Will Claudine Gay Keep Her Job? The assault on the beleaguered president of Harvard continues.
https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2023-12-22-will-claudine-gay-keep-her-job/
The microscopic reviews of Gay’s dissertation and her published papers are persisting. The pattern appears to be that Gay will occasionally cite a source but neglect to put a short passage in quotes. Once again the Harvard Corporation, the university’s top governing body, reviewed the latest allegations and found that they didn’t rise to the level of plagiarism. On Wednesday, the school issued a statement that in a few cases Gay had not rigorously followed the Harvard Guide to Using Sources. Gay has now submitted a total of seven corrections to scholarly articles adding quotation marks and revising citations. In a letter to Penny Pritzker, head of the Harvard Corporation, Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) cites the definition of plagiarism in the school’s honor code and asks, “Does Harvard hold its faculty—and its own president—to the same standards?”
Assuming that nothing worse is unearthed, the Harvard Corporation has decided to stand by its president, at least for now. Meanwhile, the donor pressure continues. The hedge fund manipulator William Ackman, a major Harvard donor, has been saying out loud what others have whispered: that Gay got the Harvard post because of her race. Donors have far too much influence at universities. In a just world, Harvard would tell Ackman where to shove his money. But in this corrupted world, Gay will also need to repair relations with other donors if she is to survive. Let’s also be honest about how affirmative action works. An institution’s leadership will admit that it is far too white and far too male, and make systematic efforts to identify qualified candidates who are nonwhite and female or both. Ackman is right that some white male, somewhere, had better credentials than Gay, at least on paper.
Four hundred years after slavery, the diversification of the top leadership of top institutions is still far from complete. Black leaders who break ceilings are expected to be above reproach, as Barack Obama was. As John McWhorter writes in The New York Times, “If she stays in her job, the optics will be that a middling publication record and chronically lackadaisical attention to crediting sources is somehow OK for a university president if she is Black.” However, there’s an instructive comparison with one failed white male Harvard president whom the governing corporation gave chance after chance to clean up his act before finally deciding in a divided vote that he had to go.
Though Larry Summers (or his legions of research assistants) made sure not to forget the quotation marks, his errors of scholarship were far more serious than Gay’s. They included assuming that deregulation of finance, which he relentlessly promoted, would not lead to a financial collapse; and that pushing postcommunist Russia to helter-skelter privatization would not lead to a deep depression that ended with Putin. Lately, Summers has failed to correct his egregious errors in his assessment of the recent bout of inflation and his calls for austerity. Summers also cost the Harvard endowment far more than whatever donors have bailed on Gay, with reckless speculations that overruled Harvard’s professional investment staff. It was his high-handedness with faculty and boorish sexist comments that finally did Summers in as Harvard president. But Harvard’s governing board, led at the time by Summers sponsor Robert Rubin, cut the arrogant Summers far more slack than it has cut Gay.
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= new reply since forum marked as read
Nah! 
🎄 🎄 🎄 🎄
Forgot to use quotation marks? OMG it's a capital crime! Burn her at the stake!
It's nice America is such a wonderful place, where everything is wonderful, everyone has enough food and healthcare, and everyone gets along with everyone else. That things are so perfect our highly qualified congressional members have the free time to go after such heinous criminals.
The biased framing by the interviewer, the lead-in, the utter cluelessness on the part of this student that she is not the victim here....
I noticed that George Mason University also used the lame "both sides" approach in response to "doxxing."
(IMO it's not doxxing if you're recorded doing something hateful and you actually perform for the recording, as the student at George Mason did. When you theatrically tear up a flyer, show disdain and contempt with your body language and words, all while knowingly being recorded, it's not doxxing when people get angry with you. Didn't we learn this in kindergarten? WTH?)
Edited to add: the interviewer says she's "barred" from off-campus housing, but it turns out that NYU simply declined to cover off-campus housing, since she chose to move out of her dorm. Declining to pay for something isn't "barring" her. She goes on to say that NYU is denying her access to higher education - because she violated the terms of her scholarship and lost it! Her sense of entitlement is breathtaking. And the dweeb interviewing her is enabling it all and feeding her sense of grievance.
