Fuck Israel and anybody that supports them. No Apartheid state has any right to exist.
this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2024
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The plagiarism allegations were serious and, once entire paragraphs were found to be copied, it was always going to end like this. Everyone remembers how strict their university was about academic dishonesty. While the claims of antisemitism sped it up, it’s very likely someone would eventually discover it and when that happened, she would still have resigned.
How was an academic dishonesty board supposed to deal with students accused of plagiarizing if the President did it too? Terrible situation in academia. Unlike money, unethical behavior does trickle down, if just because it hinders the tools of enforcement (see America since 2017).
Not serious according to her thesis advisor slash professor she supposedly stole from. Also, how do you plagiarize an appendix? Is that even possible?
Serious, in the case of academic dishonesty, is narrower than the actual actions indicate. In that article, her advisor indicates that his book “encourages scholars that use the method to describe things in those ways”. He can say that, but by describing things in exactly those ways without quotes, it muddies the water on whose thoughts you’re reading (as it would if I hadn’t quoted the above, which would have read as my words). I recall an independent review indicating she improperly cited but it wasn’t misconduct— respectfully, students doing the same thing before this would probably not be allowed that much leeway. Imagine being back in school days, would you paste paragraphs worth of words without quotes and expect to survive a dishonesty board?
Therein lies the issue: allowing that behavior is genuinely very serious, though it can look less so if you’re not literally thinking back to your own university experience. Moreover research isn’t done for the sake of writing stuff down for a grade, it’s done to progress society. Properly noting which thoughts are yours, and which are being quoted as supporting evidence or if your theories were built on others’, is important if merely for clarity’s sake. It could get worse than that though. Allowing this would allow researchers to ape words without sufficiently crediting them, and that could be taken to more sinister degrees.
Dr. Gay is an excellent academic, this aside, and she understands the danger in allowing her own behavior to go unaddressed. She corrected several of her own works and will probably correct more of them as issues continue to be found.
I kept this comment limited to analysis of the situation, but I’m gonna inject a little bit of personal opinion. I do genuinely think this sucks because, while I believe it was plagiarism, I hate when the conservatives win. But I also don’t see this as a real loss for Harvard or academia as a whole— Harvard will find another President and academic standards only improve. I also don’t want to make the conservative mistake of standing by someone whose conduct is detrimental to their own cause, simply because they are the enemy or target of a group I consider to be abhorrent.
And I think that’s ultimately the thing here. We don’t want the conservatives to take this one, especially because they themselves would likely throw academic standards into the wind if it weren’t personally advantageous in this moment. But if we remove the view of “the enemy,” this is just a President resigning because her academic history is less than flawless, and a President should always have a record capable of withstanding even the sharpest scrutiny. Any less and they are actively at risk of eroding standards which exist for a reason.
Should we think this hard about online debates involving esoteric topics, especially when they are started by white nationalist / propagandist Christopher Rufo?
Why not? Thought is free, I don’t read internet discussions to think little. Lemmy was heralded as a place for thoughtful discussions, and shouldn’t strive for less substance than Reddit had.
I understand that the agenda against Dr. Gay was started by a piece of shit, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s wrong. Broken clock and all. I’m not pleased about it either, but if I discounted literally everything said by pieces of shit, I’d be giving up my own integrity for the sake of owning the cons.
How many times does Christopher Rufo have to be proven bad faith actor until we can ignore him?
Well, I did ignore him. I don’t keep up with conservative media and did not know who he was. I heard about this initially because I’m alum of a related university and didn’t know until your article who began the agenda against Dr. Gay. Problem is, when the broken clock is correct, it’s correct, and that led to normal people talking about it.
That said, would you really ignore literally everything he or his ilk say even if it was true? I feel like all we’ve done is talk about this one guy that 99% of people probably don’t know, and not the merits of the actual events. I genuinely feel it is bad for one to ignore even truthful things just because it came from a piece of shit. That could easily be weaponized— he could champion a good cause just to throw it under the bus.
I'm talking about Rufo because he's the source of this allegation.
Imagine if Rufo and his friends lied and called you a pedophile on twitter because you oppose violence against trans people. Would it be fair for the national media to cover this lie as an allegation?
Is this really the society we want to live in? Any "allegation" from famous twitter account gets push to the front page and when it ends up getting debunked the media publishes it under the fold. Don't you see the dangers of this world?
Sure it's raining - it has nothing to do with all these people pissing on my leg!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
“Amidst all of this, it has been distressing to have doubt cast on my commitments to confronting hate and to upholding scholarly rigor — two bedrock values that are fundamental to who I am — and frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus,” she wrote.
The daughter of Haitian immigrants and an expert on minority representation and political participation in government, she took office just as the Supreme Court rejected the use of race-conscious admissions at Harvard and other universities.
She also became a major target of some powerful graduates like the billionaire investor William A. Ackman, who was concerned about antisemitism and suggested on social media last month that Harvard had only considered candidates for the presidency who met the “the D.E.I.
Dr. Gay’s resignation came after the latest plagiarism accusations against her were circulated in an unsigned complaint published on Monday in The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative online journal that has led a campaign against Dr.
“There has been a hostile takeover of postsecondary education by political activists, woke faculty and partisan administrators,” Ms. Foxx said in a statement, adding, “The problems at Harvard are much larger than one leader.”
That evening, the conservative activist Christopher Rufo published an essay in his Substack newsletter highlighting what he described as “problematic patterns of usage and citation” in Dr. Gay’s 1997 doctoral dissertation.
The original article contains 1,313 words, the summary contains 230 words. Saved 82%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
In her resignation, she cannot but help herself and try to make it about race. Playing the DEI victim until the end.
The woman has 17 Academic works, and plagarized material, down to straight up lifting entire paragraphs, changing words and rhythm --poorly-- in order to hide their obvious cheating among others from different works was found in at least 8 of them. So far. That's 48% of her total Academic output. Almost 50 separate instances.
The mere fact the Harvard Executive tried push it under the rug at first with a sham review process will surely hurt Harvard even more than even Gay. The fact that some Left leaning news media used the term "Duplicative Language," to soften her cheating us incredulous to me.
In my Uni, 1 serious example of straight up cheating could be enough for an expulsion. But? 10? Or 20? But almost 50?
On top of that, she got replaced, in the interim, with an outspoken pro-zionist.