no surprise that the majority of people who never go beyond undergrad studies think that's what plagiarism is and would be upset to see the same admin who would suspend or expel them for copying sentences and even just phrases was doing so herself.
posted by thecjm at 8:42 AM on January 3 [3 favorites]

EllaEm,

But Mr.Know-it-some's point is the real issue:

I don't think the standard for the President of the University should be more lenient than for students and other faculty.

If an undergrad at Harvard did what Gay has done, would it be considered plagiarism? Would they be punished for it?

I'm genuinely curious because my instinct based on my own experiences is that they absolutely would be held to be plagiarizing and punished for it, but you seem to be suggesting otherwise.
posted by star gentle uterus at 8:42 AM on January 3 [3 favorites]

or places to prepare young adults for what they’re going to face in the real world.

I don't think Harvard has ever had any pretensions toward doing that.
posted by Cardinal Fang at 8:43 AM on January 3 [9 favorites]

For a moment, limit this to the actual employer (board) - employee (Gay) relationship.

1. Suppose a bunch of plagiarism came up, in the absence of any flubbed Congressional testimony. Would the board have fired Gay over just the plagiarism? Yes — other colleges and universities have done so. Another. Another. In Gay's case it was not just one thing, not just a couple of things, but quite a list, and they kept on coming. The Harvard board would have fired her just for the plagiarism.*

2. Suppose, alternatively, that the Congressional testimony flub happened, but no plagiarism accusations came forward. Would the Harvard board have fired her? Probably not — a major mea culpa and restatement of her response would have sufficed. Stefanik can gloat all she wants, but she knows this, and she won't have any success with the two other presidents.

*I respectfully disagree with EllaEm's view, above, that "[t]he accusations of plagiarism have no basis at all." If that's the case, show me a collection of examples of verbatim copying by other scholars, similar to the examples from Gay's work, that did not result in plagiarism charges or termination.
posted by beagle at 8:45 AM on January 3 [14 favorites]

Oh please... had she said that, "Advocating genocide against black people is permissible under certain circumstances" the outrage from the Left would be universal. But Jews... 🤷‍♀️
posted by ph00dz at 8:33 AM on January 3 [+] [⚑]

I've heard this sentiment a number of times in the last few months. As a Jew, I urge my fellow Jews to stop making comparisons to the experience of being Black. Different oppressed identity groups have different histories, different experiences in the US, and these histories and experiences have different material impacts. Being Black and being Jewish in the US are different experiences [although of course there are people who have both experiences], and a simple look at how being born a white Jew and being born Black impact people's economic, carceral, housing, educational lives makes these differences extremely obvious. I don't know your ethnicity ph00dz, but speaking more broadly - white Jews have a different life experience from other oppressed groups. Comparisons ignore that reality. They ignore the many harms to Black people that the US absolutely tolerates (or in fact is built on and structured around).

There is absolutely no need to look to any other group to make the case that anti-Semitism is wrong. It is just absolutely wrong, period, on it's own, without the need to compare.

Like many others here, I believe that this firing represents a cynical weaponization of the accusation of anti-Semitism, and a 'gotcha' that was intended to be taken out of context (and has been). You don't have to agree with that. But you also don't need to invoke anyone else's different experience of oppression to make your case.
posted by latkes at 8:48 AM on January 3 [79 favorites]

No one should ever respond to a Republican congressional committee hearing request or subpoena. Let them waste the months it takes to get and attempt to enforce a subpoena, then (and only then!) actually show up. No comment, in the meantime. Deny the Republicans their circus and deny the complicit media the quotes, soundbites, and oh-so-serious committee hearing photos and footage that fuel their both-sides-ism.

(I'm also of the opinion that the vast majority of congressional committee hearings are wastes of time anyway. They're more about politicians feeling powerful and creating photo-ops for re-election than they are about gathering information that would be useful for writing legislation.)

Another aspect of the hypocrisy of this is that Stefanik and her ilk purport to believe in extremely limited government, perhaps especially in the context of education. Yet this hearing and its fallout was not about her doing her alleged job of drafting and voting on legislation*. It was about using the bully pulpit to accomplish something that could not possibly be done through legislation (e.g. firing Gay by fiat, which is obviously not within Congress's power, or forcing Harvard to adopt a particular bullying and harassment policy, which would likely run afoul of the First Amendment).

* In her entire congressional career, Stefanik has been the primary sponsor of a whopping two bills that have become law. One designates a commemorative coin, the other names a post office.
posted by jedicus at 8:49 AM on January 3 [35 favorites]

Something that's missing from this discussion is that being in charge of the nation's flagship college for the liberal arts is a public trust and a profound privilege, and something that nobody is entitled to have. A job like this isn't a piece of property. It's not something that you could ever be unjustly deprived of.

And if you're not sufficiently committed to resign form this position rather than let it be dragged into this vile spectacle, you never should have been offered it.
posted by ocschwar at 8:49 AM on January 3 [+] [⚑]

But that only matters if you're focused on the impact on this one individual - not on the context of why this is happening - or the impact of this person being fired on all of academia to speak up for a free Palestine.
posted by latkes at 8:51 AM on January 3 [2 favorites]

With all due respect, Latkes, I'm not comparing the Jewish experience to the Black one. I'm just saying, maybe it's not ok to call for the genocide of any race / religion. It doesn't seem complicated.
posted by ph00dz at 8:52 AM on January 3 [19 favorites]

If these quoted examples (some clearer examples shown here) are plagiarism, then every academic currently alive and publishing is equally guilt.

As a current, publishing academic, I find this claim offensive. You won't find anything even approaching the level of unattributed quotation in my work that I'm seeing in the main post review link and in the Crimson article you linked. It's just not true that every academic does this. In my opinion, it's not even typical.

I'll refrain from making any judgments as to whether anyone should care about the plagiarism in this case or as to whether anyone should care about plagiarism in general. Both of those questions strike me as very difficult.
posted by Jonathan Livengood at 8:54 AM on January 3 [35 favorites]

I'm just saying, maybe it's not ok to call for the genocide of any race / religion.

Who is saying otherwise?
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 8:55 AM on January 3 [4 favorites]

@ph00dz I agree with you; the hypocrisy of the university authorities is accurately summarised by that comparison.
posted by vincebowdren at 8:55 AM on January 3 [5 favorites]

Who is saying otherwise?
MisantropicPainforest

That's exactly ph00dz's point: a question about calling for genocide of the Jews results in legalistic hairsplitting about context or latkes's bizarre non-sequitur about differences in experience. A call for Black genocide would result in instant, unequivocal, and universal (well, at least from everyone who's not literally in the KKK) condemnation.
posted by star gentle uterus at 9:00 AM on January 3 [13 favorites]

star gentle uterus, I think this is the best way to explain it: Would you apply the same standards of plagiarism to a dictionary? To a child's drawing in preschool? A math's test? The question makes no sense because the point is a student's college paper and an academic article/PhD dissertation have nothing in common with each other. That's the misconception.

A college paper is a test, an assignment, something read by one person in order to generate a grade so the student can get a GPA that will get them on the path to a middle class life. There has to be some way of separating an A- from a B+; somewhere along the way the idea of 'original work = not using the same words' entered the mix as a concept that equalled value. The units of measurement for a grade are somewhat arbitrary and performative. Whatever. We all agree it means something and semi-pretend that this is similar to "real research" while behind the scenes professors complain about the fact their students don't fall in love with the fake research process. Go figure.

A dissertation or an academic paper, on the other hand, is a whole other genre of writing that serves a different purpose and is written for a wider and wildly more specialist audience. It has its own completely different set of rules. It's nothing at all like a college paper, so it makes no sense to compare the two. It is based on real research, and real citation and writing practices, which are based on conventions that include, for instance, describing another person's work over several pages and making it clear that you are doing so in ways other than sticking a god damn citation mark at the end of every single sentence. Because that would be unbearable after four pages.
posted by EllaEm at 9:00 AM on January 3 [26 favorites]

I used to work in higher ed communications. part of my job was to prep my college president for media interviews, because (as a former reporter) you *know* what the gotchas are going to be. This drives me crazy, because it's one they should have seen coming, and as outgrown_hobnail points out, there's an easy answer you should have ready.

you can't do nuanced free speech hair-splitting with reporters, or with Republicans who smell blood in the water, ffs.

Apparently all three of the presidents used the same law firm for their preparation, and I think all of them are owed a refund given how unprepared they sounded. This question by Stefanik was supposed to be the set up for her further gotcha questions, but they flubbed it so hard that she never needed to move on to what were supposed to be the real gotchas.

Their revised answers that they gave in statements over the following days is more of what they should have had the smarts/preparation to say in the testimony, i.e., that while there is nuance, violations of the code are wrong.
posted by Dip Flash at 9:01 AM on January 3 [13 favorites]

That's exactly ph00dz's point: a question about calling for genocide of the Jews results in legalistic hairsplitting about context or latkes's bizarre non-sequitur about differences in experience. A call for Black genocide would result in instant, unequivocal, and universal (well, at least from everyone who's not literally in the KKK) condemnation.

and yet it seems like calling for the ethnic cleansing of the gaza palestinians is completely acceptable in the halls of governance, in congress, in administration?
posted by i used to be someone else at 9:05 AM on January 3 [28 favorites]

Apparently all three of the presidents used the same law firm for their preparation

The "advice of counsel" defense is not applicable in the court of public opinion, otherwise yeah, they would be entitled to use it as that company really messed up.
posted by ocschwar at 9:06 AM on January 3 [1 favorite]

with all respect, how many university presidents would imagine themselves to be facing a congressional hearing during a genocide and being asked tendentious questions by hostile parties whose sole purpose is to destroy them?

Any university president who is invited to a congressional hearing right now.

Frankly, it is not that difficult to anticipate potential lines of questioning from hostile parties and to rehearse responding to them. This ought to be bread-and-butter preparation. A university president may or may not expect this kind of thing, but any professional claiming to be able to prepare her should.

Having said that, giving a good performance at something like this is a real skill, and even with excellent preparation it is eminently possible to give an imperfect answer and be punished for it.
posted by plonkee at 9:14 AM on January 3 [8 favorites]

maybe it's not ok to call for the genocide of any race / religion.

Nobody is saying that's ok.

Stefanik attempts to translate the word "intifada" as "genocide", which is such a total falsehood that I don't understand why people are falling for it.
posted by splitpeasoup at 9:14 AM on January 3 [22 favorites]

Commenters here have talked about bad faith, but what's bad faith is the defenses of Gay brought up here and elsewhere by those on the left.

beagle is right above:

Suppose a bunch of plagiarism came up, in the absence of any flubbed Congressional testimony. Would the board have fired Gay over just the plagiarism? Yes — other colleges and universities have done so. Another. Another.

EllaEm and others are splitting hairs and contorting themselves into knots to excuse violations that they would absolutely condemn if this were about the President of, say, Bringham Young or Liberty University. It's unsettling that we tolerate violations when it's perceived to be someone on "our team".

Of course this is being done in bad faith by the right in that it is transparently an attempt to take out Gay for political reasons, but that doesn't matter at all. The only thing matters is whether the accusations are true or not.

Otherwise, what's the alternative, that even true accusations must be ignored unless they come from a politically sympathetic source?
posted by star gentle uterus at 9:15 AM on January 3 [17 favorites]

I think it will be less than two years before there will be "serious" commentary by MAGA-ites that some form of genocide/deportation of American black people is the only way to "save" America. I sincerely hope I'm wrong.

there is a semi-serious plan, i believe, in the uk, to ship migrants and asylum seekers to Rwanda.
there is a tentative idea reported by the times of israel where the state of israel is in talks with countries like congo to send gazans.

compare with the madagascar plan
posted by i used to be someone else at 9:15 AM on January 3 [4 favorites]

...I think it will be less than two years before there will be "serious" commentary by MAGA-ites that some form of genocide/deportation of American black people is the only way to "save" America. I sincerely hope I'm wrong.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 9:06 AM on January 3 [+] [⚑]

I wouldn't take that bet. The depravity of the MAGA/Republicans is bottomless and I'm not sure that hasn't already been put forward already. It sounds 100% on message.

Also, why the fuck is Stefanik given any bandwidth at all anyway? Who the fuck is paying her bills?
posted by From Bklyn at 9:16 AM on January 3 [4 favorites]

People really, really, really need to stop falling for the right-wing, bad-faith outrage machine

People really need to stop falling for the idea that the people running the consent factory are "falling" for anything.
posted by Reyturner at 9:16 AM on January 3 [7 favorites]

More often than not academic leaders are called to account for speech codes or practices restricting offensive speech, often by FIRE, and in that light, I could imagine them being prepared on those terms. To their credit in terms of consistency (and I'm not a fan), FIRE has come out in support of a free speech position that supports the nuanced takes the presidents took.
posted by idb at 9:17 AM on January 3 [2 favorites]

I've skimmed some of the plagiarism examples, and I suspect it is correct that many many many academics have committed plagiarism if this is the test. But this does seem reductive to "are there identical phrases or sloppy attributions" rather than "did this person wholesale copy work and claim it as their own."

I've been in the corporate world a long time and some of that as an editor or reviewer of work. I've spotted outright plagiarism where the author / agency flat out and for real plagiarized and the real world consequences that I've seen to date are... zilch.

I've caught people swiping whole conclusions from ZDNet blogs and reported it to their manager. Nada. I've caught a book having huge sections of a website copypasta'ed in where the author clearly just said "fuck it, I have a deadline" and neither the technical reviewer or copy editor caught it. I've caught external agencies either copying or repurposing content written for other companies. (And I've had my own content relentlessly plagiarized.) Nothing.

I'm with the folks saying we should know better than react to the right-wing outrage machine.
posted by jzb at 9:19 AM on January 3 [16 favorites]

Bad faith is a safe assumption always with the likes of Stefanik.

Gay also fucked up, regardless the intentions of her accusers. That she fucked up in the ways she did isn't anybody else's fault. The aftermath will have an effect, and you can only blame Gay for that.
posted by 2N2222 at 9:19 AM on January 3 [11 favorites]

there is a semi-serious plan, i believe, in the uk, to ship migrants and asylum seekers to Rwanda.

I'm talking about black folks born and raised here, whose families have been in the USA for centuries. I can absolutely see why a country would want to ship off hordes of unwanted migrants, and why someone else might not like that, but that's not at all what I'm talking about, here.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 9:20 AM on January 3 [2 favorites]

This was about chilling campus protests over Gaza and humiliating a high status black woman, literally nothing else, plain and simple.

I don't see anything plain or simple about any of this.
posted by philip-random at 9:20 AM on January 3 [1 favorite]

If that's the case, show me a collection of examples of verbatim copying by other scholars, similar to the examples from Gay's work, that did not result in plagiarism charges or termination.

I'm not going to do your work for you, but use jstor or google scholar to find articles/papers that explain how the NOMINATE ideal point estimator works in two or three sentences. You will find that all of them after 1995 or so "plagiarize" someone whether they know it or not for the simple reason that all the reasonable ways to explain that in two or three sentences had already been created by that point.

After setting itself up with an initial factor analysis, it begins by estimating the locations of voters. It then holds those ideal points constant and estimates cutlines and alternative positions. It then estimates a signal noise parameter. Finally, it iterates over these three steps until it cannot make any more substantial improvements, hence *NOMINA*l *T*hree step *E*stimation.

Go on, find a way to say that that doesn't infringe on that language but still isn't horrendously awful.

The same will be true if you look up articles that explain heteroskedasticity, or an intention-to-treat design, or an ecological fallacy, or the funnel of causality, or a collective action problem, or the PD game, or many other things that fill up lit-review/theory and methods sections.

I have not read through the complaints thoroughly and am not really familiar with Gay's work (I'm in a different subfield). As far as I am aware, with one or two counterexamples the core complaint is that when Gay is summarizing someone else's work, she uses snippets of their language without putting the snippets in quotes.

That doesn't go in the plagiarism pile. When anyone actually doing work reads a paragraph that begins "Ansolabehere and Snyder (year) argue that..." they're going to expect an executive summary that probably includes language from the original. In that context, quoting everything is going to turn it into an unreadable mess. Here's a made up example:

After setting itself up with an initial "factor analysis," it begins by estimating the "locations of voters." It then "holds those ideal points constant" and "estimates" cutlines and "alternative positions." It then estimates "a signal noise parameter." Finally, it "iterates" over these "three steps" until it cannot make any more substantial improvements, hence "*NOMINA*l *T*hree step *E*stimation."

Does that in any way improve the original? Does the notional clarity about which specific words were mine and which were Poole and Rosenthal's help you in any way?

The one serious knock I've seen is the failure to cite Palmquist and Voss in her dissertation. If a grad student handed me a paper like that, or if I were a discussant at a conference and a presenter had done that, I'd just say "Hey, I think you missed a cite here." Correcting that kind of fuckup is part of what the very long peer review process is for, but a dissertation is going to miss a lot of those steps.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 9:21 AM on January 3 [41 favorites]

The one serious knock I've seen is the failure to cite Palmquist and Voss in her dissertation.

If we are to believe some of those in this thread, this is a serious violation because a dissertation is a polished piece of research that is made for a wider world, not something hastily glued together in order to make more than 30 grand a year and who cares since literally no one will read the whole thing, and at best your chair will skim.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 9:26 AM on January 3 [8 favorites]

A dissertation or an academic paper, on the other hand, is a whole other genre of writing that serves a different purpose and is written for a wider and wildly audience. It has its own completely different set of rules. It's nothing at all like a college paper, so it makes no sense to compare the two.

Again, as a current academic, who has supervised dissertations through to completion and is currently serving on multiple dissertation committees, I want to dispute the claim that college term papers are nothing at all like professional research and that the same basic standards don't apply to both. The standards for dissertation research and professional publication are, if anything, more demanding, not less. So, if Gay's work doesn't live up to the standard we set for undergraduates, then it definitely doesn't live up to the more strenuous standard of professional research. That includes citation practice.

The point about audience and purpose is right. However, the reason we assign undergraduates to write term papers is (at least in large part) to teach them how to do original research and to write to the level of the professional standard. It wouldn't be a very good or useful exercise to that end if the standards were wildly different.
posted by Jonathan Livengood at 9:27 AM on January 3 [17 favorites]

As a current, publishing academic, I find this claim offensive. You won't find anything even approaching the level of unattributed quotation in my work that I'm seeing in the main post review link and in the Crimson article you linked. It's just not true that every academic does this. In my opinion, it's not even typical.

With respect, I think you're going to see a real divide here between people working in humanities and people in STEM and empirical social sciences.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 9:28 AM on January 3 [21 favorites]

transcript of the congressional hearing, for people who are interested in more than a single statement
posted by elkevelvet at 9:30 AM on January 3 [7 favorites]

“At Harvard, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules of bullying and harassment?” Stefanik asked.

“It can be, depending on the context,” Gay responded.

There is no reason she should have remained in her position after this idiotic answer. She should have resigned immediately.
posted by interogative mood at 9:31 AM on January 3 [7 favorites]

and yet it seems like calling for the ethnic cleansing of the gaza palestinians is completely acceptable in the halls of governance, in congress, in administration?

It can be, depending on the context.
posted by 2N2222 at 9:31 AM on January 3 [6 favorites]

“At Harvard,” Ms. Stefanik asked Dr. Gay, “does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules of bullying and harassment? Yes or no?” Dr. Gay replied, “It can be, depending on the context.”

Equivocating on ethnic hatred should be an instant disqualification for any leadership position. I don't care that the question was asked in bad-faith or as a "gotcha" question to score political points, her answer was still repugnant. Stepping down was the right thing to do.

I'm going to quote the full thing, because well, it matters:

"ELISE STEFANIK: The answer is yes. And Dr. Gay, at Harvard, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules of bullying and harassment, yes or no?

CLAUDINE GAY: It can be. Depending on the context.

ELISE STEFANIK: What’s the context?

CLAUDINE GAY: Targeted as an individual, targeted as — at an individual, severe, pervasive.

ELISE STEFANIK: It’s targeted at Jewish students, Jewish individuals. Do you understand your testimony is dehumanizing them? Do you understand that dehumanization is part of anti-Semitism? I will ask you one more time. Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules of bullying and harassment, yes or no?

CLAUDINE GAY: Anti-Semitic rhetoric, when it crosses into conduct —

ELISE STEFANIK: And is it anti-Semitic rhetoric —

CLAUDINE GAY: Anti-Semitic rhetoric, when it crosses into conduct, that amounts to bullying, harassment, intimidation. That is actionable conduct, and we do take action.

ELISE STEFANIK: So, the answer is yes, that calling for the genocide of Jews violates Harvard code of conduct, correct?

CLAUDINE GAY: Again, it depends on the context.

ELISE STEFANIK: It does not depend on the context. The answer is yes. And this is why you should resign. These are unacceptable answers across the board."
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 9:33 AM on January 3 [11 favorites]

Again, as a current academic, who has supervised dissertations through to completion and is currently serving on multiple dissertation committees, I want to dispute the claim that college term papers are nothing at all like professional research and that the same basic standards don't apply to both

No, they are nothing like it. They're practicing scales, not making music.

However, the reason we assign undergraduates to write term papers is (at least in large part) to teach them how to do original research and to write to the level of the professional standard.

Undergrads aren't doing original research and are fundamentally incapable of doing so. Doing original research requires building a bank of expertise deep enough to understand where that particular research program is and how it got there.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 9:36 AM on January 3 [14 favorites]

Buried in here is the libel (yeah that word) that "From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free".

Framing a key slogan of your opponent as a call to genocide (when it is not) is a tactic that is very effectively damaging protest of Israel's campaign of ethnic cleansing.

The question posed to Gay and others was relating to that particular slander.
posted by constraint at 9:38 AM on January 3 [20 favorites]

Lastly, maybe should take a look under the rock Rufo crawls out from, see what kind of glories he has stashed there. I’ll put in a bet on… hmmm… neo-Nazi affiliations? Association with Russian”businessmen” who supported his or his wife’s business (whatever that might be)?
posted by From Bklyn at 9:38 AM on January 3 [3 favorites]

Framing a key slogan ["from the river to the sea"] of your opponent as a call to genocide (when it is not)

Oh yes it fucking is.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 9:39 AM on January 3 [16 favorites]

Yes I urge anyone who believes that Dr Gay's statement is unacceptable to at least spend 5 minutes reading the actual statement (and the preceding few questions) . The context of this hearing is absolute fucking trash. Does it raise any eyebrows for my fellow Jews here to have a supposed inquiry into anti-Semitism on campus conducted by a group or racist non-Jews?
posted by latkes at 9:40 AM on January 3 [26 favorites]

reading that transcript and focusing on what the presidents did or said wrong, or not correctly enough, I mean.. you have to ignore a lot more that is way more wrong.

this is a gross display
posted by elkevelvet at 9:44 AM on January 3 [4 favorites]

Jewish here as well, and strongly agree with Latkes, above, Stefanik's questions read to me entirely as a ham fisted attempt by the reactionary right to use antisemitism as a bludgeon against their typical targets (a black woman in a position of power, universities, any hint of resistance to making the Netanyahu admin a heavily armed military juggernaut with Jesus and America in their corner).

Having accomplished this, Rufo, Stefanik, et al will tomorrow go back to running their mouths about the globalists poisoning America from within.
posted by Pickman's Next Top Model at 9:50 AM on January 3 [37 favorites]

Does it raise any eyebrows for my fellow Jews here to have a supposed inquiry into anti-Semitism on campus conducted by a group or racist non-Jews?

I would put forth that both of these things can be true independently of one another:

* The line of questioning was very likely disingenuous and cynical

* The responses from all three university presidents were trash and unbecoming of their positions
posted by The Gooch at 9:50 AM on January 3 [25 favorites]

I have mixed feelings on this for the same reason I do about Hunter Biden.

On the one hand, fuck 'em. If they committed plagarism, or crimes, then they should get no special treatment and face whatever penalties are academically and legally handed down.

On the other hand nether Gay nor Hunter Biden would have even been investigated if it hadn't been at the behest of Republicans demanding it for nakedly partisan reasons so I'm not exactly comfortable cheering for their downfall.

I'm not going to say either should face lighter penalties or whatever. I'm just saying that giving the Republicans a win is soul wrenching and I hate it.

Especially WRT Gay because it was quite clear that the whole miserable thing was punishment for being insufficiently in favor of Israel killing large numbers of Palestinians. The goal here is to make people afraid to speak out in public against America's policy of supporting Israel's policy of genocide.

Which shouldn't protect a person from being ousted for plagarism if they did commit plagarism. But we can't just keep letting them weaponize charges like this for their political agenda unchecked. Either we need to actually go after ALL plagarists and people who committed unethical business dealings equally, or we need to start explicitly targeting Republicans for the same on a tit for tat basis just to remind them that they can't keep doing it forever without consiquence.

Ideally we'd do the former. Find all the corruption. Shame and expel all the plagarists.

But that's not going to happen so let's go after the latter full bore.
posted by sotonohito at 9:51 AM on January 3 [3 favorites]

I'm going to quote the full thing, because well, it matters:

It matters in that it makes Gay's response even worse and more absurd:

ELISE STEFANIK: What’s the context?

CLAUDINE GAY: Targeted as an individual, targeted as — at an individual, severe, pervasive.

Harvard student going around telling everyone that all Jews should be gassed: fine

Harvard student going around telling everyone that all Jews should be gassed, including specifically
Abraham Finkelstein in Crimson Yard: HOW DARE YOU

Just stop and read what they're saying and you're writing. These bizarre contortions are sad and embarrassing. The idea that this kind of answer would be defended for any other group is crazy.
posted by star gentle uterus at 9:53 AM on January 3 [13 favorites]

The extended quote makes her statement worse, not better. This isn’t some wide eyed freshman or dgaf tenured professor speaking — it’s the University President of our country’s top University. They a should have enough political savvy and media training to be able to answer/escape such an obvious trap question.
posted by interogative mood at 9:56 AM on January 3 [10 favorites]

A few days before this event, but still germane:

For the Safety of Jews and Palestinians, Stop Weaponizing Antisemitism

By Bernie Steinberg, Contributing Opinion Writer
Bernie Steinberg was the executive director of Harvard Hillel from 1993 to 2010.
posted by lalochezia at 9:57 AM on January 3 [15 favorites]

The Gooch I think you've committed the error of assuming that there was a correct answer to the question. There wasn't.

The entire thing was a game of gotcha, the entire point was to turn aboslutely any answer they gave into political advantage. There was nothing at all they could say that would have kept them from being targeted as they are.

If they'd simply said yes the inevitable followup would have been a quote taken out of context, or simply a groundless accusation, against a pro-Palestinian student or teacher and a demand that on the basis of that yes answer they agree to fire/expell that person right then and there. And that gives them the "Harvard President protects evil antismites!" if they refused, and more leverage to demand more political firings if they submitted to that as well.

There was no right answer.
posted by sotonohito at 9:58 AM on January 3 [41 favorites]

They a should have enough political savvy and media training to be able to answer/escape such an obvious trap question.

This is congressional testimony, not a press conference. She can't say, yes its always a violation of our policies. That opens Harvard up to a whole host of legal problems. She can't say, no, its not a violation of our policies because it can be a violation of their policies. The only option is to say, 'it depends'. Stefanik likely knew that, and won the PR.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 10:01 AM on January 3 [15 favorites]

this could not have been more of a show trial, and clearly there is an audience for a show trial

the fact it's getting decent mileage in this space is a bit surprising
posted by elkevelvet at 10:02 AM on January 3 [26 favorites]

They should have read out Stefanik's own tweets and given a yes/no on whether they were actionable. Shouted at Stefanik if she had ever denounced the Charlottesville Nazis, taken their money, or hired them. Gone in on Rep. Greene's history of anti-semitism. Brought up Soros on the topic of "Yeah, when you address it at someone specifically and never use the word "Jewish" that's STILL racist clownshoes". Don't give a serious answer to the circus, don't be serious IN the circus! Don't send someone who NEEDS to give a serious answer (like a university President).

Really not sure what any of them were thinking going in there. Did they expect kudos? A round of applause? Allies?

And is anyone else joining her on the way out? Maybe the University media relations head or literally everyone who suggested that approaching this in the manner demanded by Republicans was a good idea.
posted by Slackermagee at 10:03 AM on January 3 [12 favorites]

> ELISE STEFANIK: It does not depend on the context. The answer is yes. And this is why you should resign. These are unacceptable answers across the board."

Wow. Elise Stefanik is correct about this, and now I'm EXTRA pissed off at Gay for making me think that sentence.
posted by MiraK at 10:03 AM on January 3 [6 favorites]

Great op ed, lalochezia. Thanks for the link.

I honestly have a hard time seeing "From the river to the sea" as a call for Jewish genocide. At the extreme edge, I don't think "Jews will not replace us" is a call for genocide either. The people saying it might be in favor of genocide, but punishing someone for speech because "they didn't technically say it but we know they mean it" stands on extremely shaky interpretative ground.
posted by Pickman's Next Top Model at 10:04 AM on January 3 [3 favorites]

Maybe my perspective is too superficial but this seems to me like yet another exactly of the yawning chasm between people who want to be correct and people who want to win. I came of age watching Al Gore fall on his face doing the same thing; trying to give a correct and nuanced explanation while George the Younger smirked, lied through his teeth about his policies, and said he'd get things done. Watch the 2000 presidential debates. Wasn't new then, isn't new now.

I can't say I know much about the lived experience of a higher ed admin at an elite institution but I was a high achieving student and I know that in that social space considering one's words carefully and using a lot of defensive qualifiers is often normal and expected. I would have thought that the administrators hauled before a hostile congressional committee would know better than to slip into that pattern but I guess not.

Maybe Gay thought she was trying to live in the reality-based community. Stefanik certainly is not.
posted by Wretch729 at 10:05 AM on January 3 [11 favorites]

Now I'm EXTRA pissed off at Gay for forcing me to agree with Elise fucking Stefanik.

I can assure you, no-one is being forced to do anything here today. Own your choice.
posted by elkevelvet at 10:10 AM on January 3 [22 favorites]

"ELISE STEFANIK: And Dr. Gay, at Harvard, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules of bullying and harassment, yes or no?

CLAUDINE GAY: Yes. "

That's the way you deflate the bad faith question. It doesn't deflect accusations of plagiarism. But it ends accusations of accepting antisemitism. Nuance can be done later.

Now, you have to actually do the hard work of disciplining any students calling for genocide of Jews. But so be it. Because, of fucking course, you discipline students for this. And if this can't be done for whatever reason, it absolutely reflects poorly on both Gay and Harvard, and both need to be put through the wringer for it.
posted by 2N2222 at 10:10 AM on January 3 [5 favorites]

> I honestly have a hard time seeing "From the river to the sea" as a call for Jewish genocide. At the extreme edge, I don't think "Jews will not replace us" is a call for genocide either.

If you find it difficult to understand the context and source of these slogans, it is easy to look it up. There is history and story and associations behind these words that lend them the leaden weight of bigotry, not (just) what is literally the dictionary meanings of the individual words.

You might just as easily say that the Nazis were actually socialists because socialism was in their party name. Don't be so literal. Your lack of comprehension is simply an ignorance of history. There are easy ways to fix that gap.
posted by MiraK at 10:12 AM on January 3 [18 favorites]

Of course this is being done in bad faith by the right in that it is transparently an attempt to take out Gay for political reasons, but that doesn't matter at all. The only thing matters is whether the accusations are true or not.

Otherwise, what's the alternative, that even true accusations must be ignored unless they come from a politically sympathetic source?

The problem with Chris Rufo is not that he is "politically unsympathetic" (which is one of those euphemistic phrases that I've routinely pointed out is a form of bad faith argumentation.)

The problem is that Chris Rufo is a ratfucker - a person who makes his trade in deception, lies, and character assassination in order to achieve his political ends. And as his own words show, he openly admits this!

And so, the proper response to ratfuckers is "Ratfucker, you trade in lies. Nothing you say can be trusted."
posted by NoxAeternum at 10:14 AM on January 3 [23 favorites]

With respect, I think you're going to see a real divide here between people working in humanities and people in STEM and empirical social sciences.

Maybe. I'm not convinced, though. I work in a vague borderland between philosophy (my academic home, which most people think of as a humanities discipline, though it's more similar culturally to STEM than to, say, English), psychology & cognitive science (more than once, I've been mistaken in professional circles for an experimental psychologist, and I have served on a couple of dissertation committees in our psychology department), statistics, and computer science. Professor Gay works in political science, which isn't that different from philosophy (on its more political theory end) or psychology (on its more experimental and statistical end) in terms of standards. Could you say how the divide is supposed to work in this case? For example, which side Gay's work falls on and whether that side is more or less demanding?

No, they are nothing like it. They're practicing scales, not making music.

Practicing scales is a great analogy. But I think it supports my point? When you practice scales, you're practicing, among other things, tone quality and attack. If you can't get those things right in actual music, that's bad, not good. The point is that the standard goes up. The things that you practice don't go away when you put them into the "real thing," and the standard for good tone and clean attack isn't really different in the two contexts.

Undergrads aren't doing original research and are fundamentally incapable of doing so. Doing original research requires building a bank of expertise deep enough to understand where that particular research program is and how it got there.

Disagree. Basically, I disagree with all of this. Undergraduates in my senior-level classes are absolutely doing original research. It's not typically publishable, but it's their own work engaging live issues that matter for professionals in the field. Some undergraduates in my experience have been able to write things that could be published in professional journals. It's not typical, but it's not impossible. I suspect that if we had a more reasonable journal system, published undergraduate research would be much more common.

But maybe this is disagreement we can live with? I think the more important questions are whether we're teaching undergraduates to do original research (even if they never or very rarely achieve it) and whether the standards we're using in assessing undergraduate work are essentially the same (especially with respect to citation practice) as the professional standard, perhaps being a bit lower or used in a different way in line with your practicing scales analogy. Do we disagree about that part?
posted by Jonathan Livengood at 10:15 AM on January 3 [17 favorites]

The "From the river to the sea" slogan seems to fall awfully antisemitic/genocidal adjacent enough that I'd give the serious side eye to anyone saying it. It's like someone declaring "State's rights..." when defending the Confederate rebellion.
posted by 2N2222 at 10:15 AM on January 3 [14 favorites]

Dr. Gay replied, “It can be, depending on the context.”

Equivocating on ethnic hatred should be an instant disqualification for any leadership position.

So I’m shocked that I’m the first person bringing this up, but she is, in that moment, being asked a question for political purposes that is also a legal question that would have legal implications if she answered it in any of the definitive ways that are being asked for above. Answering “it depends” to a legal question when you aren’t certain of the precise answer is so well known it’s actually a joke in law school. This should have in no way been a disqualification.
posted by corb at 10:17 AM on January 3 [46 favorites]

There is history and story and associations behind these words that lend them the leaden weight of bigotry

you mean like its history as a likud slogan? or different associations? might it perhaps have a variety of associations?
posted by busted_crayons at 10:17 AM on January 3 [18 favorites]

The "From the river to the sea" slogan seems to fall awfully antisemitic/genocidal adjacent enough that I'd give the serious side eye to anyone saying it.

Well it isn't so that's on you
posted by windbox at 10:17 AM on January 3 [14 favorites]

As I noted above, if you did answer "Yes" to the question, then you would be criticized by FIRE which has loud and strong support from the same set of politicians on the right.

I suppose the mistake was taking the hearing at face value, and they should have done the politician's trick of answering the question they wanted to be asked rather than the one they were asked. The whole thing was a circus from the get-go.
posted by idb at 10:18 AM on January 3 [6 favorites]

Don't be so literal.

To be clearer, I do certainly believe that anyone chanting "Jews will not replace us" is in favor of genocide.

But isn't a speech code and its enforcement specifically a question of literalism?
posted by Pickman's Next Top Model at 10:19 AM on January 3 [2 favorites]

Honest question - what are the legal ramifications if she had just said “Yes”?
posted by whatevernot at 10:20 AM on January 3 [2 favorites]

> As I noted above, if you did answer "Yes" to the question, then you would be criticized by FIRE which has loud and strong support from the same set of politicians on the right.

This isn't about who would have criticized her for what, and how she could have avoided criticism. Jeez. She should have said "yes" (or "yes, it should be", or "yes, it will be", or "yes, it damn well better be") because every other answer is morally reprehensible. Period.
posted by MiraK at 10:24 AM on January 3 [1 favorite]

Well, as we see in this thread, there'd be an immediate push to label everyone who ever said "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free" as genocidal and antisemitic, despite the actual genocide being perpetrated against the people of Gaza and the West Bank. So there's that.
posted by sagc at 10:25 AM on January 3 [33 favorites]

I honestly have a hard time seeing "From the river to the sea" as a call for Jewish genocide.

It's a Hamas slogan. It's a slogan promulgated and used by Hamas in writings and videos. When you repeat it, however innocently, you are sloganeering for Hamas. You are carrying their water. There's no redeeming the slogan.

Framing a key slogan of your opponent as a call to genocide (when it is not)

And when you refer to Hamas as "your opponent" you show either ignorance or massive callousness. Just who does the "your" in that sentence refer to? Is it me? Is Hamas my enemy but not yours? By your words you exclude yourself from the set of people who have Hamas as an opponent. Why is that? Why is Hamas my "opponent" and not "a radical Islamist terrorist group that's trying to kill my family members"?

It's like someone declaring "State's rights..." when defending the Confederate rebellion.

Bang on correct. Or like trying to sing "Deutschland über alles" claiming you're just really into mountaineering in the Alps.

Well it isn't so that's on you

Jewish MeFi users: Our lived experience and heritage is informing us, and we are telling you, that this is a hateful slogan
This person: (see above)

I wouldn't stand for someone gaslighting trans users or POC users with an answer that flippant or ignorant, but let's count how many commenters advocate for it here.
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 10:26 AM on January 3 [26 favorites]

Honest question - what are the legal ramifications if she had just said “Yes”?

A jillion lawsuits from every legal entity the US involved in ensuring that students on college campuses do not have their 1st Amendment rights infringed. Because contrary to what lots and lots of people believe (including lots of you on MetaFilter.com) the sort of speech Stefanik was blubbering about is almost 100% protected by the 1st Amendment.
posted by Back At It Again At Krispy Kreme at 10:28 AM on January 3 [15 favorites]

The problem is that Chris Rufo is a ratfucker - a person who makes his trade in deception, lies, and character assassination in order to achieve his political ends. And as his own words show, he openly admits this!

And so, the proper response to ratfuckers is "Ratfucker, you trade in lies. Nothing you say can be trusted."
NoxAeternum

This is bad faith argumentation. Like textbook, there-is-a-formal-Latin-phrase-for-it bad faith argumentation.

So he's a ratfucker. You don't trust him. Is what he's saying true or not? That's all that matters.
posted by star gentle uterus at 10:29 AM on January 3 [6 favorites]

As I noted above, if you did answer "Yes" to the question, then you would be criticized by FIRE which has loud and strong support from the same set of politicians on the right.

To which the proper response is "fuck FIRE". We're talking about an organization that has argued that there is no legitimate reason to sanction professors (and thus any punishment is "chilling speech"), and they're always there to argue that "free speech" demands that bigots get a seat at the table.

They are a fundamentally unserious organization, and are part of the infrastructure that Chris Rufo belongs to.
posted by NoxAeternum at 10:30 AM on January 3 [4 favorites]

Jewish MeFi users: Our lived experience and heritage is informing us, and we are telling you, that this is a hateful slogan
This person: (see above)

As a data point, I am a Jewish mefi user, and my lived experience and heritage informs me that "From the river to the sea" is not a universally hateful slogan in every situation and in every context, and I am telling you this. Other Jewish users may disagree with me. Jewish people are not a monolith.
posted by Pickman's Next Top Model at 10:30 AM on January 3 [43 favorites]

Pluto Gangsta: Ah, yes, there definitely haven't been any Jewish voices defending its use. Truly, you are the arbiter of this. We should all bow to your interpretation, which reduces Palestinians to... Nazis? Confederates? Care to address it's being used as a metonym for the region by Likud?

Obviously, the biggest concern is that nobody pro-Palestine says anything even possibly offensive - and if they do, they must be punished as severely as possible.

Israel, on the other hand, can do what it likes, using whatever dehumanizing language it wants.
posted by sagc at 10:30 AM on January 3 [18 favorites]

Associated Press calls plagiarism ‘new conservative weapon’ after Harvard president scandal [Warning: Fox News link]

Plagiarism charges downed Harvard’s president. A conservative attack helped to fan the outrage [AP]
posted by chavenet at 10:31 AM on January 3 [1 favorite]

I can think of One Weird Trick to avoid the "new conservative weapon" of being accused of plagiarism.
posted by star gentle uterus at 10:33 AM on January 3 [5 favorites]

Honest question - what are the legal ramifications if she had just said “Yes”

I'm not going to pretend to speak to all of the legal implications as a second year law student. But here are some that immediately occur to me:

it could be used as evidence in a civil trial against Harvard
- as evidence of a defendant's prior inconsistent statement (FRE 801(d)1) if someone did something that could be considered a statement in support of genocide and Harvard failed to discipline them; the statement was made "under penalty of perjury at a..hearing"
- as evidence of an opposing party's statement (FRE 801(d)2) because it was made "in a representative capacity"...by "the party's agent or employee on a matter within the scope of that relationship and while it existed" in a free speech suppression trial.
posted by corb at 10:33 AM on January 3 [15 favorites]

My Jewish heritage tells me "never again, for anyone".

I'll stop commenting so I don't become one of the people dominating the thread with a one-person show. But Jews are not a monolith and suggesting that we all have the same beliefs is actually anti-Semitic in a very straightforward sense (although I would never say that my fellow Jews should lose their jobs for saying that we do).
posted by latkes at 10:34 AM on January 3 [28 favorites]

Thx corb - informative.
posted by whatevernot at 10:34 AM on January 3 [1 favorite]

This is congressional testimony, not a press conference. She can't say, yes its always a violation of our policies. That opens Harvard up to a whole host of legal problems. She can't say, no, its not a violation of our policies because it can be a violation of their policies. The only option is to say, 'it depends'. Stefanik likely knew that, and won the PR.

Within a couple of days, as the scale of their failure became apparent, all three of them managed to provide much more unequivocal answers (while still allowing for nuance). Their answers during the testimony were terrible own-goals. The defenses of those answers here is kind of weird. They weren't good answers, the presidents all acknowledged that they weren't good answers, and all of them publicly revised their answers in attempts at damage control.
posted by Dip Flash at 10:35 AM on January 3 [13 favorites]

It's a Hamas slogan.

No it's not

When you repeat it, however innocently, you are sloganeering for Hamas

No we aren't

And when you refer to Hamas as "your opponent" you show either ignorance or massive callousness

People keep keep talking about "Palestinians" and you keep talking about "Hamas" - the fact that you don't bother even delineating between the two is telling.

Jewish MeFi users: Our lived experience and heritage is informing us, and we are telling you, that this is a hateful slogan
This person: (see above)

"This person" is a fellow jew and sorry but who fucking died and made you the president of Judaism and the Grand Arbiter of Antisemitism? Thousands of Palestinian people, families with children marching in the streets and chanting from the river to the sea - and you're just peeing your diaper and pointing and calling everyone antisemites and hamas supporters? Utter fucking embarassment.
posted by windbox at 10:36 AM on January 3 [47 favorites]

It's a Hamas slogan. It's a slogan promulgated and used by Hamas in writings and videos. When you repeat it, however innocently, you are sloganeering for Hamas. You are carrying their water. There's no redeeming the slogan.

That phrase existed decades before Hamas was even a thought in someone's head.

Stop gaslighting people on this site. We're not an outlet for war propaganda.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 10:36 AM on January 3 [37 favorites]

Someone said above that this is a Congressional hearing, not a press conference, but that's wrong. They're the same thing.

Venues for public comments like these are precisely what your PR advisors exist to help navigate without putting your foot in your mouth. Advising on how to answer tricky questions without getting into legal trouble is precisely what your legal team exists to do.

The people defending Gay here are bizarrely infantilizing her. She's not some poor random clerk ripped from the bowels of Harvard admin to be raked over the coals. She is an experienced, intelligent, accomplished professional. She is the President of American's most prestigious university. It is literally her job to represent and defend her institution in public. In a job like this you will encounter and engage with hostile, bad faith actors. Your job, and the job of your PR and legal teams, is to be ready to do so.

Gay failed at this, spectacularly. Her advisors failed her, spectacularly. Both she and they are not fit for their jobs.
posted by star gentle uterus at 10:38 AM on January 3 [8 favorites]

Back when 9/11 happened, I lived in an Asian country, and to my lasting shame, I got at least a little bit swept up in the sentiment that "lol America finally got what was coming" and "haha just a small taste of your own imperialist warmongering pie". I moved to the US just a couple of years after that, though, and I've spent the last twenty years slowly, and mostly passively, learning what 9/11 meant to the people on the ground, to the people who died, to the survivors they left behind, to the first responders, to the activists who seek justice for first responders. I've seen the museum exhibits and the monuments and the commemorations. I've listened to survivors' accounts. I've read about the history of USA and understood jussssst a little bit what this particular terror attack meant to the very peculiar and idiosyncratic American psyche.

I haven't forgotten how angry US imperialism makes me. I haven't stopped hating America for Gitmo. I haven't stopped volunteering with activists who work against border patrol and ICE. But I no longer think 9/11 was just USA getting a small piece of what they (we) deserve. US imperialism and US committing atrocities don't justify 9/11 or make it defensible.

Here on this thread are a lot of folks who are openly saying that the atrocities perpetrated by Israel provide justification for the use of anti-semitic slogans and anti-semitic sentiments and a failure to categorically denounce calls for genocide against Jews. It's not right, you guys. Whatever the atrocities perpetrated by the Israeli state, does not justify anti-semitism. Please stop invoking this grotesque tu quoque defense of anti-semitism.
posted by MiraK at 10:39 AM on January 3 [12 favorites]

Her advisors failed her, spectacularly. Both she and they are not fit for their jobs.

Are you saying that Gary King should't be a professor at Harvard, and neither should Gay?
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 10:40 AM on January 3 [1 favorite]

MiraK, I do not accept your premise that it's an antisemitic slogan. And because that's in question, I don't know why we wouldn't discuss it.
posted by sagc at 10:42 AM on January 3 [13 favorites]

This is bad faith argumentation. Like textbook, there-is-a-formal-Latin-phrase-for-it bad faith argumentation.

So he's a ratfucker. You don't trust him. Is what he's saying true or not? That's all that matters.

And this attitude is what enables ratfuckers - the idea that credibility and impeachment don't actually exist, and that we are somehow obliged to ignore a person's conduct and history when evaluating their words.

Chris Rufo is a liar by trade. Nothing he says can be trusted. If this matter is so important, then it can be evaluated by uncompromised sources.
posted by NoxAeternum at 10:43 AM on January 3 [17 favorites]

Like, can you not see that it's a political question, whether it's a call for a hypothetical genocide or a call for the end of the existing one? This is being used to silence protesters in a way that we should be ashamed of.
posted by sagc at 10:43 AM on January 3 [4 favorites]

Are you saying that Gary King should't be a professor at Harvard, and neither should Gay?

Remember that bit about bad-faith argumentation? You know full well that I was referring to Gay's role as President of Harvard.
posted by star gentle uterus at 10:44 AM on January 3 [1 favorite]

"From the river to the sea, Israel will be free"
posted by ph00dz at 10:44 AM on January 3

Your fault, not mine. You said that her advisors (gary king) are not fit for their jobs.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 10:45 AM on January 3 [1 favorite]

Here on this thread are a lot of folks who are openly saying that the atrocities perpetrated by Israel provide justification for the use of anti-semitic slogans and anti-semitic sentiments and a failure to categorically denounce calls for genocide against Jews.

As this thread's resident literalist, I must ask - can you point me to one specific comment in this thread that has done this?
posted by Pickman's Next Top Model at 10:46 AM on January 3 [19 favorites]

When it comes to free speech suppression, there's actually huge issues with stopping specifically political speech. So thus, as I see it, her statements above are actually really in line with the law - there's a big legal difference between saying "I hope we kill your people, you X person" and saying "I advocate for a political position that constitutes genocide of your people." And university presidents have become really aware of that because they've recently been the targets of right wing lawsuits about just this issue, where someone gets invited to campus, says some hate speech that is political but not targeted, gets banned or disciplined, and then sues the school. The school loses in those circumstances.

And additionally, there are legal issues with what are called "content-based speech restrictions", which includes speech restrictions that always block certain types of speech.

"Second, the Court has recognized that facially content-neutral laws can be considered content-based regulations of speech if a law cannot be “justified without reference to the content of speech” or was adopted “because of disagreement with the message [the speech] conveys.”

And that's leaving aside the entire 'from the river to the sea' issue/disagreement, which is definitely the context this is being said in, because no one at any pro-Palestinian protest I've even heard of has actually called for Jewish genocide; usually when people say they are, they are referencing this slogan which has an extremely complicated history that does not lend itself to simple explanations.
posted by corb at 10:46 AM on January 3 [19 favorites]

And this attitude is what enables ratfuckers - the idea that credibility and impeachment don't actually exist, and that we are somehow obliged to ignore a person's conduct and history when evaluating their words.
NoxAeternum

They don't. What matters is whether what they're saying is true or not.

Chris Rufo is a liar by trade. Nothing he says can be trusted. If this matter is so important, then it can be evaluated by uncompromised sources.

It's irrelevant whether Rufo can be trusted, and we are in agreement. Rufo et al provided evidence of Gay's plagiarism. Unless it proves to be fabricated, the question is then whether the evidence shows plagiarism or not.

All this "Rufo can't be trusted!" nonsense is utterly irrelevant. This isn't a referendum on the character or credibility of Rufo. Is the evidence he and his people offering true or not? That's all that matters.

Your line of thinking is utterly bizarre. If he had provided evidence that Gay was embezzling funds, we're supposed to just ignore that? The only issue would be whether the evidence is real and if it indeed showed embezzlement. What even is your point?
posted by star gentle uterus at 10:48 AM on January 3 [8 favorites]

The suggestion that academic political science has a different standard for plagiarism from undergraduate essays is worth consideration.

However, it would be very simple with current technology to demonstrate Gay is not, by the standards of academic political scientist, a plagiarist - run a plagiarism analysis of the corpus of a bunch of political scientists of her vintage and loftyness of appointment, and see if they demonstrate in the order of magnitude of her works' level of unattributed quoting and paraphrasing.

That no one has made this demonstration - not Gay, not the Harvard Corporation, not any of Gay's supporters - suggests fairly strongly it cannot be made, and that Gay is, in fact, a plagiarist even by the standards of her profession. I'd be happy for this to be proven wrong of course.
posted by MattD at 10:49 AM on January 3 [6 favorites]

Here on this thread are a lot of folks who are openly saying that the atrocities perpetrated by Israel provide justification for the use of anti-semitic slogans and anti-semitic sentiments and a failure to categorically denounce calls for genocide against Jews.

Just because you are framing the conversation in this manner does not mean it's the conversation we are all having.
posted by elkevelvet at 10:49 AM on January 3 [21 favorites]

Your job, and the job of your PR and legal teams, is to be ready to do so

I don't know how you infantilize a victim of racism, but I saw what happened with my own eyes and it was pretty obviously a campaign of convenient racism led in a semi-organized fashion by Republics and Israel's far-right cabinet, who are more than happy to team up with Republic/MAGA anti-Semites and racists to fight their PR war here.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 10:51 AM on January 3 [6 favorites]

I don't know how you infantilize a victim of racism

By painting them as a poor naïf blindsided by a situation they couldn't possibly have foreseen and to which they had zero agency to respond, which apparently is the defense of choice in this thread.
posted by star gentle uterus at 10:54 AM on January 3 [6 favorites]

Could you say how the divide is supposed to work in this case? For example, which side Gay's work falls on and whether that side is more or less demanding?

More or less demanding is a wrong way to think about it. I'm struggling to find language that's not snotty here, but the divide is between disciplines where the words are the product, which I expect to be correlated with a higher tolerance for difficult/obscurantist/cacophonous writing, and disciplines where the words merely explain the product. Gay is clearly in the latter camp.

In your writing you'd really do something like

Someone and Otherperson describe a "prisoners' dilemma." In a "prisoners' dilemma," each of the "two players" face "a choice whether to cooperate or defect." The "payoffs are structured" so that is that there "is a dominant strategy" to defect, so "both players" can "reasonably expect" the "other player to defect." However, this equilibrium "is Pareto inferior."

Where the original has those phrases scattered over an overly-wordy, three page description? Because that seems to be what the complaint demands.

Undergraduates in my senior-level classes are absolutely doing original research. It's not typically publishable, but it's their own work engaging live issues that matter for professionals in the field.

If it isn't actually pushing the boundaries of human knowledge out, it isn't original research.

Do we disagree about that part?

Yup. We're teaching undergraduates to go through the motions of original research in order to force them to actually engage more deeply with some aspect of the material. The point is not at all what they write, the point is that afterwards they better understand what corporatism is or whatever. For scholarly work, the point is either the words themselves or the underlying findings being described.

The standards are different. To be clear, if an undergrad handed me a paper that summarized an article similar to the way Gay did, I'd think that was *GREAT*. I might check to make sure they weren't just pasting a chunk from the abstract, because then the thing I'd really be punishing would be not engaging with the article. I might check to make sure that they didn't paste in the summary from another article, same reason. But I would not remotely be concerned that their executive summary included phrases from the original.

Our standards for undergrads are ways to try to force people to engage with something. It's fine and absolutely understandable if the typical undergrad doesn't particularly want to engage with it, and it's fine that there are just so many ways in which the typical undergraduate is very unlike the kind of person that goes on to get a terminal degree and become a researcher in that area. But we're trying to force that student who's only there because that course fit their schedule, only there to check off a gen-ed requirement, to actually engage. To stop and think about some aspect of it more deeply than is required to pass an exam.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 10:57 AM on January 3 [14 favorites]

The suggestion that academic political science has a different standard for plagiarism from undergraduate essays is worth consideration.

Political scientist here. I've published in many of the same journals Gay has. Its not that there are 'different standards' its that a lot of this language is technical, and theres only one way to describe it (see the comment above about DW-NOMINATE). We should of course do away with this language and just have bullet points, but that's neither here nor there. The only clear cut case of sloppy citations is from her dissertation, which is not a big deal at all because its from her dissertation!!! They're sloppy almost by definition!
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 10:58 AM on January 3 [25 favorites]

But then MattD raises a good point. Why did neither Harvard nor Gay herself raise the points you're making? Obviously the right wingers baying for blood will not be satisfied with anything, but if what you and others here are saying is true it does stand out as odd that no one involved has even attempted to say that Gray was well within normal academic writing norms.
posted by star gentle uterus at 11:01 AM on January 3 [2 favorites]

By painting them as a poor naïf blindsided by a situation they couldn't possibly have foreseen and to which they had zero agency to respond, which apparently is the defense of choice in this thread

No one is saying this.

Personally, having read the exchange above, I think that Gay's answers were appropriate and a reasonable interpretation of the conduct code, assuming that the conduct code at Harvard is reasonably similar to the conduct code at my law school, which I think is likely. I also think that people are misunderstanding that a hearing before Congress is both a political situation *and a legal one*. She answered appropriately for a legal hearing - with as few words as possible on the matter likely to get litigated. (Because this is definitely going to get litigated, let's face it.) She didn't give purely political answers and if she had that might have also been a legal problem.

And the issue of conduct policies is definitely going to get litigated because it impacts people's future earnings, especially if you are talking about Harvard students, whose parents or whose friends' parents almost certainly have the money to hire a lawyer to challenge the suspension or expulsion of their child.
posted by corb at 11:02 AM on January 3 [8 favorites]

Why did neither Harvard nor Gay herself raise the points you're making?

My guess for Gay is that she realized she was being railroaded by a national right wing outrage machine and made a calculated decision that the best move in that situation was to just not add any further fuel to the fire.

My guess for Harvard Corporation is that they are fundamentally sympathetic to Rufo's aims, if not his methods.
posted by Pickman's Next Top Model at 11:04 AM on January 3 [18 favorites]

corb:

No one is saying this.

They are saying exactly this, that she had no idea what was going to happen, what else could she have said (as you yourself are saying), etc.

I also think that people are misunderstanding that a hearing before Congress is both a political situation *and a legal one*.

I'm an attorney. I have advised clients on appearing before government hearings and committees. I did this working with client PR teams because this is a political situation and a legal one and a PR one.

She fucked up not legally but on the PR front. This is absolutely not a situation to give a dry, technical legal answer. She and her team fucked up in not understanding or not being ready for what they were walking into, which is astonishing because it was completely foreseeable what the hearing was going to be like.
posted by star gentle uterus at 11:06 AM on January 3 [16 favorites]

Your line of thinking is utterly bizarre. If he had provided evidence that Gay was embezzling funds, we're supposed to just ignore that?

Yes, because you can't fucking trust Chris Rufo. As the old saw goes, if he said the sky is blue, I would go outside for independent verification. There is a reason why impeachment is a huge matter in the law - because if you are trying to produce evidence of something, whether or not your word is trustworthy is a huge factor.

What even is your point?

That your attitude is what enables ratfucking - "hey, it doesn't matter that this person has a history of lies and deceit to achieve his political aims - logical rules for spherical cows say we're obliged to take any claim he makes seriously." (And no, the ad hominem fallacy doesn't oblige us, as the definition specifically states" irrelevant characteristics", and I find it hard to think that someone's integrity is irrelevant to the trustworthiness of their arguments.)

If we want to combat ratfucking and misinformation, then we have to hold their purveyors accountable. And one way is to make it clear that they can no longer be trusted.
posted by NoxAeternum at 11:07 AM on January 3 [16 favorites]

Elise Stefanik's Wiki page is notable for its mention of her involvement with Harvard's Institute of Politics.
posted by DJZouke at 11:07 AM on January 3 [1 favorite]

there are legal issues with what are called "content-based speech restrictions", which includes speech restrictions that always block certain types of speech.

Harvard is a private institution. It has significant leeway to make content-based speech restrictions, it is not bound by the sorts of First Amendment jurisprudence that state-run schools are.
posted by BungaDunga at 11:09 AM on January 3 [5 favorites]

Yes, because you can't fucking trust Chris Rufo.
NoxAeternum

But the accusations aren't true because Rufo says so.

The accusations appear to be true based on the evidence presented, which no one has claimed is fabricated. If real evidence supports the accusations' truth, then they're true regardless of how shitty Rufo personally is.

Hence, all your comments about Rufo being a ratfucker are completely irrelevant. Hence, what is your point?
posted by star gentle uterus at 11:10 AM on January 3 [8 favorites]

If it's a show trial comprised of bullies seeking any possible means of furthering their fascist agenda then perhaps the character of those asking questions is relevant

that's my framing, and I realize it's not the way some here look at it
posted by elkevelvet at 11:14 AM on January 3 [13 favorites]

But it isn't because, again, the truth of their accusations here isn't resting on their character or integrity or history. Gay isn't resigning because Rufo said she's a plagiarist, she's resigning because he and his compatriots have presented evidence of plagiarism. He and his compatriots are dishonest pieces of shit. That is without question. But, again, as far as I know there have not been any claims that the evidence they provided is either fabricated or taken out of context (a favored tactic of liars like Rufo or James O'Keefe).
posted by star gentle uterus at 11:17 AM on January 3 [4 favorites]

If it's a show trial comprised of bullies seeking any possible means of furthering their fascist agenda then perhaps the character of those asking questions is relevant

that's my framing, and I realize it's not the way some here look at it

Does the veracity of the allegations matter, or just the character of those making them? How does this actually work?
posted by 2N2222 at 11:18 AM on January 3 [2 favorites]

I'm not quite sure I understand the 1st amendment aspect of this. I don't know if there are separate Discrimination and Harassment policies for the different schools at Harvard, but the first one I found is from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences:

Discriminatory harassment is unwelcome and offensive conduct that is based on an individual or group’s protected status. Discriminatory harassment may be considered to violate Harvard University Policy when it is so severe or pervasive and objectively offensive that it creates a work, educational, or living environment that a reasonable person would consider intimidating, hostile, or abusive and denies the individual an equal opportunity to participate in the benefits of the workplace or the institution’s programs and activities.

Race and religion are both listed as "protected classes." So if a student called for the genocide of a class of people based on the race or religion a fellow student belonged to, wouldn't the above apply? But if then the student was punished/expelled, could they claim their 1st amendment rights were infringed? It does seem complicated. Are Discrimination and Harassment policies in general a potential legal morass if the policies include speech? (I'm also not clear as to who the final arbiter of a Discrimination and Harassment policy violation would be)

It seems that Stefanik's question at first glance feels like a moral one, but is actually a legalistic one? And maybe that was what would make this a "trick" question? But surely there are ways to answer in a manner that addresses both the moral aspect and the legalistic one?

On preview: If what BungaDunga said above is true, then maybe my comment is moot, and Gay's response really was inexcusable?
posted by gwint at 11:18 AM on January 3 [1 favorite]

Political scientist here. I've published in many of the same journals Gay has. Its not that there are 'different standards' its that a lot of this language is technical, and theres only one way to describe it (see the comment above about DW-NOMINATE). We should of course do away with this language and just have bullet points, but that's neither here nor there.

Likewise, except that among those I've only ever landed in AJPS and that was back when their rejection rate was as low as 90\% instead of whatever atrocity it is these days.

The thing I'll add is that for us, the kind of summarization you see in a lit review/theory section is pretty tolerant of the kind of paraphrasing that Gay is doing so long as it's plainly obvious that you're describing someone else's work. Nobody is reading a piece of empirical political science because they want a really good and wholly original summary of Ansolabehere and Snyder, and neither putting quotation marks around a bunch of two and three word phrases nor torturing your summary to avoid language that someone might have used before are useful things to do.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 11:19 AM on January 3 [26 favorites]

The accusations appear to be true based on the evidence presented, which no one has claimed is fabricated. If real evidence supports the accusations' truth, then they're true regardless of how shitty Rufo personally is.

Well, we've had a number of academics here point out that the accusations actually aren't true, or at most heavily overstated based on a misinterpretation of how academia works based on experience with the field that was at best incidental. So your main prior of "he produced Real Incontravertable Evidence we are obliged to listen to because it is Real and Incontravertable" doesn't actually hold up. In reality, what happened is that a known ratfucker said "hey, I think that this shows plagiarism", and you're arguing that we should consider his argument on face value and ignore his long-running career of lies and deceit when evaluating his claims.

That, to me, is what is ridiculous, and that is my point.
posted by NoxAeternum at 11:21 AM on January 3 [34 favorites]

For those asking about whether the character of the accusers matters or just the evidence, I'm not convinced that the evidence clearly demonstrates that Gay is a plagiarist. Per GCU and Misantropic, above, the question of whether a scholar has committed plagiarism can be a complex one and isn't really the same as the question of whether an undergraduate has committed plagiarism, and can't be judged in the same ways - and CERTAINLY can't be adjudicated in the court of public opinion while a mass media apparatus is busying itself screaming "Plagiarist! Anti-Semite! Nasty woman!"

On preview: What Nox said.
posted by Pickman's Next Top Model at 11:25 AM on January 3 [12 favorites]

So your main prior of "he produced Real Incontravertable Evidence we are obliged to listen to because it is Real and Incontravertable" doesn't actually hold up.

On the contrary, that simply reinforces my position.

Other academics in this thread have also pushed back on those defenses and said that Gay did indeed plagiarize. This is precisely the way things should work. Evidence is presented and evaluated. How it doesn't work is "it's just not true because this guy is involved so there".

Though, as noted above, curiously no one involved (including Gay herself) has raised these apparently obvious and well-known-within-academic-circles defenses.
posted by star gentle uterus at 11:27 AM on January 3 [6 favorites]

it's a good thing these elected representatives are leading the charge on ethics in higher education

because clearly this is about plagiarism

I'm out, I never liked circuses and this one stinks to high heaven
posted by elkevelvet at 11:27 AM on January 3 [15 favorites]

I'm not convinced that the evidence clearly demonstrates that Gay is a plagiarist.

The Harvard Corporation apparently was. Or at least that it was enough in question that it wasn't worth mounting a defense.
posted by star gentle uterus at 11:29 AM on January 3

Other academics in this thread have also pushed back on those defenses and said that Gay did indeed plagiarize.

Are these pusher backers quantitative social scientists?
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 11:31 AM on January 3 [6 favorites]

Feel free to read the thread and find out for yourself.
posted by star gentle uterus at 11:32 AM on January 3

It seem that Stefanik's question at first glance feels like a moral one, but is actually a legalistic one?

The full transcript is here. Earlier, Stefanik said, "the use of the term intifada in the context of the Israeli Arab conflict is indeed a call for violent armed resistance against the state of Israel, including violence against civilians and the genocide of Jews." She wanted to be able to (falsely) claim that by not expelling students who used the term "intifada," Gay was violating school policy. So I have some sympathy for Gay and the others, but still, the section of the testimony that MisantropicPainforest posted above is absolutely horrific. Gay could have taken the correct moral stance without legal jeopardy by saying something like, "Any calls for genocide are violent threats that clearly violate Harvard's rules on bullying and harassment."
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 11:33 AM on January 3 [3 favorites]

My background to all this is that I was an IT staffer at MIT once upon a time. The building where I ran ethernet cables and supported scientists was close to the one where Aaron Swartz was caught. So I have a strong desire to be able (when necessary) to hold students accountable for being young&stupid, and at the same time not have accountability escalated to criminal charges or the proverbial federal case, over something that really should be dealt with more gently.

And even mild disciplinary measures against undergrads can have unfortunate consequences when they turn into (effectively) another semester's tuition financed with undischargeable debt with compounded interest, or with a revoked student visa. So it really is walking a razor's edge. MIT had an issue with this two months ago because yes, pro-Palestinian students crossed lines that called for disciplinary action but OTOH, any action against the foreign students among them would have ended their stay at MIT forthwith, and that was going too far.

So yes. It depends. It's threading a needle to be able to support free speech on campus, while at the same time letting all students get their work done and graduate on time regardless of their ethnic background and their desire to be involved in activism (or lack thereof.) You need leeway. You need to be trusted with that leeway. You need to be able to make ad hoc judgment calls, and you need to be trusted to be acting in good faith beforehand and afterwards, and be able to defend your actions before Elise Stefanic. Gay failed that test. She needs to go. But again, this is the presidency of America's foremost college. It's not a job for everyone. So ok, it's not a job for Claudine Gay.
posted by ocschwar at 11:34 AM on January 3 [8 favorites]

All of the people trying to argue that Gay actually plagiarized or to what extent, or whether she poorly answered some stupid bad-faith republicans gotcha questions spoonfed by a ratfucking conservative operative all evades the original point of why this is all actually happening to begin with: To chill protest on campus, and to score another win for the "Anti-Woke Anti-CRT Anti-DEI Anti-'Racialist' But Totally Not Racist" Crowd. That is it! That's literally all this is. Everyone who is taking it even remotely seriously either got played or got what they wanted - in which case congratulations, you won, go celebrate.
posted by windbox at 11:35 AM on January 3 [41 favorites]

I hadn't read Gay's comments after the hearing (I can't find a direct link to the statement, so here is the Crimson article about it):

Harvard President Claudine Gay apologized for her remarks at the end of her congressional testimony, which sparked fierce national criticism and led the leadership of Harvard Hillel to say they don’t trust her to protect Jewish students at the University.

“I am sorry,” Gay said in an interview with The Crimson on Thursday. “Words matter.”

“When words amplify distress and pain, I don’t know how you could feel anything but regret,” Gay added.

...

As the backlash grew into an uproar, Gay issued a statement through Harvard’s official social media channels on Wednesday in an attempt to clarify her response to Stefanik’s line of questioning.

“There are some who have confused a right to free expression with the idea that Harvard will condone calls for violence against Jewish students,” Gay said. “Let me be clear: Calls for violence or genocide against the Jewish community, or any religious or ethnic group are vile, they have no place at Harvard, and those who threaten our Jewish students will be held to account.”

Based on that comment, it seems that the 1st ammendment issue may be a red herring and she fully regretted not making a simple statement against calls for genocide.
posted by gwint at 11:37 AM on January 3 [4 favorites]

Feel free to read the thread and find out for yourself.

Its a rhetorical question: theres one, and they're not.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 11:37 AM on January 3 [6 favorites]

Feel free to read the thread and find out for yourself.

In my reading of the thread there are three commenters who have published at the postgraduate level in academia who say some version of "If this is plagiarism, then all academic writing is plagiarism; certain phrases become standardized in certain fields and using them in one's work does not amount to passing off someone else's work as your own."

And in the other corner, one commenter who has published at the postgraduate level (field unknown) and two other commenters with unknown credentials who believe this is obviously plagiarism.

Assuming everyone is being honest about their credentials, this leads me to believe the former position has more support than the latter.
posted by Pickman's Next Top Model at 11:37 AM on January 3 [13 favorites]

We Sat Down With the Conservative Mastermind Behind Claudine Gay’s Ouster

For an operative who works mostly behind the scenes of Republican politics, Rufo isn’t shy about revealing the true motives behind his influence operations. Last month, he told me that his efforts to rehabilitate Richard Nixon’s legacy are part of broader ploy to exonerate former President Donald Trump. When I spoke to him on Tuesday afternoon, he was equally frank about what motivated his efforts to get Gay fired.

posted by ryanrs at 11:39 AM on January 3 [19 favorites]

But then MattD raises a good point. Why did neither Harvard nor Gay herself raise the points you're making? Obviously the right wingers baying for blood will not be satisfied with anything, but if what you and others here are saying is true it does stand out as odd that no one involved has even attempted to say that Gray was well within normal academic writing norms.

Their earlier response was that the uncited text was an error, but not a major error, and that her issuing corrections was a sufficient response. At no point did Harvard say that it was just normal academic writing. By the third or so tranche of revelations, it got a lot harder to keep saying it was not a major issue.

She answered appropriately for a legal hearing - with as few words as possible on the matter likely to get litigated. (Because this is definitely going to get litigated, let's face it.) She didn't give purely political answers and if she had that might have also been a legal problem.

Her answers were bad enough that she made a major public apology the following day. Again, I'd say these defenses of her testimony are strange. It's possible for the three presidents' answers to have been both legalistically correct and also completely terrible. Those things aren't in contradiction.
posted by Dip Flash at 11:45 AM on January 3 [6 favorites]

But this really was a team effort that involved three primary points of leverage. First was the narrative leverage, and this was done primarily by me [Rufo], Christopher Brunet and Aaron Sibarium. Second was the financial leverage, which was led by Bill Ackman and other Harvard donors. And finally, there was the political leverage which was really led by Congresswoman Elise Stefanik’s masterful performance with Claudine Gay at her hearings.

People who keep claiming this is about plagiarism should close their mouths for just one second and read what the Fascists are saying about their own work.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 11:47 AM on January 3 [38 favorites]

What if I told you that Gay used her advisors code to run her analysis in her dissertation and published work??
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 11:48 AM on January 3

I honestly have a hard time seeing "From the river to the sea" as a call for Jewish genocide.

It's a Hamas slogan.

Likud--aka the leader of the coalition and the party of the current PM--has been using this slogan to announce their intentions of ethnic cleansing and genocide for decades, well before any Palestinians did.

Jewish MeFi users: Our lived experience and heritage is informing us, and we are telling you, that this is a hateful slogan
This person: (see above)

You are not all Jews, let alone all American Jews, and most certainly not all Jewish MeFi users. In fact, you're probably in the minority of Jewish members here.
posted by Glegrinof the Pig-Man at 11:53 AM on January 3 [15 favorites]

Really interesting comments as always. For those eviscerating Gay, put yourself in her shoes: ridiculously high pressure situation, limited prep time, shitty law firm advice, no fucking possible right answers that wouldn't get atrocious people like stefanik and rufo the material they needed to successfully accomplish their vile aims, not to mention the legal ramifications. Man, I just dont get why youre doing that eviscerating over and over again. She got fucked.

The mind-numbingly awful political media are running front page news on this over and over again (WTF about 'poisoning the blood' and 'vermin', shouldn't those be the every day stories?). It's like they took the 'butter emails' fiasco as their model and will not stray from it.

Shocking that three women were put on trial and no shitty failed up older white males made the cut.
posted by WatTylerJr at 11:57 AM on January 3 [29 favorites]

There are so many issues being raised in this thread (important ones) but I would like to comment on two of these:
1) I'm also an academic who has directed many dissertations and served on many dissertation committees. I have also taught undergraduate courses that required writing empirical research papers that involved formal presentations of replications of published data collected in the class, and papers that required undergraduates to synthesize existing literature, write an introduction that uses that original literature to propose a novel experiment (including methods and hypothetical data patterns plus statistical analyses). I have also directed undergraduate honors theses that involved this latter process plus actual data collection, analysis and conclusions. For all of these cases, I would have flagged what Gay did as plagiarism. I would however have characterized this level of plagiarism as relatively minor (compared to one paper that was turned in by a student that was a verbatim copy of a book chapter in a book I had just finished reading - that kid I gave a failing grade to. I could've escalated it to have it heard by the Honesty Committee, with a possible consequence of denying registration or worse.)

Is what Gay specifically did in terms of plagiarism sufficient to be fired? IMO no. Is what Gay did in terms of her responses to the horrible Stefanik sufficient to be fired? IMO yes. I also hate the NYT.

2) Undergraduates can and do do original research. They need guidance just as graduate students do, but undergrads can absolutely do original research.

3) Why are undergraduates doing the kinds of work in a class such as I described in 1? Because IMO this kind of in depth critical thinking is part of what makes an educated person, and this is what an undergraduate education should include. I know of no better way to learn to evaluate critically and think beyond what is offered you that the process I described (I'm sure there are other ways but I have found this to be a gold standard in my discipline, an empirical social science).
posted by bluesky43 at 11:57 AM on January 3 [8 favorites]

"did Gay fail to find the right magic words to answer a gotcha question"

Gotcha question or not, the question "Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules on bullying and harassment?" actually has a very simple answer, and you don't need any magic words.

The follow-up questions that would have been inevitable could be carefully parsed or hair-split until the cows come home, because at that point it would have all fallen under dispute (as can be seen even in this thread among people who it is reasonable to presume are not acting in bad faith unlike Stefanik) as to what specifically constitutes calling for genocide.

"Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard's rules on bullying and harassment?" is a simple question with a simple answer.

"Does the term 'from the river to the sea' constitute a call for genocide or encode a genocidal objective?" is a much more complex question. Except Dr. Gay just handed Stefanik and all her pals an easy win by stepping on her own face with the first question before it came to the contextualization, historical and contemporary usage, and all the other stuff this thread has been talking about with the latter.

I think the very notion that the first question involved being a place for hair splitting or subtlety is foolish in the extreme. There was nothing preventing her or either of the other university chiefs from answering in the simple affirmative to that question and then getting into the rhetorical nitty gritty on the follow-ups, and I think it's foolish to defend Dr. Gay's answer to that question especially when she doesn't defend the answer herself.
posted by tclark at 11:58 AM on January 3 [2 favorites]

One comment deleted. Let's avoid doom predictions please. Also, several flags have come from both ends of the "From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free" argument and as mentioned in a previous thread: While we can moderate the thread and step in whenever the Content Policy or Guidelines are being overstepped; we can't change the root cause of the issue; that is, the fact that the people participating in the thread have different levels of involvement and stakes with the situation and even hold conflicting views among themselves.

posted by loup (staff) at 12:01 PM on January 3 [6 favorites]

I honestly have a hard time seeing "From the river to the sea" as a call for Jewish genocide.

It's dog whistles and yes, it's both sides eagerly using dog whistles to drive antagonize the other.
( I speak Hebrew and Arabic, and I am so close to a barking frenzy you have no idea.)

From the river to the sea is 5 hours by bike. No human being should be so constrained by borders that they can't take a 5 hour bike trip. The issue if a singular social order is to prevail from the river to the sea, what kind of social order should it be? And the answers are dog whistled. And that's the real issue here. You're an undergrad. You're paying tuition in student loans, potentially shackling yourself to debt for life. You should not have the racket of dog whistles interfering with it.
posted by ocschwar at 12:04 PM on January 3 [4 favorites]

I was in academia (humanities) for 10+ years, and dealt with many a student plagiarism case. I've also published a few articles. Some of the most recent examples that have come to light (link to a Washington Free Beacon article, which yes, I know is right-wing) are pretty clear cut plagiarism, and if I was evaluating this as a student paper how I addressed it would start by looking at the paper holistically. Sometimes students will just copy-paste all sorts of scholarship, resulting in a paper that they mostly didn't write. That's earns them a serious talking to, and a zero on their paper. But other times students will copy-paste without citation and include the source in their bibliography, and still have a paper that is mostly their own thinking. In those cases, I do confront the student, but ultimately I just dock their grade a bit (the degree depending on what percentage of the paper was plagiarized).

I haven't analyzed Gay's scholarship, but my sense from how other academics are responding is that this is the case - what she did isn't great, but the instances of plagiarism were overall small, and she at least always put her sources in her bibliography - she wasn't trying to pull one over on people or anything. These mistakes are sloppy, and should be corrected, but doing so doesn't radically change her credentials or the value of her own scholarly arguments. And yeah, I only care about what she did in published articles - most people's dissertation is a mess, one way or another.

Where Gay did screw up though:

LISE STEFANIK: Well, let me ask you this, will admissions offers be rescinded or any disciplinary action be taken against students or applicants who say from the river to the sea or intifada advocating for the murder of Jews?

CLAUDINE GAY: As I’ve said that type of hateful reckless offensive speech is personally abhorrent to me.

On the one hand, it's only recently that university presidents have to contend with the threat of "going viral" on Twitter/TikTok, so I am willing to give them a little slack, but...I still can't understand how Gay failed to better prepare for this question with her legal team. This was a moment to have a bit of spine, and clearly say "A challenge with the value of free speech always arises when phrases have more than one meaning. I am aware that there are currently phrases that can mean different things - we take such cases seriously, but we also don't want to assume the motivations of the people speaking." Or something - I'm not a lawyer, but I can totally see why she wouldn't want to endorse "from the river to the sea..." as always genocidal (because it's not! Is it sometimes? Yes. Are most college students chanting it genocidal? No.)

Instead, her unequivocal labeling of this as "hateful reckless offensive speech" set the trap for her - I still don't think she should have lost her job over this (because I don't think the job of college presidents is to avoid going viral, it's to be a thoughtful steward of a university - if you read the full transcript it is much, much, more nuanced than the clips that spread far and wide on social media).

(For whatever it's worth: I was not raised religiously Jewish (just some culture) but I have a name that is very Jewish and am often marked as such, and I am in community with observant Jewish people - including family, including my partner. I don't claim a Jewish identity per se, but I do care deeply about anti-semitism. But signs/words can have multiple meanings sometimes.)
posted by coffeecat at 12:11 PM on January 3 [6 favorites]

Elise Stefanik's Wiki page under "Tenure" notes "her invitation to join the Senior Advisory Committee at the Harvard Institute of Politics shortly after her election. Stefanik was removed from the committee in 2021 following her objection to Pennsylvania's electoral votes after the storming of the U.S. Capitol." NB I may have plagiarized some of the Wikipedia article on Elise Stefanik.
posted by DJZouke at 12:06 PM

Why does it not surprise me that some right wing hack does what they do because they have some axe to grind over some aggrieved supposed slight. Jesus, will we ever be rid of these idiot politicians. Also, I saw what you did there DJZouke.
posted by bluesky43 at 12:15 PM on January 3 [5 favorites]

probably responding a litle too late in this thread but a couple of points:

1. The university presidents were INVITED to testify, they did not have to come. They came woefully unprepared for what should been a totally obvious "when did you stop beating your wife?" type ambush. President of any Ivy League (or probably any major university) is as much a political position as anything else (other roles include but are not limited to: hedge fund manager, billionaire donor foot massager, real estate developer, entitled undergrad adult baby mollifier, etc...) and they COMPLETELY FAILED the politics test. They were INVITED to a gun fight, and showed up with a giant nerd style Jansport backpack stuffed full of legalistic nonsense and tried to blather their way out of it while Stefanik and the other freaks totally bodied them rhetorically. They deserve to lose their jobs bc they are bad at them.

2. As a longtime resident of CamberVille, with a domestic partner who has a Phd from Harvard, who in the course of earning that Phd had to teach and grade Harvard undergrad courses - all this talk about Harvard holding Gay to higher standard than their students / all the praise and hand wringing for Harvard as this bastion of greatness, the best of the best, etc... has my brain melting out of my ears. For people who don't live around here or know somebody who has been at Harvard (and presumably this goes for all the ivories) let me just say that the "MERITOCRACY" is just as full of shit around here as it is anywhere else. My partner had to get special permission to give any undergrad student any grade lower than a B, EVEN FOR OBVIOUS PLAGIARISM. It had to be incredibly exceptional circumstances (which are way beyond what normal people would expect) for these students to get in trouble/get anything approaching a bad grade. There are PLENTY of fucking idiots at Harvard, don't get caught up in the hype.
posted by youthenrage at 12:19 PM on January 3 [46 favorites]

I found the conversation between Stefanik and Gay fascinating. To me it perfectly encapsulated the differences between academic and political speech. Stefanik asked a political question and Gay answered academically. She incorrectly identified the context in which her comments would be judged and paid the price for it.

On preview, youthenrage, you nailed my point with your first point.
posted by sid at 12:24 PM on January 3 [5 favorites]

I started to write a response to these two bits (from different commenters):

In your writing you'd really do something like

Someone and Otherperson describe a "prisoners' dilemma." In a "prisoners' dilemma," each of the "two players" face "a choice whether to cooperate or defect." The "payoffs are structured" so that is that there "is a dominant strategy" to defect, so "both players" can "reasonably expect" the "other player to defect." However, this equilibrium "is Pareto inferior."

Where the original has those phrases scattered over an overly-wordy, three page description? Because that seems to be what the complaint demands.

And ...

Political scientist here. I've published in many of the same journals Gay has. Its not that there are 'different standards' its that a lot of this language is technical, and theres only one way to describe it (see the comment above about DW-NOMINATE). We should of course do away with this language and just have bullet points, but that's neither here nor there. The only clear cut case of sloppy citations is from her dissertation, which is not a big deal at all because its from her dissertation!!! They're sloppy almost by definition!

But in the process, I think I convinced myself that you're both more right than I was. I'm curious whether we disagree about some of the dissertation examples -- not as to whether they're problematic but as to whether they're plagiarism at all.

Even in the worst cases, it seems to me on reflection that the kind of borrowing without attribution at play here wouldn't impact anyone, really: it wouldn't steal credit from the source or give credit wrongly to the borrower, nor would it slow innovation in research. It looks like a mistake, not any kind of academic fraud.

I still maintain my view that even this harmless kind of borrowing isn't something that every academic researcher does or has done. But yeah, count me as at least mostly convinced. If the examples in the Crimson article are the most serious examples, there's nothing here that should cost anyone any sort of job.
posted by Jonathan Livengood at 12:36 PM on January 3 [20 favorites]

If it's a show trial comprised of bullies seeking any possible means of furthering their fascist agenda then perhaps the character of those asking questions is relevant

Yes, and not just bullies, these people are also actual anti-semites and/or their defenders, accusing university administrators of anti-semitism. Face, palm, forever.
posted by kensington314 at 12:46 PM on January 3 [8 favorites]

My partner had to get special permission to give any undergrad student any grade lower than a B,

For real? I mean, I heard that as gossip for a longtime, but when you're hearing it as part of the Camberville MIT crowd, you have to discount it a little as MIT chauvinism.
posted by ocschwar at 12:51 PM on January 3 [1 favorite]

RICK W. ALLEN: Thank you, Madam Chair and I want to thank each of you for being here today. And first — and my colleague earlier asked the question, you know, what is the truth? Of course, that question was asked 2000 years ago at Pilot. And — and of course, you know, obviously knowledge is important. But what about wisdom?

In full disclosure, I am a student and believe in God of the Bible and His word. In the House of Representatives, we — we are without excuse. We have, above the American flag, In God We Trust. Really? And then we have the full face of Moses looking down on the entire body who gave us the first five books of the Bible.

RICK W. ALLEN: Let me tell you how serious this issue is. In 1885 BC, BC not AD, BC, the Bible says Genesis 12:3, I will bless — talking about Israel, I will bless those who bless you. And whoever curses you, I will curse. And all peoples of the Earth would be blessed through you. That is a serious, serious promise. In fact, we heard one of the panelists talk about the Jesus of the Bible.

and of course, our church, was founded by Jesus, who was a Jew, the American Church. In fact, the church throughout the — the world. You know, this is the Committee of Education and Workforce. Illiteracy — illiteracy is the number one problem in our workforce. But I think from a standpoint of truth, biblical illiteracy is the number one problem in America.

We are a biblically illiterate society. We have no idea about these promises that are ancient in this book that the prophecies, every one of them has come to fruition. Every single one of them. So with that, Dr. Magill like so many others, I have been extremely disappointed — or I’m sorry, Dr. Kornbluth.

Kornbluth, is that correct?
posted by elkevelvet at 1:18 PM on January 3 [3 favorites]

Race and religion are both listed as "protected classes." So if a student called for the genocide of a class of people based on the race or religion a fellow student belonged to, wouldn't the above apply? But if then the student was punished/expelled, could they claim their 1st amendment rights were infringed? It does seem complicated. Are Discrimination and Harassment policies in general a potential legal morass if the policies include speech?

My literal first response - which is perhaps why I am so sympathetic to Gay - would be "it depends". I think the questions it would turn on is whether the speech rose to the level of conduct, and that's why issues like severity, frequency, etc

Also, the 'you can make whatever content based speech restrictions you want at private institutions' issue is not correct.

First, SCOTUS has said that states are allowed to go further than the US constitution in protecting free speech within their borders. In some places, like California and Massachusetts, this is through state law, and such restrictions were overturned. Corry v. Stanford Univ.. In this case, the Massachusetts Civil Rights Act of 1979 applies and

" (1) applies to private actors as well as state actors, and (2) proscribes interference not only with federally protected rights but also with rights secured under state laws, which may include the common law, as well as statutes and regulations."

This has been specifically tested in Massachusetts: in Abrahamowitz v Boston University, it was held to apply to private colleges as well and a student threatened with expulsion for hanging an anti-apartheid banner won in court with the help of the ACLU. (In addition, a number of state constitutions explicitly protect speech: Massachusetts, where Harvard is located, is one of them.)

Secondly, the "State action" doctrine comes into play: essentially, in places where the state and the private institution are so intertwined that private action essentially becomes state action; such as when private institutions receive large amounts of public funds or support.

In addition, people who are saying that Gay knew what she was saying is wrong because of her apology are neglecting the legal differences between what she said before Congress and what she said in her apology. In her apology, she said "Let me be clear: Calls for violence or genocide against the Jewish community, or any religious or ethnic group are vile, they have no place at Harvard, and those who threaten our Jewish students will be held to account.” The key there is the AND. These are two separate statements, not one unified statement. When she says that calls for genocide are vile and have no place at Harvard, she isn't talking about the student disciplinary code. She's expressing a protected opinion about what she thinks should happen on campus. Her followup statement, "and those who threaten our Jewish students will be held to account" is NOT saying that people who call for genocide will be disciplined under the student code. It's saying that people who engage in unprotected CONDUCT, in this case, threatening Jewish students, will be held to the conduct code. Nothing she said there contradicts her statements in Congress that it is context dependent.
posted by corb at 1:24 PM on January 3 [22 favorites]

I still maintain my view that even this harmless kind of borrowing isn't something that every academic researcher does or has done.

Sure, a thousand percent. I expect there are disciplines where it would be a serious offense, ones where words and word choice are in large part the scholarly product itself or where a clever and original turn of phrase is one of the things that are heavily valorized.

It would be hard to avoid in polisci, where editors are always yelling at you to cut everything by a third to half to make room for one more acceptance.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 1:26 PM on January 3 [4 favorites]

Undergrads aren't doing original research and are fundamentally incapable of doing so. Doing original research requires building a bank of expertise deep enough to understand where that particular research program is and how it got there.

Yeah, disagree on this one as someone in the sciences--and someone who has had a well-received paper in STEM published entirely on the basis of a new conceptual approach to a long-published body of facts, not even a novel analysis of an existing dataset. Ideas actually are sometimes novel when it comes to the framework with which we approach complex topics. In theory, there's nothing I can see that differs between the mock review papers I wrote as a senior undergrad and the ones I wrote as a junior grad student, and those latter ones were at least in theory supposed to be of good enough quality to submit for publication.

I think the way we teach plagiarism at the undergraduate level is in fact stupid, poorly articulated, and sets up people to misunderstand the point of avoiding plagiarism in a conversation among equals. If the important thing is assessing student mastery of thought via examining the argument posed in the student's own words, then that is sufficient justification for requiring rephrases where possible in a paper. If the important thing is correctly attributing ideas and the sources of existing knowledge, especially in the natural sciences, then we have to actually explain that to them and show them what it's like to try and find the original source for a claim that turns out to be based in a 1997 paper that cites "personal observation." Citations, then, aren't only attribution and credit for existing ideas: they're breadcrumb trails to the origins of claims about the universe made by previous thinkers. Suddenly using them becomes much more intuitive for students.

(Similarly, I think the common STEM undergraduate paper-writing requirement for all cited papers to be no more than 5 years old gives instructors an easily-graded metric to approach and narrows down the available pool of papers for an easily overwhelmed undergraduate to sift through. I also think it encourages scholars at all levels to approach the literature without a grasp of the basic history of the field and inappropriately cite fourth-degree sources when a first-degree one is perfectly viable. Old research is often still insightful, and it drives me nuts that this isn't a widely accepted viewpoint in some fields.)

I think the pedagogy has long since lost sight of the point regarding the way that citations, quotations, and word choice artifacts are treated. That said, I think that if this is the asinine standard we hold undergraduates to, it's real bad fucking optics for the president of the university to claim (correctly or otherwise!) that this doesn't matter in the real world.
posted by sciatrix at 1:48 PM on January 3 [12 favorites]

Fair enough; I stand corrected!
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 1:52 PM on January 3 [4 favorites]

Ha, and I was re-reading up and worrying if I'd missed the point of your argument vis a vis the way things work in humanities! But yeah... look, in both animal behavior and ecology, it's actually still fairly common to see written, metaphorical models dueling in terms of ideas that are then tested on the wargrounds of mathematical models. (Which is exactly what happened next in terms of the one I was involved with, actually.) Those framework ideas about how natural forces work--or might work!--can be important contributions in their own right. The actual word choice? Oh, fuck that, it's almost as awful as those hand-written copies of organic chemistry instructions conveyed in the passive voice I had to do in undergrad.

I do take your meaning about undergraduates rarely being capable of original research, of course. I don't necessarily expect undergraduate papers to be up to the standard I'd expect from a graduate student, any more than I expect a high schooler to turn in a paper I'd expect from a college student.

What a damned mess. So, so glad I'm not anywhere near the Ivies myself. No thank you.

For real? I mean, I heard that as gossip for a longtime, but when you're hearing it as part of the Camberville MIT crowd, you have to discount it a little as MIT chauvinism.

For what it's worth, I've had two different friends in wildly different departments at Harvard (religious studies and ecology) and have heard similar stories. The grade inflation at these institutions is just absolutely unreal. It's not just Harvard; I've heard the same from Duke, Princeton, Yale--anything with a big name slapped on it.
posted by sciatrix at 2:07 PM on January 3 [5 favorites]

Here's a tweet from Sequoia Capital VC Shaun Maguire bragging about how their investment in Musk buying Twitter has paid off in, among other things, getting Claudine Gay fired. (screenshot).
posted by Nelson at 2:11 PM on January 3 [8 favorites]

Preach, sciatrix! I’ve been working on getting folks at my university to take the approach to academic integrity you describe - we have an “academic integrity” policy in the university calendar, but it only talks about academic disintegrity, and only the most common forms of that, as well, with no context. Some of my colleagues have been complaining of the increasing ease with which students seem to be cheating (which may reflect more resources available on the internet, though perhaps also reflects more tools for us as faculty to catch cheating as well), but do not give their students any compelling reason why they shouldn’t cheat - no positive vision of academic integrity to compete with the grade and degree requirements that are becoming increasingly high stakes for students in our current economy.
posted by eviemath at 2:12 PM on January 3 [5 favorites]

ocschwar My partner graded a bunch of assignments, including one that met Harvards definition of plagiarism which she gave a D grade to and then submitted them to the professor in charge of the course. The professor wrote back with notes on who should get their grades bumped up (almost all to low Bs at the least) and particularly noted the D grade. She pushed back a little on it but the professor basically said that if they gave that person a D, they’d make a big deal out of it and it would be easier for everybody to just give them a high C/low B and move on. My partner was completely burned out at the time and didn’t have the will to make it more of a thing so the student got bumped up. My understanding is that this was common practice but I only witnessed personally this particularly incident (like I actually read the back and forth emails with the professor). Another incident involving my partner a student blew off a paper deadline (submitted nothing) bc they were on the football team as an explanation (at HARVARD like who cares?!) and got an extension and another student blew off an exam (no showed, no explanation) and when called on it told my partner they had a job interview at some talent agency in LA and got to make it up.
posted by youthenrage at 2:21 PM on January 3 [8 favorites]

I think the way we teach plagiarism at the undergraduate level is in fact stupid, poorly articulated, and sets up people to misunderstand the point of avoiding plagiarism in a conversation among equals.

Oh don't worry, it's also this way in some master's programs. I have to pre-submit assignments to a turnitin.com module on d2l and if it's too high, I'm supposed to edit it and resubmit until it's under some threshold. Nothing but lip service is ever given to actual academic writing. It's infuriating.
posted by lizjohn at 2:46 PM on January 3 [10 favorites]

If I firmly believe that all religious indoctrination and education is immoral, and that parents should be banned from raising their children in any faith tradition, including bans on circumcision, bar/bat mitzvahs, baptisms, Sunday school, etc., I am, by a pretty straightforward reading of the UN definition, advocating for the genocide of the Jewish people, and most other faith based communities to boot. But that also seems like a perfectly reasonable position for an academic to have—does anyone really think that a professor espousing such a position should be held in violation of Harvard’s anti-bullying policy?
posted by rishabguha at 3:04 PM on January 3 [2 favorites]

Names withheld to protect the guilty here... I remember one time I taught an undergrad writing course w/ a couple of student athletes in it on the U's lacrosse team, and for one of the writing assignments three or four of the lax players turned in what was effectively the same essay with very minor cosmetic differences (like "But this one has a moustache and glasses!" cosmetic differences). I gave their assignments a failing grade in accordance with the school's academic integrity policy and very soon after got a lecture from an assistant coach about the relative values of the school's academic integrity policy and the school's lacrosse team's prestige. Like youthenrage's above, this story ends with all of the athletes getting Bs on that assignment by administrative decree.

ETA this was not an ivy league but a large state school with a pretty good reputation as large state schools go.
posted by Pickman's Next Top Model at 3:05 PM on January 3 [11 favorites]

Claudine Gay is "using the NYTimes for this": Claudine Gay: What Just Happened at Harvard Is Bigger Than Me.
posted by Nelson at 3:09 PM on January 3

"Follow the money" always proves useful.

Chief among the campaigners celebrating the resignation of Claudine Gay as president of Harvard University was a man who arguably did the most to push Gay, Harvard’s first Black president, out of the door: Bill Ackman, a billionaire hedge-fund manager and Harvard alumnus.

-- The Guardian

Gay made a mistake on full public display, which Rufo et al. were prepared for. The apology might have sufficed had it not been for Rufo, and the plagiarism might have as well, in the absence of other complaints, but the two together combined with people like Ackerman willing to threaten Harvard's cash flow was a perfect storm.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 3:09 PM on January 3 [6 favorites]

It's a little depressing that Ctrl F + Gorsuch in this thread and in most articles about Claudine Gay yields zero results.

This whole thing -- political and social discourse and processes in America -- sometimes seems so hopeless, because Democrats, women who are seen as part of "The Left," and minorities are held to a standard of "Even the appearance of impropriety must be avoided;" and should you actually commit a transgression, then "The Left" will pull some "Black police showing out for the white cop" shit and lead the charge to get rid of you. And the same folks on the middle and in the right who weep and moan about Cancel Culture will be there grinnin' and dancin' as the band plays you off the stage. Apologies won't cut it, nor will you have a chance to make amends.

By contrast, if you're on the right, you probably won't even get a cross look from the middle and the right for your small to medium improprieties -- as long as your sins don't include disloyalty to the made men and the bosses in the Republican party. And chances are you'll fall up after committing major transgressions.

Thing is, I'm in alignment with the idea that folks on "my side" ought to have known better and should face the music for screw ups: Acorn absolutely should have seen some consequences for even appearing to facilitate election fraud, Franken absolutely should have resigned, Gay absolutely deserves all the heat in the world for her missteps.

But it hurts to see us stumble right into the jaws of these traps again and again, it hurts to see the fascists/racists/$phobes do their victory laps, it hurts to see very nearly no consequences when people on the right do the same or worse.

(In the interest of disclosure, note that I am a black leftist and Harvard grad who has personal experience with "When a cishet white conservative dude in this organization does a bad thing, it's minor; but when *you* do a bad thing, we shall unleash hell.")
posted by lord_wolf at 3:14 PM on January 3 [18 favorites]

But it hurts to see us stumble right into the jaws of these traps again and again

the only problem here is if there isn't someone ready to step into Gay's place (and Franken's, et cetera) and proceed with the same agenda undeterred. If the cause is important, the cause's figurehead should be replaceable in a heartbeat.
posted by ocschwar at 3:19 PM on January 3 [1 favorite]

If the cause is important, the cause's figurehead should be replaceable in a heartbeat.

This is an oversimplification. First of all, what is the cause?

Is this about a career, is that the cause? Does Claudine Gay represent something to a community of people? I'd like to know the cause in this instance. Let's say Claudine Gay represents progress to people who've never seen a black woman serve as President of Harvard. Are the events leading to her abrupt resignation part of some cause? Is her resignation serving to illuminate the problem of plagiarism in higher education? Will her resignation reduce anti-Semitism on campuses?

This is all a load of shit. Comments in this thread are sufficient to lead anyone with a brain to keep their head down, trust no-one, and don't get involved in causes.
posted by elkevelvet at 3:25 PM on January 3 [6 favorites]

A call for Black genocide would result in instant, unequivocal, and universal (well, at least from everyone who's not literally in the KKK) condemnation.

Yes, it would and it should result in universal moral condemnation. But as a matter of law & university policy, I'm not sure that it would be illegal speech or a violation of university policy. I am not a lawyer, but as far as I'm aware, the relevant first amendment case is Brandenburg v. Ohio. In that case, a KKK leader gave a speech calling for "revengeance" [sic] against "N------" and "Jews" & encouraged a march on Congress to oppose the president, Congress, and Supreme Court for suppressing "the white, Caucasian race." In a second speech, the leader also called for the forced expulsion of African Americans to Africa and all Jews to Israel.

Liz Magill, the former president of the University of Pennsylvania, already resigned before Dr. Claudine Gay. At about the same time that Magill was being brought before Congress to be accused of facilitating anti-Semitism and genocidal speech, Penn law professor Amy Wax invited the White nationalist Jared Taylor to her class as a guest lecturer. A lot of strongly worded letters against Wax and Taylor were passed back and forth, but neither has been sanctioned.

And a lot of the same people who were demanding Claudine Gay's ouster would be the same people who would view sanctioning Professor Amy Wax as "cancel culture." The example mentioned in Congressional testimony was a hypothetical, not an actual incident. If you applied the Brandenburg standard to the hypothetical case, if somebody's advocacy for genocide actually threatened to incite imminent violence committed against somebody else, that would not be protected by the First Amendment & that would then be presumably against law & university policy too. But what if somebody advocated genocide in a pamphlet & there was no imminent threat & nobody had any wherewithal to commit any violence, let alone genocide? As far as Brandenburg (which is still good law) is concerned, that is still covered by the First Amendment. You may think that it shouldn't be. But the presidents who have been subject to Congressional witch hunt were simply going off based on what First Amendment law really is in this country.
posted by jonp72 at 3:47 PM on January 3 [13 favorites]

It's a little depressing that Ctrl F + Gorsuch in this thread and in most articles about Claudine Gay yields zero results.

Here's the relevant article from Politico from 2017: Gorsuch's writings borrow from other authors. I'm pretty sure that this will not result in Neil Gorsuch's resignation from the Supreme Court, even though there is no consistent, non-partisan definition of "plagiarism" that could simultaneously convict Claude Gay and exonerate Neil Gorsuch.

That data point alone is enough to tell you that the Elise Stefanik hearings & the resignations of President Liz Magill and President Claudine Gay have about as little to do with "plagiarism" as Gamergate had to do with "ethics in games journalism."
posted by jonp72 at 3:52 PM on January 3 [14 favorites]

It's a little depressing that Ctrl F + Gorsuch in this thread and in most articles about Claudine Gay yields zero results.

We already covered that above. That Republicans do not believe the laws they enforce should apply to them is a non-sequitur; otherwise, exactly what is it that makes Democrats better than them? That so many establishment Democrats are shrinking violets in the face of minor Republican admonishment is an issue with the party and has been for a long time.
posted by The_Vegetables at 3:59 PM on January 3 [4 favorites]

This is an oversimplification. First of all, what is the cause?

Doesn't matter. Whatever the cause, if it matters, there should be a full bull pen.

The cause, as far as I am concerned, is Harvard's ability to function as something approaching and striving for the Platonic ideal of Harvard. Seems that's been forfeited already, so go for it and propose your alternatives. Whatever it is, it should matter more than Claudine Gay herself.
posted by ocschwar at 4:06 PM on January 3

There are two categories of issue here that are being conflated.

The surface issues include "did Gay plagarize" and "did Gay fail to condemn calls for genocide" and "did Gay fail to find the right magic words to answer a gotcha question".

The other issues are the deeper questions. Things like "Why was this happening in the firat place" and "will this continue the chilling effect on pro-Palestinian speech" and "shouldn't it matter that bad acting antisemites are politically weaponizing false accusations of antisemitism"

Both are valid, but it's important to remember that the surface issues are just that: surface. That at core this isn't about any of those things, it's about racist, sexist, antisemitic, right wing choads setting out to ruin a successful Black woman and also continuing their decades long attack on higher education.

I'd argue that while the surface topics are interesting, they are of less importance than the deeper questions and the really deep question of "how can we effectively work against right wing efforts of this nature"

Thank you sotonohito for clarifying this. I've been reading this thread and it's been saddening, fascinating, confusing, and elucidating, with many twists and turns. Your comment provided a nice spot to rest and take a breath.

In that spirit, I might suggest my own dichotomy: emotional truth and technical truth. My sense of Dr. Gay's response was that she failed to acknowledge the emotional truth suggested by the question. I am not sophisticated when it comes to politics, so I'll defer to other MeFi users who say this was a gotcha question-- that seems highly probable based on what I know of right wing American politicians today. Even as a gotcha question, though, it suggested an emotional truth that the answer should have acknowledged, which is that nobody should ever, under any circumstances, be calling for genocide of Jews or anybody else on a college campus unless they are acting in a theatrical production. They may technically have the option to do so, but they shouldn't. I would like to believe that Dr. Gay or anybody else of her caliber would have the capacity to acknowledge this emotional truth while also answering with technical specificity. Even in a congressional testimony that is high pressure and has legal ramification, I think this would be the decent thing to do.

That being said, I imagine the pressure on (the first! ugh!) black, female president of Harvard in a congressional testimony would be enormous, and I understand that falling back on technical speech can be a defense mechanism. I do this myself sometimes, so I can't fault her for doing the same, but I also understand that it was a really bad moment for higher ed. The panel did not represent higher ed very well to the American public.

Like I said, I'm not very sophisticated when it comes to politics, but my sense is that the right wing understands emotional truth better than the left. And not only in a slimy, manipulative way (although there is plenty of that). I accept the premise that the majority of right wing voters are not awful people, so I accept that right wing politicians are speaking a truth to them that is powerful enough to drown out the lies, overt racism, and scary fascism. The left seems behind on this. John Fetterman might be one of the few new politicians on the left who can acknowledge and speak to emotional truths; we certainly haven't had presidential candidates in the last twenty years who could do so. Dr. Gay is not a politician, but she is kind of, and she is in keeping with a long line of folks on the left who did not represent the left very well to the public when it comes to emotional truths.

There is A LOT going on with this situation and most of it I won't pretend to fully understand; I did find, however that this dichotomy clarified certain aspects it for me in ways nobody had mentioned yet (that I read anyway).
posted by MyBeautifulThrowaway at 4:23 PM on January 3 [10 favorites]

Also, the embarrassment of Harvard hiring it's first black president in the year of 2023, like 15 years after a US president (so the bar is really low) and that they let "fire all poor people" Larry Summers be president for a while means that Harvard President grouping isn't really that esteemed.
posted by The_Vegetables at 4:49 PM on January 3 [10 favorites]

I'd argue that while the surface topics are interesting, they are of less importance than the deeper questions and the really deep question of "how can we effectively work against right wing efforts of this nature"

Well, for me, a good first step would be to stop treating ratfuckers who act in bad faith as anything else. It still amazes me that, after they literally spelled out how all this was a planned campaign, that we have people arguing that we are somehow still obliged to treat their words with any sort of credulity.

This is the point Sartre made in his famous quote - you can either let your principles be weaponized against you, or you can treat their bad faith as such.
posted by NoxAeternum at 5:02 PM on January 3 [16 favorites]

Professor Danielle Allen of Harvard, please come to the blue courtesy phone.

Same background as Claudine Gay.

It's the presidency of Harvard. If I can find this lady in just a cursory glance at Musk's hellsite, why the hell can't other people? If Harvard really wanted to score a gut punch against racist reactionaries, they should have had her in the bullpen ready to take Claudine Gay's job at a moment's notice.

This isn't rocket science. Staff a bullpen, and keep it staffed. That's how you advance causes and protect institutions.
posted by ocschwar at 5:04 PM on January 3 [3 favorites]

You seem to be conflating the claim that “this was a baseless right wing hit job against a black woman” with “Harvard rulezz!!!”
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 6:11 PM on January 3 [1 favorite]

Rufo is a professional character assassin for hire, as long as his targets are somehow related to the Left. He’s hit trans people, the president of Harvard now, and he’s now creeping on a rooftop with his sniper rifle and custom bullets preparing for his next target (or going back to trans people again as the behest of the Project 2025 crowd).

Stefanik is so crooked she needs to screw on her clothes every morning.

Gay tried to bring nuance to a shit-flinging competition and found out that the winners are the ones with the biggest buckets, and she brought a child’s beach sand pail.

None of them are innocent, but I can see which one is a POC who got hit by the right wing shit flinging machine and finally decided that the Joshua Maneuver was the best option(“The only way to win is not to play.”)
posted by mephron at 6:40 PM on January 3 [11 favorites]

An interesting angle to this that hasn't really come up is the requirement that high level admins have similarly high level scholarly credentials. My understanding is that Gay's were relatively thin.

Why does academia insist that it's top administrators also be accomplished scholars? Hospital CEOs are not all doctors, manufacturing CEOs need not be engineers, etc. Why is academia different? If this requirement were removed, there would be less incentive for mediocre scholars who are good administrators to illegitimately pad their academic CVs to further their administrative careers.
posted by sid at 7:12 PM on January 3 [4 favorites]

Secondly, the "State action" doctrine comes into play: essentially, in places where the state and the private institution are so intertwined that private action essentially becomes state action; such as when private institutions receive large amounts of public funds or support.

Has that doctrine ever actually been found to apply to any private university? The closest thing I can find is this decision, but the "intertwining" was substantially more than just receiving a lot of state money.
posted by BungaDunga at 7:15 PM on January 3 [1 favorite]

Hospital CEOs are not all doctors

US hospital administration seems pretty bad, though. These were the people that were laying off doctors at the peak of the pandemic, right?
posted by ryanrs at 7:29 PM on January 3 [6 favorites]

(though upon reflection, I guess the state action doctrine is kind of neither here nor there if Massachusetts has something like California's Leonard Law)
posted by BungaDunga at 7:35 PM on January 3 [1 favorite]

Professor Danielle Allen of Harvard, please come to the blue courtesy phone.

Same background as Claudine Gay.

It's the presidency of Harvard. If I can find this lady in just a cursory glance at Musk's hellsite, why the hell can't other people? If Harvard really wanted to score a gut punch against racist reactionaries, they should have had her in the bullpen ready to take Claudine Gay's job at a moment's notice.

I couldn't make heads or tails of that twitter thread you linked to, but I think the implication might be that Allen is too conservative for the Harvard presidency? Here's what she thinks about the whole Stefanik/Gay kerfuffle. Briefly, she argues that:

Regardless of what initial intentions student protesters might have for chants such as “globalize the intifada,” or any of the other slogans associated with eliminating Jewish people from Israel’s land, they can no longer pretend not to know that their use causes many people a reasonably felt sense of intimidation.

And proposes the policy that:

If the communications you use while protesting would constitute harassment if targeted at a specific individual, the presumption will be that the protest method is likely to create a pattern of generalized intimidation incompatible with a culture of mutual respect.
...
If you continue to use forms of communication that would be taken by a reasonable person as harassment if targeted at a specific individual, you will be sanctioned through customary disciplinary procedures.

We are an educational institution, so our scale of sanctions begins with an opportunity for learning and correction; it can, however, end in expulsion.

In other words, protests that use the words "globalize the intifada" or similar should be addressed with sanctions up to and including expulsion.

Is she still in your "bullpen"? Wait until you read what she has to say about antiracism.
posted by mr_roboto at 8:06 PM on January 3 [4 favorites]

Why does academia insist that it's top administrators also be accomplished scholars? Hospital CEOs are not all doctors, manufacturing CEOs need not be engineers, etc. Why is academia different?

Hospital CEOs who come from a managerial background are how we get horrendous rises in hospital complications.

Manufacturing CEOs who are not engineers is what got Boeing to flush its reputation down the toilet with the Dreamliner.

We had an earlier story on The Blue about the Mckinseyfication of corporate America and how ground-floor-to-C-suite is no longer a thing there. We can't have the same happening in academia. That's how a university turns into a football club with a side hustle in career training.
posted by ocschwar at 8:34 PM on January 3 [12 favorites]

If you continue to use forms of communication that would be taken by a reasonable person as harassment if targeted at a specific individual, you will be sanctioned through customary disciplinary procedures.

Or to rephrase to so many other contexts used so many other times here:

Young man, your choice of words is a dog whistle because of what it means in a context not all that different from this one. You're a student at an elite university. Find another slogan to chant or else.

Not sure the or-else part really should be university policy, but I've seen people argue for the affirmative here, so no, I don't think it disqualifies Professor Allen from being Harvard president.
posted by ocschwar at 8:42 PM on January 3

though upon reflection, I guess the state action doctrine is kind of neither here nor there if Massachusetts has something like California's Leonard Law

Yeah, I think it's interesting mainly in terms of why this stuff is never easy or simple. There's also a few other 1A issues and even contractual issues around what's said/promised to students in the handbook and other forums, but the main point is that people suggesting that the head of the university testifying doesn't incur liability is just incorrect.

But more broadly: the real reason she was likely asked to resign is because her words and actions made Harvard's donors uncomfortable. Harvard (and its law school) have been under a lot of pressure from donors that have been threatening to withdraw money from the school unless they clamp down on pro-Palestinian protests they don't like, and I imagine that Gay's actually nuanced statement was considered a bridge too far for those donors. It's not about the plagiarism, that's just the excuse.
posted by corb at 8:54 PM on January 3 [10 favorites]

As a Jew, I urge my fellow Jews to stop making comparisons to the experience of being Black.

Thank you for saying this, latkes. One of the things that has really made me step back from some online spaces including MeFi is this universal tendency people have to trot out a comparison with black people whenever there's a shocking point to be made, even if we have nothing to do with the conversation. It usually comes off as if the person drawing the analogy has some kind of passive-aggressive resentment of black people's very limited success at calling out racism.

People who are just malicious right-wing trolls aren't going to care anyway, but just an fyi to people who consider themselves liberals, leftists, progressives, or "allies," if your first reaction to some unremedied injustice perpetrated against you and yours is "what about the blacks," that is highly sus. In my opinion that is. Can't speak for how other black people feel on this matter.

Anyway, back to Dr. Gay, my personal feeling is that she was done an injustice here. I mean the NY Times or any other mainstream media organ couldn't seem to remember for more than one news cycle any of the very many antisemitic things that the president of the entire country said and did. But they remembered Dr. Gay over and over again, stretching this out into torturous weeks. I imagine people must've been advising her, badly, to ride this one out and eventually the story would move on to other things. IMO once the first plagiarism accusation dropped, she should've realized on her own that there was unfortunately no escaping her fate. And for that, as well as the whole "depends on what the meaning of is is"-ness of her testimony, she mainly has herself to blame.
posted by xigxag at 9:54 PM on January 3 [14 favorites]

Zionist donors are going to repeat this exact playbook all over the place at every type of institution that takes their money.

All the now reason not to do even a little bit of supposedly excusable plagiarism.

you can either let your principles be weaponized against you, or you can treat their bad faith as such.

It's the old problem of principles: if you have them, they can be used against you by people who don't. The solution is to live by your principles. It sucks that a bunch of hypocrits who don't live up to your ideals can call you out for not doing so, but if you actually care about your ideals, you take the accusations seriously even if made in bad faith. Because scab if they are in bad faith, if you care about your principles, you should care that you're violating them.

So, the best defense against having your principles weaponised against you is to live by them. It doesn't matter if the guy calling you out genuinely believes the offense or crime is a problem - if we do, then we have to take it seriously.
posted by Dysk at 11:29 PM on January 3 [5 favorites]

One day, when the first perfect person makes it to adulthood, we'll finally have the ability to stand up for what is right, and the bad-faith hypocrites will back down when faced with the righteous fury of the one who is without sin or error.

Unfortunately, until then, I don't know anyone who has completely and utterly indisputably lived up to all of their principles. Must be in with a bad crowd.
posted by Audreynachrome at 12:18 AM on January 4 [10 favorites]

Which is more reason to be seen to be taking them seriously. You don't need to be perfect, and in fact, if Gay's plagiarism (it looks that way to me, as someone with a postgrad politics background) had been dealt with rather than ignored in the first place, it wouldn't be a skeleton to get out the closet now.
posted by Dysk at 12:20 AM on January 4 [4 favorites]

The Real Harvard Scandal: Claudine Gay is not the real story. Academics debase their profession when they redefine plagiarism to suit their politics

The true scandal of the Claudine Gay affair is not a Harvard president and her plagiarism. The true scandal is that so many journalists and academics were willing, are still willing, to redefine plagiarism to suit their politics. Gay’s boosters have consistently resorted to Orwellian doublespeak—“duplicative language” and academic “sloppiness” and “technical attribution issues”—in a desperate effort to insist that lifting entire paragraphs of another scholar’s work, nearly word for word, without quotation or citation, isn’t plagiarism. Or that if it is plagiarism, it’s merely a technicality. Or that we all do it. (Soon after Rufo and Brunet made their initial accusations last month, Gay issued a statement saying, “I stand by the integrity of my scholarship.” She did not address those or subsequent plagiarism allegations in her resignation letter.)

Rufo won this round of the academic culture war because he exposed so many progressive scholars and journalists to be hypocrites and political actors who were willing to throw their ideals overboard. I suspect that, not the tenure of a Harvard president, was the prize he sought all along. The tragedy is that we didn’t have to give it to him.

posted by Noisy Pink Bubbles at 2:17 AM on January 4 [8 favorites]

With respect, I think you're going to see a real divide here between people working in humanities and people in STEM and empirical social sciences.

As someone trained in the humanities who does research in a science department and teaches or supervises graduates in both, I don't see a divide at all when it comes to the understanding of plagiarism.
posted by GeorgeBickham at 3:27 AM on January 4 [1 favorite]

Incredible that people are trying to paint this as a "right-wing hit job" (worse, some Zionist conspiracy against someone insufficiently pro-Israel). The plagiarism is clear-cut and would get a student suspended (at the least). In her case, it was systematic and over a long period of time. As a Harvard student said, having her as President makes signing the Harvard honor code a farce.
posted by Jon44 at 5:52 AM on January 4 [4 favorites]

No one is painting it as a "right-wing hit job"

It is objectively a right-wing hit job. They are openly bragging about it.
posted by mrjohnmuller at 6:05 AM on January 4 [23 favorites]

They are openly bragging about it.
It's a perverse symbiotic relationship where self-promoters like Rufo claim credit and then Progressives get to make him the bogeyman. The key players were more the wealthy alumni like Ackman, current professors who felt lied to by the board (who tried to claim there was no plagiarism), and the beat reporters who dug up the examples.
And whatever the intent of anyone involved, the plagiarism stands on its own as does the fact that it clearly violates Harvard's own rules.
posted by Jon44 at 6:11 AM on January 4 [1 favorite]

The Real Harvard Scandal: Claudine Gay is not the real story. Academics debase their profession when they redefine plagiarism to suit their politics

Tyler, someone who is not a social scientist, tweeted out about how if anyone thinks Gay didn't plagiarize, then they should post writing of theirs that they wouldn't mind being copied. A whole bunch of researchers did so. Here are the gems:

"A distribution of posteriors is Bayes plausible if the expected posterior probability equals the prior"

"ATLAS uses a right-handed coordinate system with its origin at the nominal interaction point (IP) in the center of the detector and the 𝑧-axis along the beam pipe. The 𝑥-axis points from the IP to the center of the LHC ring, and the 𝑦-axis points upwards. Cylindrical..."

"The uncertainty in the combined 2015-2018 integrated luminosity is 0.83% [DAPR-2021-01], obtained using the LUCID-2 detector [LUCID2] for the primary luminosity measurements, complemented by measurements using the inner detector and calorimeters."

And my favorite:

“The fundamental problem of causal inference is that we can only observe one of these potential outcomes for any particular unit.”

To anyone saying Gay is a super bad plagiarist---If I write in one of my papers that "the fundamental problem of causal inference is that we can only observe one of the potential outcomes for a unit" without attribution, am I a plagiarist?
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 6:12 AM on January 4 [13 favorites]

I think, as many have pointed out here on this thread, the alleged incidents of plagiarism are very much a nothing-burger. A rounding error, at the worst. Even the people who wrote the things Gay is accused of plagiarizing from have come to her defense.

Pretending that this is a justified outcome is just silly.
posted by mrjohnmuller at 6:14 AM on January 4 [16 favorites]

It was strange to read the news about Gay’s resignation because it doesn’t affect me yet I felt a distinct sinking feeling in my stomach. Her resignation isn’t a win for academic integrity. It isn’t going to make things better for Jewish people on campus who feel unsafe. It’s just a win for those acting in bad faith. That’s pretty discouraging.
posted by kat518 at 6:15 AM on January 4 [12 favorites]

It is gaslighting to suggest that she was ousted for plagiarism. This is no more about plagiarism than Gamergate was about ethics in journalism.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 6:21 AM on January 4 [26 favorites]

It sucks that a bunch of hypocrits who don't live up to your ideals can call you out for not doing so, but if you actually care about your ideals, you take the accusations seriously even if made in bad faith. Because scab if they are in bad faith, if you care about your principles, you should care that you're violating them.

This is surrendering your principles to people who don't give a shit about them, which is the point that Sartre was making. Bad faith should never be treated as anything else, because treating it as anything else rewards malefactors.
posted by NoxAeternum at 6:28 AM on January 4 [10 favorites]

[Harvard insider's scoop on why tide turned against Gay (from Twitter)]:
-Loss of faculty confidence tipped the scale.
*Including many of Gay’s previous supporters.*
-Made clear to the corporation & Gay herself.
-Everyone knew a public faculty revolt was in no one’s interest & would end w her gone.
Why?
-Gay put faculty in an absurd position w students.
-Frustration w Gay’s lack of remorse, didn’t explain herself, come clean.
-Anger at corp for the BS investigation that initially led faculty to take her side. They felt duped.
-Institutional harm
posted by Jon44 at 6:37 AM on January 4 [2 favorites]

For reasons that should be abundantly obvious, Twitter is not a reliable source for accurate information on anything.
posted by mrjohnmuller at 6:38 AM on January 4 [5 favorites]

Also, no one was harmed, at all, by Gay's alleged plagiarism. For all the rule-sticklers out there, do you really think what she did warrants her being forced to step down? That what she did was so egregious (even there there are no victims and the people who were alledgedly plagiarized are like, no this isnt plagiarisim) that she needed to resign?
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 6:46 AM on January 4 [1 favorite]

This is purely a signal to colleges and universities: step in line, or else.

We can have a conversation about plagiarism and ethics in higher education. To say this event should prompt that conversation is beyond disgusting.

We can have a conversation about anti-Semitism on campuses. To say this Congressional hearing has illuminated the issue in any way, or will serve to improve things, is grossly mistaken.
posted by elkevelvet at 6:50 AM on January 4 [13 favorites]

One comment removed. Please be sensitive to context, per the Guidelines and be careful about the usage of the phrase "Zionist donors" .
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 7:20 AM on January 4 [6 favorites]

There was a really interesting interview some years back with one of the sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. As folks likely know, the Rosenbergs were framed and executed for treason during the McCarthy era. Various material had become declassified and the son had been investigating the case, maybe was involved with a documentary or something? Anyway, if I recall correctly, they found that there was maybe some evidence that Julius passed some information to the USSR (though nothing of sufficient value to warrant execution), but that this evidence was not available to McCarthy and his investigators, who quite clearly framed the couple (and, in particular, made their accusations against Ethel in part to pressure Julius to making some sort of confession, while not themselves even believing that Ethel had engaged in espionage). That, retroactively, it appears that Julius did engage in a small amount of espionage does not change the fact that McCarthyism was wrong and quite harmful to the US, however.

I don’t have a stake in Gay’s academic area nor is Harvard an institution I look to for leadership on anything, and thus have neither the interest or patience to wade through the evidence linked in the fpp (I tried, but that “report” is certainly undergrad level writing, itself, that did not seem to cite its own sources or methodology). Thus I have no personal conclusion or opinion on the plagiarism allegations. They may be true, they may not be true. What is clear is that, separately, there has been a right wing hit job against her. The motivation for digging up any dirt they could find on Gay was clearly stated as retaliation for her Congressional testimony and for viewing her as too lenient against students protesting against the war on Gaza. Even for those of you who believe that Gay violated Harvard’s policies for faculty, or those of you who believe that she didn’t violate policies for faculty, but did violate policies for students and find it unfair that there is a difference between the two, it can simultaneously be true and be a significant problem that we are entering another era of right wing politically motivated smears and hit jobs. If (and I say if because, again, this is not of significant enough importance to me for me to have an informed opinion about, so my language reflects my own uncertainty, not imputing any uncertainty on anyone else’s part) the plagiarism accusations are valid, that would be relevant to Harvard and to Gay’s academic research community, but much less so to the rest of the country and is not a defence of the particular timing and evident racism in selection of whose academic work has received this level of scrutiny. On the national politics level, we must (also, for those of you with Harvard connections) be concerned with the political impact of this, and not ignore the connections with the pressure campaigns against other universities, both from Congress and in individual states such as DeSantis’ campaign against liberal/liberal arts education in Florida.
posted by eviemath at 7:21 AM on January 4 [20 favorites]

Also, in regards to Harvard and "we have to take the allegations seriously", the fact that Alan Dershowitz remains a professor emeritus in good standing blows that particular argument out of the water, especially after this week.
posted by NoxAeternum at 7:25 AM on January 4 [22 favorites]

"that Harvard President grouping isn't really that esteemed" - I would disagree with one example. Drew Faust is a fine scholar and did a solid job as (first woman) president.
posted by doctornemo at 7:29 AM on January 4 [2 favorites]

Coming in late (sorry, a pile of very late and very good student work to grade) -

Two points.

1: the role of a university president is not to be an academic. (I'm saying this not only as an academic, not only based on talking with hundreds of presidents, but also from researching higher ed.) The primary role is to be a "living logo" of the institution, as one college president described it. This is massively different from being a professor, staff members, or dean/VP. The main goal of that role is.... fundraising.

We can talk about the neoliberalization of American higher ed. I'd prefer to say the privatization of the public university system (roughly 2/3rds of US colleges and universities), which have seen their state funding reduced across the board, in blue and red states alike, since circa 1980. Some schools get around 10% or less of their revenue from their state governments. This is one reason presidents have to never be on campus, as they are always out hustling for dollars.

I don't write this to celebrate the situation.

This means in a Congressional hearing they aren't acting as policy scholars.

But keep in mind Harvard - like U Penn, like MIT - is not a public institution. It's private. And speaking of which....

2: We're talking about Harvard University, the very definition of outlier American campus. It's the richest, with an endowment around $50 billion, hence the old but good joke of it basically being a hedge fund with a school attached, off to one side. It's the oldest university in the US and has staggering prestige.

It's also private. Private institutions in the US have more freedom than their public (read: state affiliated) peers. Having that financial behemoth and reputational juggernaut gives it a lot of independence.

I say this because it's not a good idea to generalize from Harvard. It's like saying "Stephen King, therefore anyone who writes."

That said, academia is a deeply, extensively, and even enthusiastically hierarchical world. Harvard influences colleges and universities way, way more than it should. For example, for decades I've heard of "Harvard envy," the desire of any university, no matter its nature or resources, to ape that pinnacle. Individual academics, our media, and national media pay outsize attention to Harvard's every twitch.

So what happened to Gay matters more than it should for the other circa 4,000 colleges and universities.
posted by doctornemo at 7:39 AM on January 4 [8 favorites]

Without speculating on anyone's politics in this space, or in meatspace United States, it's safe to say this little show trial has consumed a lot of attention and created rifts in the communities of not-hateful-Fascists

if you think that characterization is stark or hyperbolic I don't know what reality you live in, but enjoy the fantasy I guess?
posted by elkevelvet at 7:42 AM on January 4

While of course people shouldn't plagarize, let's get real. This was not about plagarism.

This was about an organized right wing movement looking to oust academic leaders, intimidate academic institutions, and silence opposition to Israel's genocide in Gaza.

They won.

That's the core issue here. Yet again the right wing won and got more intimidation and power over schools. Yet again the right wing won and got more people self censoring on one of the more pressing moral and humanitarian issues of our time.

I'll be honest here, I don't like plagarism but I hate giving the right a win even more. We can afford to have some plagarists go unpunished, we can't afford to let the right keep winning. Once universities are safe from the Michelle Bachmans and Donald Trumps THEN we can focus on possible plagarism by university presidents.

But this is like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic or argung about the wallpaper color when the hous is burning. There are bigger, more pressing, more exestentially threatening, issues at hand.

Again, I'm not saying defend Gay or that she shouldn't be peanlized for plagarism (if she did indeed plagarize). I'm saying stop letting the right win, stop letting their framing dominate, and stop letting them weaponize our principles against us.

The response should have been "I"m more interested in the efforts by the right to intimidate and control higher education, and their efforts to silence protest against Israel's inhumane actions are the real issue. It is essential that we not allow the right to continue coercing people into self censorship on the most critical humanitarian and moral issue of the day". Rather than accepting their framing and giving them control of the conversation we reframe and center on the actual issue.
posted by sotonohito at 7:49 AM on January 4 [12 favorites]

The sons of the Rosenbergs are not unbiased sources. There is not "maybe some evidence that Julius passed some information to the USSR;" Rather, "Julius was the leader of a Soviet spy ring, and Ethel actively and knowingly assisted him."

That McCarthy was scum is important, but doesn't change the fact that the Rosenbergs were spies. Similarly, that Rufo is scum is important, but doesn't change the fact that Gay violated rules against plagiarism.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 8:07 AM on January 4 [3 favorites]

Even the people who wrote the things Gay is accused of plagiarizing from have come to her defense.

Well, not all of them. Voss (also political science) has vocally supported Gay and made clear he thinks she should keep her position, but he has also made clear he sees this as clear-cut plagiarism, and that he's alarmed by how many academics are trying to pass it off as something else. (Source: his Twitter - I believe it's also in the Atlantic article above). It's possible to both agree she's plagiarized to a degree that demands correction, but also argue she should keep her position.

But again, like eviemath has eloquently put it, it doesn't really matter - the larger story here is that we have one political party that contains a large faction that is untethered to reality, that is rightly not well represented in higher education - there is no place for anti-vaccines/"slavery had some pros"/trans people are a myth/etc. in universities - professors, in my experience, tend to average out somewhere around "liberal" in terms of politics - there are some leftists, but most professors are not leftists. But it's much rarer to find a MAGA-republican (and there are many departments where they simply don't exist). And now folks like Rufo have set their sights on forming higher ed more to their liking, or at least dismantling it - look what's happening at West Virginia University - whole departments, gone.

While I certainly don't agree with Rufo et. al., I do think universities somewhat failed Republican students in the wake of the 2016 election, and we're now paying an oversized fine for it. I was at a flagship state school then - I remember students who voted for Trump writing in the student newspaper that they felt uncomfortable given how most of their professors were using class time to rail against Trump - including professors who previously had never made any political statements. I remember professors mocking those students. It was a genuinely tricky time - I remember myself feeling like it was important to not be politically neutral - neutrality didn't make sense when one side was full of hatred for so many of my students based on their various identities. I still think that's correct. But in hindsight, more should have been done to make sure students who voted for Trump didn't feel like pariahs on campus - especially since no doubt, some of them would later regret their vote - 18-22 year-olds are still figuring out what they believe, they should be allowed to make missteps. I don't blame any of the professors - their job is to teach and research - I do blame the admin though.

I suppose you could say the real problem is that universities were set up to function like Old Boys' Clubs, with their rigid hierarchy and homogeneity. That's been whittled away at a bit, but universities are still not designed/structured in a way that deals well with diversity of any sort. And our current political climate just exacerbates that problem.
posted by coffeecat at 8:10 AM on January 4 [7 favorites]

Yeah, even if she did commit plagiarism (she didn't), do I need to spell out that being a fucking spy is not the same thing as what people are alledging she did?
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 8:10 AM on January 4 [2 favorites]

I'm saying stop letting the right win

I'm curious what that would have meant in this case.
Would it have involved neither Penn nor Harvard president resigning?
How would it have changed their Congressional testimony?
posted by doctornemo at 8:13 AM on January 4

I like Nate Silver's twitter comment on the matter:

There's an order of operations here.

1) Keep your own house in order.
2) Get it in order when good-faith critics tell you that you have a problem.

If you've already failed 1 and 2, I have less than zero sympathy if it's bad-faith critics who force your hand.

posted by vincebowdren at 8:22 AM on January 4 [3 favorites]

Lol. Nate Silver has spent the last three years turning himself into the last person anyone should listen to about bad faith arguments and keeping their house in order.
posted by Glegrinof the Pig-Man at 8:40 AM on January 4 [22 favorites]

Harvard has no true independence. It can't make it without its centimillionaire and billionaire donors. It definitely can't make it if the Republicans are back next year and decide to administer a killing blow (a retroactive tax on large endowments, banning all federal grants/deductions/exemptions to schools that don't cancel all DEI policies and spending, etc.)
posted by MattD at 8:40 AM on January 4 [3 favorites]

Cheryl Rofer at LGM puts it plainly - Punch A Nazi For Academia:

Be as explicit as he is. Use his tactics against him. Don’t start out with your misgivings about DEI or the higher-education bureaucracy. When you do, you’ve already lost. You’re wasting time and exacerbating the divisions.

I recognize that the habits of higher education are hard to break. I have to almost physically restrain myself from responding to the lies in Rufo’s piece. But that’s a fool’s errand. The point of the piece, stated in the dek, is to rally his people to further attack education. Let’s talk about that instead.

Let’s talk about why the people who call themselves conservatives hate diversity and why they want to destroy the American educational system. Let’s talk about all the good that system has done and why it should be extended.

Let’s attack on multiple fronts. There’s no need to decide (another academic habit) on what is most important. It’s all useful.

Punch a Nazi for academia!

posted by NoxAeternum at 9:01 AM on January 4 [18 favorites]

How We Squeezed Harvard to Push Claudine Gay Out
Conservatives can prevail in the culture wars by understanding how power works—and using it.
By
Christopher F. Rufo

For what its worth, the Harvard corporation backed up Gay. The faculty backed up Gay. The Harvard Alumni association backed up Gay.

I cringed at Gay's response in the Congressional testimony but also realized at the same time that we are all being played. Conservatives excel at flattening every issue down to a soundbite.
posted by vacapinta at 9:03 AM on January 4 [16 favorites]

It can't make it without its centimillionaire and billionaire donors.

Harvard is financially secure, backed by a $50b endowment. Its leaders can tell racist donors to fund other racist projects elsewhere, and it was an act of cowardice on their part to cave in to this organized cabal.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 9:05 AM on January 4 [7 favorites]

For what its worth, the Harvard corporation backed up Gay.

Sorta? We now know from Gay's recent op-ed that she was receiving death threats and a barrage of hateful/racist email. At no point did Harvard's board say publicly "Hey, please cut out the death threats and racist emails to our president." I'm not sure I'd call that support.
posted by coffeecat at 9:12 AM on January 4 [7 favorites]

That McCarthy was scum is important, but doesn't change the fact that the Rosenbergs were spies. Similarly, that Rufo is scum is important, but doesn't change the fact that Gay violated rules against plagiarism.

You seem to have missed my point, which was that although it turns out that Julius Rosenberg did some espionage, that doesn’t change the fact that the trial against both him and Ethel was a farcical bit of political theatre that had significant negative impacts far beyond their individual case, and was part of a pattern of fascist intimidation and abuse of power by McCarthy and his followers, that also had hugely detrimental impacts to the US that lasted beyond the end of the Cold War even.
posted by eviemath at 9:20 AM on January 4 [14 favorites]

Part of “putting my own house in order”, to me, is focusing on the components of my “own house” that wield the most power and ensuring that they are using that power appropriately. I have no connection to, nor little care for, Harvard as an institution. I am a US citizen and care very much about what my federal government does, and how my elected officials use or abuse their power.
posted by eviemath at 9:22 AM on January 4 [7 favorites]

Speaking of donors, Robert Reich draws a bead on the influence of zillionaires here:

Kenneth Griffin – who earned billions on Wall Street and has donated more than half a billion dollars to Harvard ($300m this year alone, enough to get Harvard to name its graduate school of arts and sciences after him) – was particularly enraged by a statement made by several Harvard student organizations shortly after the 7 October Hamas attack, holding Israel responsible.

Griffin called the head of the Corporation, Penny Pritzker, urging that Gay take a more forceful stand against these students.

Bill Ackman, another Harvard alumnus and major donor, who heads the giant hedge fund Pershing Square Capital Management, demanded that Harvard release a list of members of the student organizations behind the letter.

In a string of posts on X (formerly known as Twitter) Ackman said he wanted to ensure that he and other CEOs did not “inadvertently hire any of their members”.

Seth Klarman, another wealthy financier and major donor whose name adorns Harvard buildings, also let it be known publicly that he was upset with Gay’s weak response to the Hamas attack and the student letter.

Lloyd Blankfein, former chief executive of Goldman Sachs, said: “Given the use of Harvard’s name by Hamas-supporting student groups, it was a grave mistake not to condemn the hate messages more quickly and absolutely.”

That’s only a partial list of major Harvard donors incensed at Gay.
(emphases added)

Again, I don't want to generalize from Harvard, but this is an extreme example of something I've seen elsewhere. Super-rich and activist donors can throw their weight around.

I've run into this at other private colleges and universities, less soaked with money and rep than Harvard. A donor will insist on something happening, tying up their money with it, and the thing is more likely to occur. I've seen this on a small scale, with installations appearing which nobody on campus wanted. Also at a medium-to-large scale, with new buildings cropping up. Remember, the president is a fundraiser.

At a macro level, the influence Reich detects is also powered by the accelerating wealth and power of the elite, which MeFi has tracked closely.
posted by doctornemo at 9:27 AM on January 4 [9 favorites]

doctornemo I think mostly not letting them win in the aftermath of Gay's gift to the Republicans would have involved ignoring the accusations entirely, and ignoring whatever happened to Gay entirely. Any discussion they wanted to have about Gay should be recentered on the right wing attack on higher education and efforts to encourage self censorship.

Basically, Gay doesn't matter and we shouldn't talk about her.

More proactively it means never letting them do shit like this again by trying to get academics to refuse invitations to be abused by Congressional Republicans, and teaching them to give politician's answers to questions asked by Republicans.

In the future if some Republican shitbag askes if an academic believes antisemitism should result in expulsions the answer should be something like:

"Antisemitism in any form is wrong, and I resent your implication that I'm a supporter of antisemitism.

"Why do you tolerate the presence of Rep Greene, an antisemite who made maliciously false accusations that forest fires were started 'Jewish space lasers'? When will you address the deep problem your party has with antisemitism? When will the Republicans begin motions to expel Rep Greene for her hatred of Jewish Americans and her efforts to incite violence against them?"

Ignore the question, go on the attack, and never play defense. Go in assuming the Repulicans are the enemy and be prepared with canned attack dog responses that you hammer into any question asked that is remotely inappropriate.

Never play defense. If they invite you to defend Gay ignore that and go on the attack. That's not letting them win.

If they bring up Gay, ignore that and go on the attack.

If they try to talk about other university leaders ignore that and go on the attack.

Control the conversation. Don't let them talk about what they want to talk about, make them talk about what YOU want to talk about.

"When will you denounce Donald Trump for his antisemitic comments about Jewish accountants?"

"Why do you support Elon Musk when he claims Jews are conspiring to eliminate white people?"

"The Republican Party has not prohibited members who attent antisemitic rallies and chant antisemitic slogans, why is it that you think you need the votes of antisemites to win?"

"Most Holocaust deniers are Republicans, why is your Party so attractive to people who hate Jews and think Hitler was right?"

Etc.

Never play defense. Control the conversation. Go on the attack.

This isn't debate. They have no interest in facts, they don't care if they're wrong, they are looking to display strength and put on a public display of dominance. So don't try to debate. If you debate them you lose.

I loathe Ronald Reagan, but he was 100% right about one thing, if you're explaining then you're losing.

Go on the attack. Ignore their questions and answer the question you want to answer, or ask a loaded, biased, and malicious question of your own. They are part of a movement that is filled to the brim with antisemites, it is a failure on our part that they have us on the defensive.

That's what not letting them win looks like. It looks like ignoring their bogus charges and counterpunching hard, fast, and relentlessly.

Gish gallop. Memorize a list of Republican antisemites and Republican alliances with antisemites. Toss out several of those in the most aggressive, accusatory, and mean way you can. When they respond to one, say that since they agree with you that one they didn't talk about is evil why they haven't expelled that person.

Turn the techniques they use back on them. Be hyper vigilant for anything at all you an use to make an accusation that the personyou're speaking to is antisemitic, racist, hateful, and a supporter of violence. Put them on the defensive and never let up.

Musashi said it in his Book of FIve rings:

To Hold Down a Pillow means not allowing the enemy’s head to rise.

In contests of stategy it is bad to be led about by the enemy. You must always be able to lead the enemy about. Obviously the enemy will also be thinking of doing this, but he cannot forestall you if you do not allow him to come out. In strategy, you must stop the enemy as he attempts to cut; you must push down his thrust, and throw off his hold when he tries to grapple. This is the meaning of “to hold down a pillow”. When you have grasped this principle, whatever the enemy tries to bring about in the fight you will see in advance and suppress it.

posted by sotonohito at 9:29 AM on January 4 [17 favorites]

Harvard has no true independence.

Harvard’s endowment exceeds $50 billion. I recognize that the rules around how universities can spend gifts from donors can be complicated but I don’t believe for a moment that they are helpless in the face of bad faith would-be donors declining to contribute until their demands are met. They made a choice.
posted by kat518 at 9:33 AM on January 4 [2 favorites]

The endowment may be a defense against a donor boycott, but the endowment itself is vulnerable -- a Republican President and Congress with sufficient will could dissolve Harvard and its endowment by rescinding tax benefits and imposing large endowment disbursal requirements. Maybe Stefanik is too nostalgic for it, but you know that most Republican members of Congress would be happy to see Harvard Yard sold for condos and its former faculty adjuncting at BC and U Conn.
posted by MattD at 9:41 AM on January 4 [1 favorite]

sotonohito, thank you so much for taking the time to answer me.

Attacking Republican antisemitism at scale seems like an excellent plan.
posted by doctornemo at 9:43 AM on January 4 [1 favorite]

a Republican President and Congress with sufficient will could dissolve Harvard and its endowment by rescinding tax benefits and imposing large endowment disbursal requirements.

This and related major moves against the richest parts of American higher ed: I've been tracking and forecasting such. It would have all kinds of political support:
-anti-elitism
-Democrats are fractured on higher ed support
-regionalism, if done right (focus on snooty, blue New England)
posted by doctornemo at 9:44 AM on January 4 [3 favorites]

… a Republican President and Congress with sufficient will could dissolve Harvard and its endowment by rescinding tax benefits and imposing large endowment disbursal requirements.

This seems extremely unlikely. There’s plenty of anti-Harvard sentiment but it’s outweighed by the members of Congress who want their kids to go to Harvard and have wealthy donors who want their kids to go to Harvard.
posted by kat518 at 10:21 AM on January 4 [7 favorites]

Adding on a bit to my earlier comments, I think that while it’s fair to recognize the influence that Harvard, as an institution, does have(*), that the direction of reasoning that goes ‘Harvard is influential, therefore we should care about and opine on what happens at Harvard’ is exactly backwards of how we should approach these things. A more reasonable approach would be, ‘Is what is happening at Harvard worth emulating or not? Based on that, we will decide how much influence we accept from Harvard.’

(* In my experience, Harvard’s influence as an institution - in terms of its institutional policies, who is president ,etc. - is less on academia and more on business and politics. Some Harvard researchers are leaders in their fields (though my particular sub-field doesn’t include any Harvard connections), but the institution as a whole doesn’t impact the direction of mathematics research (historically it has - what was considered important areas of math at Harvard influenced research more broadly back in the middle of the last century; but not really anymore). Harvard is not particularly at the forefront of math education reforms in higher ed currently, either - neither are they behind the times, but in my experience few math departments in the US are saying “we need to structure our undergrad or grad programs in this way because that’s how they do it at Harvard”. I did spend some time as an undergrad at a liberal arts college that competed with Harvard to some extent for students, so how Harvard did things was relevant there to some degree. But the economic and structural circumstances between Harvard and any public university are so great at this point that, even in the few cases of more prestigious flagship state universities that would compete with Harvard for some small portion of their student body, they simply can’t do things the way Harvard does, they have to make a case to prospective students about why their differences better. I’m less familiar with the fundraising side of things, so it’s quite possible that “we should do this because that’s how Harvard does it” is a more widely used argument there - Harvard certainly does have fundraising and alumni donation success.

On the other hand, graduates of Harvard Business School and Harvard Law are significantly over-represented in spaces of economic and political power, including the US Congress and Supreme Court. How these graduates act - and how a distressing number of them are abusing their power and/or seem ignorant of the economic realities of the vast majority of people - certainly does reflect on Harvard as an institution. Although it reflects more on Harvard of the past, including who was university president at the time these graduates were students, and what standards those past presidents were held to. So we might be concerned about the standards the current university president is held to in terms of how that may impact our future economic and political elite. But, to me, the correct approach is not ‘Harvard’s standards will determine the standards of our politicians and business leaders in 20+ years, therefor we have a public interest in what they are”, but rather “we should work to base future access to political and economic power on who has demonstrated our ethical values, not on which institutions have historically greased the wheels of such access”. Also, that is a less pressing issue than the current issue of the ways in which past Harvard graduates are currently abusing power that they gained through in part through their affiliation with Harvard in the past. That is, the current issue is how Stefanik, Rufo, et al’s actions reflect on Harvard. How Gay’s scholarship reflects on Harvard is a future issue that will only potentially become more widely relevant in a decade or more.)
posted by eviemath at 10:25 AM on January 4 [2 favorites]

This seems extremely unlikely.

The Speaker of the House is all-in on Trump and has made public statements about protecting the criminals who tried to overthrow the election

at this point, I don't think the Handmaid's Tale is extremely unlikely. we just saw a McCarthyesque trial take down the first female Black president of Harvard, they're just starting to flex their muscle.
posted by elkevelvet at 10:26 AM on January 4 [4 favorites]

Should Harvard be additionally looking into rescinding degrees for graduates who have used their positions of power and influence gained in part from their Harvard degree and associations for actively harmful purposes that would contravene current or former student codes of conduct?
posted by eviemath at 10:36 AM on January 4

In particular, have Rufo et al always assiduously cited their sources, including funding sources that could create the appearance or potential for conflict of interest?
posted by eviemath at 10:42 AM on January 4 [3 favorites]

What? of course not. A degree isn't a license.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 10:42 AM on January 4

Academic integrity also includes not cherry picking your data.
posted by eviemath at 10:46 AM on January 4

What? of course not. A degree isn't a license.

It’s a certification of something though. And the argument that Gay’s alleged plagiarism matters and that she should be fired over it relates to ethical conduct - no one is questioning her actual knowledge of the subject areas. The argument is that her actions in that respect reflect poorly on Harvard, even though she went through the proper certification process for gaining the employment position of university president there. So it’s a retroactive assessment that she didn’t meet the certification requirements after all. How would retroactive assessments that Harvard graduates haven’t met ethical requirements for the Harvard degree certification be substantively different?
posted by eviemath at 10:51 AM on January 4 [1 favorite]

The “report” linked in the FPP appears to be the output of someone just running all of Gay’s papers through the TurnItIn checker. Will Harvard also be doing this to everyone else in positions of institutional leadership (other upper academic administrators, board members, etc.)?
posted by eviemath at 10:56 AM on January 4 [3 favorites]

Like, if we think that what goes on at Harvard is sufficiently in the public interest that we should all be debating it, and that there’s a principle here that is important to stick up for, okay. Let’s apply it consistently.
posted by eviemath at 10:58 AM on January 4 [1 favorite]

a Republican President and Congress with sufficient will could dissolve Harvard and its endowment by rescinding tax benefits and imposing large endowment disbursal requirements

Silly hypotheticals aside, the endowment is what it is as of 2024 and Harvard's leaders made the decision they made in 2024.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 11:02 AM on January 4 [1 favorite]

The argument is that her actions in that respect reflect poorly on Harvard, even though she went through the proper certification process for gaining the employment position of university president there. So it’s a retroactive assessment that she didn’t meet the certification requirements after all.

All along, there have been allegations that the Harvard Corporation (almost always with "secretive" as the adjective) had a rushed selection process and didn't do all of their necessary due diligence. Whether or not that's true (I doubt it, I would bet she got the same background checking all other previous presidents got), I'm pretty sure that future candidates will have some or all of their work checked for this exact issue.
posted by Dip Flash at 11:06 AM on January 4

But what about current Harvard Corporation members? If we’re concerned about the principle of the matter and not being racist and sexist, we should be double-checking their credentials about now as well.
posted by eviemath at 11:09 AM on January 4 [6 favorites]

(My cynical take, assuming the concerns that their initial report looking into the plagiarism allegations was rushed and incomplete are true, is that they looked at the examples are were like, “uh, we’ve all done at least that and worse”, of course. But Harvard is also not my concern, unlike my elected government.)
posted by eviemath at 11:13 AM on January 4

Also apparently I do have opinions now that I’ve started thinking about this! :P Apologies for my fire hose of comments.
posted by eviemath at 11:13 AM on January 4 [3 favorites]

On the academic side of things, a large part of the issue is that we trust various steps of a multi-step credentialing process and don’t typically go back and re-check things except on a case-by-case basis when some concern is raised. But, especially given political interference as well as just general societal bigotry, this obviously leads to discriminatory impacts. It’s not that academic fraud and disintegrity isn’t important - it is! But we need to address any systemic failures at those various credentialing steps (notably, the lack of adequate time and incentive for careful peer review) in a non-discriminatory manner.
posted by eviemath at 11:25 AM on January 4 [3 favorites]

True but there is absolutely no way anyone can reasonbly construe this as fraud.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 11:26 AM on January 4 [2 favorites]

Pretty much every college and university Board chair right now has a quiet memo in the works to the general counsel to hire a plagiarism vendor and check the publications of the President/Chancellor and Provost, and there are going to be a lot of quiet resignations over the course of the year. Going to be a good season for search firm fees, that's for sure.
posted by MattD at 11:34 AM on January 4 [8 favorites]

Is that she was fired is a 'Republican win' playing right into Republican hands? If Harvard literally has only one black person capable of being university president, that's on them - and if they choose to replace her with some milquetoast white guy.

College presidents are replaceable the same as CEOs -it's not a job everyone can do but the field is large enough that there should be multiple black women at Harvard alone capable of doing the job. They could easily replace her with a different black lady and come out fine.
posted by The_Vegetables at 11:40 AM on January 4

^ WhyNotBoth.gif
posted by eviemath at 11:49 AM on January 4

They could easily replace her with a different black lady and come out fine.

And Chris Rufo still has his trophy. Which is the whole fucking problem.

You cannot negotiate with ratfuckers, nor can you fend them off with your conduct. There is only one language that they understand - a punch in the face (metaphorically and literally.)

Again, this is why binding our hands will never bind theirs is so important - because we will never control their conduct by diminishing ourselves. It's also why I believe in tolerance as peace treaty as well - because if they're going to foreswear the obligations of tolerance, then they foreswear the protections as well.
posted by NoxAeternum at 11:51 AM on January 4 [10 favorites]

Well, or: it’s okay to care about our principles! But one of our (the “our” that includes me, anyways) principles is equity, and it’s not okay to let bad actors pressure us into ignoring our equity principle or accept a restricted framing based on other people’s values instead of our values that requires us to abandon that principle in order to uphold another of our principles.
posted by eviemath at 12:00 PM on January 4 [1 favorite]

"An analysis by Business Insider found a similar pattern of plagiarism by Ackman's wife Neri Oxman, who became a tenured professor at MIT in 2017.

Oxman plagiarized multiple paragraphs of her 2010 doctoral dissertation, Business Insider found, including at least one passage directly lifted from other writers without citation."

posted by urbanwhaleshark at 12:08 PM on January 4 [7 favorites]

the economic and structural circumstances between Harvard and any public university are so great at this point that, even in the few cases of more prestigious flagship state universities that would compete with Harvard for some small portion of their student body, they simply can’t do things the way Harvard does, they have to make a case to prospective students about why their differences better.

Agreed, eviemath... but it doesn't stop university leaders from obsessing.
And sometimes it's over the idea of Harvard, rather than the reality.

Heck, I remember seeing all kinds of academics getting excited about this damn book, even though it's clearly and entirely about students at Yale etc.

We (American academics) are just so deeply wedded to our hierarchy, for all some of us proclaim our subversive tendencies.
posted by doctornemo at 12:17 PM on January 4

lol if Ackman's wife gets hit by this

but also lol if anyone thinks that'll make Ackman wanna give Harvard more money, or make Harvard less beholden to him
posted by ryanrs at 12:19 PM on January 4 [1 favorite]

if people want to list examples of how this take-down of Claudine Gay is hypocritical and/or transparently political, fine. there is not enough time in a day

it's not enough for power to show itself.. what is the fun if you can't rub the opponent's face in it. That is the point: the display of power and showing that it only counts when power is being applied against the out-group
posted by elkevelvet at 12:29 PM on January 4 [5 favorites]

We (American academics)

The Harvard (specifically) comparisons or envy are not something I particularly encounter as a now-Canadian academic, either. But the post is about US politics, so figured it didn’t merit mentioning previously.
posted by eviemath at 12:52 PM on January 4 [1 favorite]

In Gay's op-ed, I'm not sure she understood the well-laid trap at all. She says she should've been more forceful and given contextual examples of Hamas and/or genocide being abhorrent/unacceptable discourse. But… that *is* the trap. Because, had she been more forceful and elaborative (than the bureacratic lawyerese answer she did offer), the right-wing would've jumped at weaponizing that answer. Specifically, if Gay gave such details then she was implicitly admitting that Harvard has certain rules/policy for unacceptable speech, which lets the reactionaries ask "Aha! Here's an example of bad student protest behavior, and Harvard has done nothing about it despite your claim!". That's the trap, it's a no-win scenario in that the whole public exercise was done in bad faith.
posted by polymodus at 1:06 PM on January 4 [7 favorites]

Rufo is a board member at a public college. I wonder how closely his writings have been scrutinized for parroting the views of others without attribution.
posted by TedW at 1:08 PM on January 4 [5 favorites]

Specifically, if Gay gave such details then she was implicitly admitting that Harvard has certain rules/policy for unacceptable speech, which lets the reactionaries ask "Aha! Here's an example of bad student protest behavior, and Harvard has done nothing about it despite your claim!". That's the trap, it's a no-win scenario in that the whole public exercise was done in bad faith.

It's like a much-higher-stakes version of moderating a message board and dealing with a rules lawyer.
posted by Captaintripps at 1:27 PM on January 4 [5 favorites]

“The campaign that removed the President of Harvard was about DEI, not plagiarism,” Don Moynihan, Can We Still Govern?, 22 December 2023

Is there a difference between covering the culture wars and participating in them?

posted by ob1quixote at 2:28 PM on January 4 [9 favorites]

next day, lo and behold, the billionaire's attack is really on 'DEI' (just like the ratfucker said was the program)

Fortune (archive.is): "Hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman takes aim at DEI ‘ideology’ after Harvard president’s resignation, claiming it’s anti-capitalist"

According to the billionaire hedge fund manager, the anti-semitism that he had previously accused Harvard of “was not the core of the problem” but merely “a troubling warning sign” of the real issue—an obsession with DEI
...
he called DEI efforts a step “on the path to socialism” that is “inherently inconsistent with basic American values.”

posted by away for regrooving at 3:10 PM on January 4 [9 favorites]

Harvard exists to get and invest money from elites, including Republican elites. They may have $50 billion but they're not going to turn down the chance to make it $51 billion on behalf of Claudine Gay.
posted by kingdead at 3:24 PM on January 4 [2 favorites]

“An open letter to a man who neither demoralizes nor deranges me...” Garrett Bucks, The White Pages, 03 January 2024

...but whom I do find pretty boring

posted by ob1quixote at 3:48 PM on January 4 [4 favorites]

“The right's war on higher ed won't stop with Claudine Gay,” Lisa Needham, Public Notice, 04 January 2023
posted by ob1quixote at 6:46 PM on January 4 [4 favorites]

Again, this is why binding our hands will never bind theirs is so important - because we will never control their conduct by diminishing ourselves.

We should still bind our own hands - we should still have rules and principles. We diminish ourselves far more when we ignore them if politically expedient - it makes us just a mirror version ratfucker for a different team.
posted by Dysk at 1:05 AM on January 5 [1 favorite]

Yeah outing the first black female president of the most prestigious university in the world after six months for minor technical transgressions in her dissertation really reaffirms our principles of not knowing what game we’re playing.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 4:14 AM on January 5 [19 favorites]

We should still bind our own hands - we should still have rules and principles.

The point isn't to not have principles - it's to not let ratfuckers define them for us. In addition, there's the point of tolerance as peace treaty - if one group isn't going to hold to their obligations, they don't get to demand that everyone else hold to them in regard to themselves.

Unilateral disarmament is a sucker's game.
posted by NoxAeternum at 5:42 AM on January 5 [9 favorites]

We should still bind our own hands - we should still have rules and principles.

So if you see a witchhunt targeting someone on specious claims, you stand against that witchhunt regardless of the target. Simple. What is your point?
posted by elkevelvet at 7:06 AM on January 5 [6 favorites]

it makes us just a mirror version ratfucker for a different team

Both-sideism needs to die in a fire.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 8:27 AM on January 5 [10 favorites]

Some of us don't.

Be specific. The dissertation was sloppy, as nearly all dissertations are. They were corrected. What do you find so egregious that she should be fired? Again this is a minor transgression. She didn't steal anyones ideas. She didn't copy paragraphs whole cloth. She re-used technical language.

Here's what the effect will be: right-wing attack mobs will not comb through every prominent academic who doesn't toe the right-wing party line looking for anything they can construe as malfeasance. Liberals will be the lap dog and say, 'aw shucks, someone didn't cross their Ts and Is!'. Uni admins will be more aggressive silencing criticism of Israel's ongoing genocide in Gaza, which I should remind you, has resulted in the deaths of over 10,000 children.

I hope the quotation marks will be worth it.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 8:43 AM on January 5 [10 favorites]

there is no serious conversation to be had with people who are stuck on the plagiarism angle

and the whole "DEI gone too far," we might as well relitigate "reverse racism"

I'm reminded of oschwar's comment re: "the cause" and keeping some kind of bullpen lined up so you can replace your (?) players when you take casualties. I still think that's a poor characterization of things, and I'm still left wondering how we define "the cause" here.

either something egregiously wrong happened or it did not, I don't have time for the both-sides bullshit and if we are picking teams, how about Team Not Fascist Bullies?
posted by elkevelvet at 8:49 AM on January 5 [9 favorites]

“Elise Stefanik Truly Is The Worst,” Jay Kuo, The Status Kuo, 05 January 2024
posted by ob1quixote at 8:55 AM on January 5 [4 favorites]

For example, see the case of Harvard lecturer Carole Hooven.

So, we have a college professor who should know better says something factually false (because intersex individuals do, in fact, fucking exist because of how human genetics works) on a platform that routinely enables and engages in the erasure of said individuals - and is held accountable for making false and bigoted comments. Which, by the way, is how free speech is supposed to work - you are welcome to make statements - and people are welcome to evaluate them.

Your argument here is just the tired canard that "free speech" obliges us to give bigots a seat at the table, and that concept can just kindly fuck off.
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:27 AM on January 5 [12 favorites]

More substantially, I think there's real substance to Ackman's accusations that "The DEI movement has also taken control of speech. Certain speech is no longer permitted."

This is some hateful bullshit, written about a hateful bullshitter, by more hateful bullshitters. There's no "substance" to these accusations, just raw bigotry that the usual centrists and liberals somehow find palatable enough to defend if someone says it with enough weasel words.
posted by Glegrinof the Pig-Man at 9:44 AM on January 5 [16 favorites]

Like, posting "but reverse racism!" and "LGBTQ people are the real fascists" bullshit in the year 2024--especially on Twitter-- should set off alarm bells, red flags, and fireworks that spell out I HATE MARGINALIZED PEOPLE AND WANT THEM TO SUFFER.
posted by Glegrinof the Pig-Man at 9:48 AM on January 5 [6 favorites]

(Also, there is a "deep debate" over biological sex in the same way that there was a "deep debate" over heliocentrism in the day - the evidence literally exists in the form of the genomes of intersex individuals, and the people who are arguing that "there are only two biological sexes" are covering their ears and closing their eyes to it.)
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:53 AM on January 5 [9 favorites]

Good lord . . . I love to get into the weeds as much as the next person, and yes, the on-campus attempts to incorporate DEI and anti-racism are incredibly complicated and occasionally ridiculous as attempts are made to do the right thing, allow kids to have influence and a voice, and protect academic freedom and avoid legal liability . . .

But Ackman and FIRE are complete garbage, full stop.
And attacking DEI as opposed to engaging with how to improve it is just the version of anti-wokeness that smarter people who don't want to blatantly seem ridiculous choose.

Also, yes, we on the left/progressive/etc. side of things need to maintain our commitment to being principled and consistent, but letting fascists ferret out and over-simplify culture-war nuggets that we then happily consume and regurgitate in order to show that we are fair and honest is a fool's game. "Is it right/is it true?" is not the point. How about "Is it important?"

Is higher education a hot mess in this country? Yep. Always has been, really.
Will taking down higher ed administrators relying on specious or contentious claims change that? Nope.
Even here on the glorious Blue we can't agree if Gay committed plagiarism (I fall into the "nah, not really" camp myself), which is supposedly the core of her sinful nature. Oh, and, as a school official, she tried to represent the complicated nature of protecting students and their rights in the modern world, and unfortunately she just wasn't the kind of hero that some demanded she be . . .

If, in the midst of a witch hunt, you don't stop and just ask "What's actually wrong with witches?", you're offering aid and comfort to the witch-hunters.
posted by pt68 at 10:13 AM on January 5 [12 favorites]

Came back to this thread just to post two things and love that ob1quixote has those plus a third that is also great.

Garrett Bucks over at The White Pages goes with boring for his reaction to Rufo, noting that even historians, always the latecomer to any party, have established the arc of reactionary politics in modern America.

It is certainly very predictable, but I din't think it's 'boring' that every advance made by African Americans towards equality has resulted in a counter assault from the white ruling classes and their populist enablers. Bucks also throws in a brief review of Rufo's low budget rehab of Nixon noting 'there are a lot of terrific “other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?” moments' in the video and called out how Rufo just skips past Hoover as little more than a footnote.

I find Lisa Needham argument that Rufo is a clown with powerful backing very convincing and the piece's conclusions is worth including in full:

However, right-wingers neither need nor value consistency. Accusing them of hypocrisy or calling them out for their opportunistic behavior does nothing because they simply don’t care. Rufo will gleefully explain to anyone who will listen that he latched on to attacking critical race theory because it is a “promising political weapon” rather than something borne out of deep conviction. And thanks to the credulity of the mainstream media, none of these people will ever suffer the slightest consequence for their inconsistencies.

The New York Times will continue to give Rufo guest opinion columns to complain about DEI. The Washington Post will continue to treat cynical attacks on female college presidents as a both-sides free speech debate. CNN’s Jake Tapper will continue to frame Gay’s alleged plagiarism as a real issue rather than a trumped-up way to force her out. Until the media is prepared to push back against these bad-faith actors, naming and shaming and explaining their actions rather than regurgitating articles from the Free Beacon or the Daily Caller, the right-wing war on higher education is going to continue to rack up wins.

posted by zenon at 1:02 PM on January 5 [12 favorites]

i know that article you posted, mr. know-it-some, implies that carole hooven isn't transphobic, but this is following a pattern you have when it comes to trans issues: you are weirdly credulous to anti-trans talking points and rhetoric, and this is not the first time this has happened.

anyway, to the matter of carole hooven.

Hooven frequently defends and collaborates with other gender critical public figures, including spouse Alex Byrne, a philosopher and anti-trans activist.
Hooven frequently appears on gender critical and anti-transgender shows to defend sex segregation and criticize refinement of value-neutral language in science.
In 2022 Dartmouth political science professor Henry C. Clark arranged an event with Hooven, Jesse Singal, and Katie Herzog. After the event was cancelled, the event was moved to New York. An additional event with Singal was later arranged at MIT by Hooven’s spouse Alex Byrne.

none of that historical background is included in that inquirer article.

but yeah, let's just go and allege that lgbt folk are the real fascists here who are stifling real free speech. why not just keep airing that tired old right-wing belief that the f--, d--, and t-- are secretly in charge of everything?
posted by i used to be someone else at 1:47 PM on January 5 [14 favorites]

One comment removed. Linking hateful or otherwise discriminatory sources (authors or websites) goes against our content policy.
posted by loup (staff) at 2:28 PM on January 5 [3 favorites]

o r we still talking about plagiarism

what about the case of neri oxman? wild that she's married to bill ackman.

y'know, the same bill ackman that said plagiarism was verrry big bad and pushed gay out.

or is her being white and married to a billionaire make this a big ol' nothingburger for garbage press like the nytimes? we already know that the rules probably won't apply to her anyway.
posted by i used to be someone else at 4:59 PM on January 5 [7 favorites]

and now bill ackman is threatening to chase after all mit staff and business insider staff in vengeance.

wondrous.

billionaires should not be allowed to exist.
posted by i used to be someone else at 1:48 PM on January 6 [12 favorites]

“Best Candidates,” A.R. Moxon, The Reframe, 07 January 2024

To see the whole picture, find the frame. To get the whole story, remember the beginning and the end. A look at accusation, the next bully tactic of supremacists and other abusers.

⋮

Why am I saying this? I suppose I’m saying it in part because Claudine Gay, who was until recent days President of Harvard, resigned this week, a lot of people seem to be operating under the assumption that it was over plagiarism, in the name of academic integrity.

But it was actually because Chris Rufo and his fellow eliminationist supremacists, who don’t care a bit about plagiarism or academic integrity, and who in fact are participants in a decades-long conservative campaign to demolish the academy, wanted to destroy her reputation and that of her work and of the institutions and programs of diversity and equity and inclusion that she represents to them. And they did this because their intentions are supremacist and eliminationist, so they targeted her for elimination from her position, trusting our various media institutions to make the accusations against her the story, rather than the motivations and intentions of those bringing the accusation. And Chris Rufo trusted that our media would do as they expected, just because they, the eliminationist supremacist who were targeting Claudine Gay, said it should be so.

posted by ob1quixote at 4:25 PM on January 7 [14 favorites]

Speaking of the abject failure of our Fourth Estate to meet the moment…
posted by non canadian guy at 8:17 PM on January 7 [4 favorites]

another excerpt from ob1quixote's link to ar moxon

Chris Rufo finds ways to reframe institutions and programs and movements which foster diversity and equity and inclusion, and which name and deconstruct supremacy. If he can make these institutions and programs and movements synonymous with annoyance or incompetence, that’s good. If he can make them synonymous with corruption and theft and other crime, that’s better. If he can make them synonymous with violence, that’s best of all. He connects them however he can to whatever smear he can generate, and any weakness, whether real or manufactured, he can discover, trying one after another until he gets people willing to ignore his beginning supremacist assumptions and his ending eliminationist goals and start saying, “you know, he does have a point.”

It’s this moment he’s after. The moment when you say “I don’t agree with him unusually, but you do have to hand it to him, he’s right about _____.”

_____ is some problem to address, or some matter of ethics or standards or principle.

The ____ doesn’t matter to an eliminationist supremacist. The _____ is just a tool. If it’s a useful tool, he’ll keep beating the drum of _____ until _____ stops working. When _____ stops working, then he’ll abandon it, and whatever _____ is, it won’t have improved in the slightest, because improving it was never the goal. In fact, _____ will now probably be something that is harder to improve, now that it has become degraded in the public consciousness for having been tied to supremacist efforts, even though _____ might be something important to address in order to have a functional society, which will mean that the degradation of _____ also helps eliminationist supremacy, which has no ethics or principles or standards, which seeks only to degrade and destroy them.

Chris Rufo knows that there’s an instinct in our country to find common ground with supremacy and supremacists, which isn’t similarly extended to non-supremacists. It’s a reflexive thing, to remove as much of a supremacist’s false frame as is necessary in order to only see the part of the picture that everyone agrees is true. To ignore as much of a story as necessary in order to not notice the supremacist assumptions that begin the story and the eliminationist intentions that come at the end, because the main project of our supremacist institutions is not opposing supremacy but simply not detecting it. Rufo knows that there’s an instinct in this country to look at supremacists and find the one thing about which you can say “you know he does have a point.”

a lot of "you know he has a point about plagiarism" happened, and it's all water under the bridge, and it's gonna happen again with another ____ when he wants to claim another scalp. so many people fell for his very obviously telegraphed anti-crt bigotry ("he's got a point about all this racism talk--surely i'm not racist #notallwhitepeople"), and then his transphobia ("he's got a point about this medicalization stuff--you gotta just let kids be kids, you groomers"), and it'll keep going and going because nobody learns from the past or they like being complicit.
posted by i used to be someone else at 10:31 AM on January 8 [12 favorites]

i just wikipediated chris rufo for the first time and huh: the baddies have sent some sort of ersatz revolutionary strategist; a bizarro-world bargain-bin lenin to unite the squirrely white dudes from the farthest corners of the incelarium with the ones from middle management; a living examplar of the tw*tter dictum about not deigning to argue with people john brown would've shot. jesus christ it is a grim thing that someone like this can win at anything. and he crawled out of the think-tank-iverse, too. fuck academia but fuck fake academia even more. what a damn loser.

far be it from me to defend a university president of any stripe, let alone h*rv*rd --- everyone above the chair is structurally a bastard and most everyone below is a bastard on their own initiative --- but you could replace claudine gay by someone much much worse and of course they'd still be 100% in the right if the other side includes even a whiff of this rufo creature. he needs to proceed from his current location, riparian or otherwise, directly to the sea, and then get in same.
posted by busted_crayons at 4:26 PM on January 8 [5 favorites]

Indiana University suspends tenured professor. For reserving a room for a Palestinian student group, more or less. For all those who think the Claudine Gay situation was about plagiarism, do you also think this one is about room reservations?
posted by tofu_crouton at 4:16 PM on January 10 [8 favorites]

Would you, aside from the culture war bullshit, be fired for plagiarism? If so, you should be fired if you have done plagiarism regardless of any culture war bullshit.

Would you, culture war bullshit aside, be fired for filling in a room booking form just slightly wrong? If so, you should be fired for it regardless.

There is a pretty clear difference between the two situations here.
posted by Dysk at 11:29 PM on January 10

Would you, aside from the culture war bullshit, be fired for plagiarism? If so, you should be fired if you have done plagiarism regardless of any culture war bullshit.

Bullshit. This attitude enables ratfuckers. Chris Rufo relies on you saying "well, he has a point", so you can never give him that.
posted by NoxAeternum at 11:34 PM on January 10 [4 favorites]

By just reflexively doing whatever is the opposite of what Rufo is saying, you let him define your actions entirely. You ignore Rufo entirely, and you assess cases on their own merits. To do otherwise is to give him power to determine your actions.
posted by Dysk at 11:42 PM on January 10 [1 favorite]

By just reflexively doing whatever is the opposite of what Rufo is saying, you let him define your actions entirely.

Your point? Because frankly, your position there has some real John Bain "it's about ethics in X" energy. As Moxon pointed out, the only way to deal with a ratfucker is to not enable their framing.
posted by NoxAeternum at 11:48 PM on January 10

Something doesn't become wrong just because a ratfucker says it, if it was true before. Someone doesn't get immunity from consequences for their actions just because they're on our "team".
posted by Dysk at 11:52 PM on January 10

If you have to become an unprincipled ratfucker yourself in order to win, then ratfuckers win.
posted by Dysk at 11:53 PM on January 10

Something doesn't become wrong just because a ratfucker says it, if it was true before.

Actually, it does - or more to the point, ratfuckers corrupt what they advocate with their bad faith. It's the "fruit of the poisoned tree" principle.

Someone doesn't get immunity from consequences for their actions just because they're on our "team".

The problem with Chris Rufo isn't that he's "on the other team" - it's that he's a ratfucker trying to forward white supremacy and fascism. Using the "team" framing shows a fundamental lack of understanding of what the issue is.

If you have to become an unprincipled ratfucker yourself in order to win, then ratfuckers win.

As was pointed out earlier, this is just galloping bothsidesism, rooted in that "team" framing that lacks understanding. "Nazi Punks Fuck Off" is a very important principle to uphold.
posted by NoxAeternum at 12:07 AM on January 11 [3 favorites]

Nazi punks fuck off, but the rule is law doesn't stop applying to our mates if some Nazi punks decide to make a fuss about their crime. You don't do it because the Nazi punks called for it, but if you have any principles at all you don't break your own rules and principles merely to spite them.
posted by Dysk at 12:21 AM on January 11

Would you, aside from the culture war bullshit, be fired for plagiarism?

No, because she wasn't fired before. As an administrator, it's not really normal for someone to run your old academic work through TurnItIn.
posted by tofu_crouton at 3:56 AM on January 11 [8 favorites]

Nazi punks fuck off, but the rule is law doesn't stop applying to our mates if some Nazi punks decide to make a fuss about their crime.

Which is why things like drug laws, public assembly laws, etc, work so well. I gladly support every cocaine charge against an impoverished person because I'm confident it will pay off and get Boris Johnson some day. It's also good how it applies to things like theft, like Voltaire once said "In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread".

See, it's a good thing to evaluate all crimes outside of context.
posted by Audreynachrome at 6:36 AM on January 11 [3 favorites]

I'm concerned about ethics and principles, not laws. I oppose cocaine charges for Johnson just as much as for any impoverished person too, because this isn't about 'winning' against the other side. I do not believe there are circumstances that make plagiarism okay, unlike theft.
posted by Dysk at 6:40 AM on January 11

But there's such a wide variance in the idea that she actually did commit plagiarism. I'd be okay with taking time to have an in-depth investigation and academic discussion, but the way this played out, it wasn't about that, and you know that this is not a rule we can apply to anyone who isn't being targeted for not automatically defending Israel.
posted by Audreynachrome at 6:55 AM on January 11 [1 favorite]

Dysk, the issue (for me, at least) is that your argument here is the equivalent of supporting the carceral state in cases where someone has violated another of your principles.

I, also in academia and also having had to deal with issues of student plagiarism, am not convinced that the examples brought up of Gay’s work are all that serious - they’re not great, but certainly not at the level of fire-able offence, in my opinion. But let’s suppose they were a more clear pattern of plagiarism. What you appear to be conceding is that we should deal with it in the way proposed and defined by Rufo and his coterie. You’re not saying “hey, let’s look at the system in which this happened and reform that to help prevent similar instances”, you’re only (to our knowledge, based on what you’ve written here in this thread) supporting firing this one person who Rufo has chosen to target. You’re not just saying “plagiarism is bad”, you’re supporting a system of case-by-case investigations and consequences that, through bad actors like Rufo and through its interactions with the rest of our racist, sexist, and other discriminatory systems and overall culture, necessarily leads to discriminatory impact or outcomes - where those accused of, investigated for, and experiencing consequences for plagiarism are disproportionately from marginalized groups. It is highly relevant here that Rufo et. al., due to their own bigotry, are starting from the assumption that Black women can’t be qualified for positions such as president of Harvard. The manner in which you are defending your principle of “plagiarism is bad” is, as it currently stands, conflicting with the principle that you’ve demonstrated holding in multiple other threads that “bigotry and discrimination are bad”.

Do you think that plagiarism is worse than upholding inherently supremacist systems? I suspect that you do not. In which case, I strongly suggest putting some more thought into the specific solutions you support and argue for.
posted by eviemath at 7:01 AM on January 11 [5 favorites]

(At the very least, what do you make of the fact - and why have you not commented on it yet - that the Beacon report that purports to be a damning condemnation of Gay’s plagiarism seems to be doing the exact same failure of citation that it accuses Gay of, albeit it the most obvious example is that it seems to fail to cite a computer system used instead of, more directly, another human?)
posted by eviemath at 7:07 AM on January 11 [1 favorite]

I am firmly for reforming the systems at play (or actually implementing some in place of the ad-hoc status quo), but I am firmly against not taking accusations seriously because it is politically expedient, because the accused is "one of us", which is very much how the consensus position appears to me.

The lack of citation in the plagiarism report is not great, but also seems like a really weird gotcha - it isn't plagiarism, it's a lack of a decent methods chapter. But it also isn't in itself academic output.
posted by Dysk at 7:11 AM on January 11

But that’s exactly what that report is accusing Gay of! So if it’s overlookable in the report, how is it serious enough that Gay should be fired for? Relatedly, do you think that police evidence obtained illegally should be admissible in legal trials, then?
posted by eviemath at 7:20 AM on January 11 [4 favorites]

It seems to me like you've gotten confused between the idea of accepting wrongdoing within our own circles and not accepting the judgement of kangaroo courts of the most bad-faith obvious enemies.
posted by Audreynachrome at 7:21 AM on January 11 [4 favorites]

Nazi punks fuck off, but the rule is law doesn't stop applying to our mates if some Nazi punks decide to make a fuss about their crime.

Why do you believe Chris Rufo? Because that's what you are arguing for here - that we are somehow obliged to take his bad faith arguments at face value out of some nebulous obligation to "principles" that ignores that he's a ratfucker operating in bad faith.

Nobody was talking about Gay engaging in plagiarism until Rufo started laundering the idea in right wing media, based on another right wing ratfucker with a history of engaging in attacks on academics (as was pointed out) engaging in what amounted to running her work through TurnItIn. The whole charge was built on bad faith, presented by bad faith operators with openly stated white supremacist and fascist agendas for doing so. And yet your argument is that somehow we are obliged to take these blatantly bad faith accusations at face value out of an obligation to "principles" that ignores that another principle is that you don't reward bad faith.

but I am firmly against not taking accusations seriously because it is politically expedient, because the accused is "one of us", which is very much how the consensus position appears to me.

It appears that way to you because you're applying a badly fitting "tribalism" context to the matter that covers up the actual issues by reframing the conflict as a matter of "teams" and "sides" while ignoring the actual underlying positions involved. People aren't defending Gay because she's "one of us" - we're defending her because she's the target of a bad faith attack on her character rooted in white supremacy and fascism.
posted by NoxAeternum at 7:22 AM on January 11 [3 favorites]

(And the report is absolutely academic output, in being an analysis of other academic output and in its authors’ desired use in an academic hiring/firing decision.)
posted by eviemath at 7:22 AM on January 11 [1 favorite]

Gay is most certainly not "one of us" as far as I'm concerned. She seems like she was doing the bare minimum legal thing to protect pro-Palestine people, and she herself thinks "From the River to the Sea" is a genocidal slogan. I hate her.
posted by Audreynachrome at 7:24 AM on January 11 [2 favorites]

The report is not academic output, it is administrative or procedural. Citation is a requirement for academia, not for all things in life.

I'm not saying believe Rufo, I've looked at the reports, and it absolutely looks like plagiarism to me. TurnItIn is a blunt tool, and a lot gets past it, but it can indeed help catch some plagiarism that would otherwise be missed. It's not a turkey solution, but it can be part of a well constructed system for catching plagiarism. Most universities I am familiar with here in the UK use it routinely on all submitted student work these days, and postgraduate or postdoctoral submissions with that level of issue in it would absolutely be an academic practices offense.
posted by Dysk at 7:43 AM on January 11

Once we finally get Blair's ID cards in action, the ubiquitous CCTV of the UK combined with facial recognition, license plate scanning, turnitin, TerraMind, ActivTrak and Controllio, we can reach true political absolution. We'll catch the Pope's son smoking and get him for littering the butts.
posted by Audreynachrome at 7:50 AM on January 11 [1 favorite]

As an academic, who has worked in academia in the US and Canada for a couple decades: referee reports on articles are absolutely considered academic output or academic work (even though they are not infrequently more shoddily done), and the academic standard is that a report used in the manner that the authors wanted their report used should absolutely be held to similar standards. Academia doesn’t always live up to its standards, but that report was not taken as seriously at Harvard because it, itself, was not up to standard.
posted by eviemath at 7:55 AM on January 11 [3 favorites]

I'm not saying believe Rufo

Yes, you are - you're just trying to deny it by appealing to principle, in much the same way John Bain tried to defend his credulity towards Gamergate (at best) with "it's about ethics in games journalism."

You're saying to believe him because these charges literally originate with him. Again, nobody was accusing Gay of plagiarism until Rufo began his laundering of the charges in right wing media. Taking the charges seriously by definition means taking Rufo seriously because of that simple fact.

Either you reject the charges, or you say that Rufo has a point. There's no third option.
posted by NoxAeternum at 8:02 AM on January 11 [1 favorite]

I'm not saying believe Rufo in that I'm not saying take him at his word. I'm saying look at the reports, look at the writing.

Either you reject the charges, or you say that Rufo has a point.

And if you're against agreeing with Rufo on principle, then you're effectively giving him the power to exonerate/pardon people through accusation.

As an academic, who has worked in academia in the US and Canada for a couple decades: referee reports on articles are absolutely considered academic output or academic work

Over here, this would be handled as an administrative matter. The flagging of a potential academic practices offense is a functional admin document to the academic practices office, not a piece of academia that is intended for publication or dissemination. Similarly, their handling of it is procedural and administrative - what is at issue is fundamentally a code of conduct violation. In a context where the expectations of such a report are very different, I can see the shortcomings being notable, but that just isn't a context that makes much sense to me.

What would be ideal would be if Harvard were applying a code of conduct with clearly defined penalties for plagiarism and academic fraud, and a set policy on historical plagiarism, that applied equally to everyone, whether student, staff, or executive. That would be the ideal outcome here, over both what is happening, and over just ignoring it because we don't like the messenger.

This is a pointless argument, so I'll bow out of taking up space in the thread now.
posted by Dysk at 8:20 AM on January 11

I'm not saying believe Rufo in that I'm not saying take him at his word. I'm saying look at the reports, look at the writing.

Reports created by another right wing ratfucker with a history of doing this sort of shit specifically to provoke a reaction like yours, at Rufo's behest (and this is all openly documented by Rufo himself.) This is basic "fruit of the poisoned tree" stuff - you are arguing that we should take bad faith in good faith and avert our eyes from what is actually happening.

And if you're against agreeing with Rufo on principle, then you're effectively giving him the power to exonerate/pardon people through accusation.

No, I'm the one trying to take that power away from him by saying that nothing he says can be trusted. You're the one who is arguing that we should be taking his accusations seriously - then tying yourself in knots because you're finding that argument impacts your own credibility.

That would be the ideal outcome here, over both what is happening, and over just ignoring it because we don't like the messenger.

Ah, the good old "X you don't like" bad faith argument, meant to dodge the arguments people are pointing out by making a meaningless appeal to "tribalism".

Yes, I "don't like" Chris Rufo - because he's a ratfucker seeking to forward white supremacy and fascism. That, to me at least, seems like it's a pretty good reason to not like him! And my dislike of him doesn't change that because of that background, anything he says is suspect because he frames anyone other than a cishetero white man as lesser, and as such their achievements as inherently illegitimate. Not to mention that a pretty important principle to me is "better a hundred guilty men go free than one innocent punished," which further undercuts the argument that it is somehow principled to grant credibility to such poisoned claims.
posted by NoxAeternum at 8:55 AM on January 11 [4 favorites]

audreynachrome:

Obligatory pedantry: the quote about "the law, in its majestic equality..." is by Anatole France, not Voltaire.
posted by adrienneleigh at 8:59 AM on January 11 [3 favorites]

Would you, aside from the culture war bullshit, be fired for plagiarism? If so, you should be fired if you have done plagiarism regardless of any culture war bullshit.

She would not have been fired absent the relentless press coverage. And the press coverage wouldn't have happened without the culture war bullshit. None of the Harvard donors would have cared if it wasn't in the NYT for day after day. Rufo's messaging, amplified by the New York Times, multiplied by people's anger over her performance at that House hearing, is why she was fired.
posted by BungaDunga at 9:08 AM on January 11 [8 favorites]

I'm not saying believe Rufo in that I'm not saying take him at his word. I'm saying look at the reports, look at the writing.

The Harvard internal report exonerated Gay. The Beacon report is also Rufo, not a neutral third party source.

Folks at Harvard have expressed some concerns about the process that generated the internal report. My take is that, given all the other surrounding issues, that’s not my business to comment on one way or another. As well, as a class, university presidents are upper management and their interests are structurally not aligned with mine as a faculty member. Harvard is not my in-group; university presidents are not my in-group. The principles I’m concerned with are broader political principles, and the health of the academic enterprise and making it as democratic and egalitarian as possible a source of human knowledge creation. That does implies a concern for academic integrity, since our system of incentives for knowledge production relies on reputational rewards; and being able to trace the development of ideas as ideas (quite apart from whose ideas they were at each stage) is important! However, Stefanik’s show trial contravenes my broader political principles in the first part. In the second part, Gay’s articles don’t seem to have caused any significant harm to the principles of academic integrity, and even if they were more egregious, they would have to have involved significantly more theft of recognition from other marginalized academics to come close to rating as seriously as the problem of the blatantly racist and sexist pressure campaign based on the bigoted assumption that a Black woman can’t be highly qualified so must have attained career success in some way fraudulently. So overall, supporting this particular concern at this particular time (and not just leaving Harvard faculty to deal with it in their own time) is overall bad (and very clearly so, like not even close to the line, for me) for the vision of academia that I want and support.

If it were a case of someone from a marginalized background using a position of power they had attained within academia to abuse others with less power, that would change the balance of things for me. But the power differentials in this case are people in higher-power demographic, political, and socioeconomic status categories going after someone in a high but not quite as high power socioeconomic category and marginalized demographic category, based on details that would also apply to those of us at the general academic worker level not just the upper management level. This is not a case of someone in our activist circles making organizing efforts harder and disrupting solidarity by abusing, facilitating abuse, or tolerating abuse of people with less power within the activist circle. In this situation, the balance of issues is more harmful to those of us who support an accessible-to-all, democratic, egalitarian academia than not. Thus the balance of what I comment on and spend my time and effort advocating for is commensurate. It’s more like the situation of Paris Hilton having also been a victim of the abusive troubled teen industry, despite all of her other incredible privileges - sure, I have other issues with how she has used her racial and economic privilege in some ways, but she’s certainly not the worst example of heirs/heiresses, and the troubled teen industry is way harmful to a large number of mostly not-privileged kids, so when that’s part of the discussion I am going to leave any Paris Hilton critique to another time.
posted by eviemath at 9:10 AM on January 11 [6 favorites]

(I'm sure everyone has the best intentions but when two people engage in a continuous one-on-one debate it degrades the discussion for everyone. Once you've made your point, I know it's hard, but I think we just have to accept that the other disagrees, and let our arguments stand on their own merits and trust that others can make up their minds)
posted by latkes at 9:35 AM on January 11 [2 favorites]

It's not a turkey solution, but it can be part of a well constructed system for catching plagiarism.

I think your auto correct may have fowled up.
posted by euphorb at 1:07 PM on January 11 [5 favorites]

metafilter: it's not a turkey solution, but...
posted by sciatrix at 4:25 PM on January 11 [1 favorite]

Obligatory pedantry: the quote about "the law, in its majestic equality..." is by Anatole France, not Voltaire

Oh thanks! See, that's what I get for trusting google...
posted by Audreynachrome at 8:29 PM on January 11 [2 favorites]

Clearly Voltaire was a plagiarist and must not be taken seriously.
posted by TedW at 1:42 PM on January 12 [4 favorites]

And to quote Bill Hicks: :”…and to really throw people off, I did it before he did.”
posted by TedW at 1:44 PM on January 12

The Oxman story keeps getting worse. The latest news is that she apparently plagiarized from one of her own undergrad advisees (twitter link via nitter)
posted by adrienneleigh at 8:52 PM on January 12 [3 favorites]

And in re the Claudine Gay case, a good essay from a forensic metascientist (a research integrity guy) on the case's merits and the issues with politicizing plagiarism inquiries.
posted by adrienneleigh at 9:03 PM on January 12 [2 favorites]

The Oxman story keeps getting worse. The latest news is that she apparently plagiarized from one of her own undergrad advisees (twitter link via nitter)

In the spirit of every accusation being a confession...
posted by Dip Flash at 6:11 AM on January 13

And apparently in response to those revelations, Ackman has gone full Musk on social media, ranting about the reporting on his wife being "illegal".

Do it, Bill. Pull that ripcord, defend your wife's "honor", and file that defamation lawsuit you so want to.
posted by NoxAeternum at 2:28 PM on January 13 [2 favorites]

Scientist cited in push to oust Harvard’s Claudine Gay has links to eugenicists

Rufo described Jonatan Pallesen as “a Danish data scientist who has raised new questions about Claudine Gay’s use – and potential misuse – of data in her PhD thesis” in an interview published in his newsletter and on the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal website last Friday.

He did not tell readers that a paper featuring Pallesen’s own statistical work in collaboration with the eugenicist researchers has been subject to scathing expert criticism for its faulty methods, and characterized as white nationalism by another academic critic.

posted by BungaDunga at 8:05 AM on January 14 [4 favorites]

Weaponized plagiarism another unwanted escalation of culture war

This is an opinion piece on the National Post (fairly right wing media for Canada) so I was curious where it was going. Of course the weaponization is that Oxman's work is being examined. Not the original out of the blue attack on Gay's work... or Ackman straight up vowing retaliation. Nope it's only when their side's hypocrisy is pointed out that it's weaponization.

I also (regrettably) read the comments... and besides the airing of random unrelated grievances (Including of course a couple of bizarre attacks on Trudeau), some wild conspiracy crap, and various culture war bs, they also manage to attack the author of the piece. They obviously didn't RTFThing, so they are assuming it's some kind of defense of Gay. At least the right is remaining constant in stupidity.
posted by cirhosis at 9:44 AM on January 15 [2 favorites]

The Humiliation of higher ed (Inside Higher Ed, Jennifer Ruth)

The chairwoman of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, Virginia Foxx, wasted no time in capitalizing on the hearing’s success. On Jan. 5, The New York Times reported that Foxx intends “to broaden the inquiry to include a deep dive into what she has described as a ‘hostile takeover’ of higher education by partisan administrators and political activists.” On Jan. 9, she dispatched a letter to Harvard University’s board, launching a wide-ranging probe that calls upon them to assemble and submit within two weeks, among other things, “posts by Harvard students, faculty, staff, and other Harvard affiliates on Sidechat and other social media platforms targeting Jews, Israelis, Israel, Zionists, or Zionism.” Given that the House’s working definition of antisemitism wrongly includes criticism of Israel and the project of colonial Zionism, there can be little doubt that we are facing a massive attack on academic freedom and free speech that will rival or exceed the McCarthy era’s violations in scale and scope.
posted by tofu_crouton at 7:36 AM on January 16

Living Inside a Psyop - a Harvard professor describes what it's been like to be at Harvard for the last few months.
posted by tofu_crouton at 3:46 PM on January 20 [4 favorites]

Scientist cited in push to oust Harvard’s Claudine Gay has links to eugenicists

Anyone who continues to call this an issue about plagiarism should be identified as a probable racist, at this juncture.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 5:48 PM on January 26 [4 favorites]

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