The first lesson is if hostile Congresspeople invite you to testify in a sham hearing short of a subpoena, it's best to say you have a scheduling conflict. They invited Columbia too and the president said sorry busy and that was the end of her involvement.
I thought the two Dave Weigel tweets in this LGM post pretty much said it all re: Harvard etc.
The coverage that internal Harvard issues get in the national news is completely insane and shows that hiring at institutions like the NYTimes is broken.
This should be major news at the Crimson, and sure the Globe should put it on the front page once or twice. But it just shouldn't be national news. And it wouldn't be national news if NYtimes hired from a wider variety of schools.
I thought Gay's Op-Ed (of all the things the NYT ran about this!) was pretty good. Have to say though that this paragraph:
It is not lost on me that I make an ideal canvas for projecting every anxiety about the generational and demographic changes unfolding on American campuses: a Black woman selected to lead a storied institution. Someone who views diversity as a source of institutional strength and dynamism. Someone who has advocated a modern curriculum that spans from the frontier of quantum science to the long-neglected history of Asian Americans. Someone who believes that a daughter of Haitian immigrants has something to offer to the nation's oldest university.
is much more compelling as a reason to stick it out than this:
My hope is that by stepping down I will deny demagogues the opportunity to further weaponize my presidency in their campaign to undermine the ideals animating Harvard since its founding: excellence, openness, independence, truth.
I presume she made this argument where she could and simply didn't have the support of her board, which sucks, but what are you going to do.
Also the fact that her scholarship was on the importance of minority representation in leadership positions is a little on the nose.
3: As someone other than Weigel noted, there was a much more serious academic misconduct allegation involving the president of Stanford (who was accused of falsifying scientific data--a story broken by the student newspaper!) last year and it got a vanishing fraction of the coverage from the Times, including no stories about it before his resignation. But not only did they treat this as a bigger story than, like, Congress (let alone something like the Gordon Gee's flensing of West Virginia University), the Times put business reporters rather than education reporters on the story, which had the double effect of making sure that anyone with actual experience reporting on academic misconduct was sidelined and signalling to Bill Ackman that they're on his team.
Heebie, does Brittney talk about the groundswell of support she eventually got when trying to break the conservatorship? No disrespect to "Toxic", but that's the most interesting part of the story to me.
Also I fully agree with 1, and I have a hard time understanding the scope of the PR failures that led to that hearing. I don't think that those mistakes -- going to the hearing in the first place, and then getting caught in a soundbite the way she did -- should've led to her resignation under the circumstances, but she sure did get clowned.
When your job is to be the public face of an extraordinarily image-conscious institution, it's ... not good. I still think she could and should have ridden out the storm (until the board turned on her), but she and the people who advised her along the way played it seriously wrong.
3: the counter-argument to that is that articles about this business have consistently been among the most popular on the NY Times website. (And elsewhere as well. The BBC sent out a breaking news alert when Gay resigned, ffs.)
Now, are they popular because they're on the NYT front page, or is the NYT writing lots of them and putting them in prominent places because lots of people want to read them?
There was another university president, Elizabeth Magill from Pennsylvania, who resigned last month to considerably less publicity - partly because it happened more quickly, I suspect, and partly because there was no suggestion of plagiarism in addition to the "well, I would say calling for a second Holocaust is probably OK as long as they're polite about it" cockup.
She talks about seeing people wearing Free Britney shirts on TV, and how that was how she learned that there were people outside who were concerned about her. But the whole resolution is slim on details in general. And somewhat nonlinear.
7.1: Fair enough, MY is always banging on this drum, but it really is true that the main problem with news these days is that readers have terrible preferences. (To some extent this is a part of the more general algorithm-driven content issue where they just reinforce addictive behavior leading people to be unhappy but clicking.)
Reader preferences don't happen in a vacuum. When you cultivate an audience that appreciates this kind of bullshit, that's what they want to see. Its just a more upscale version of Fox News running stories attacking wokeness.
I thought the two Dave Weigel tweets in this LGM post pretty much said it all re: Harvard etc.
Weigel is being dishonest here, and cleverly so - more cleverly than is the standard for LGM.
If you look closely he's comparing the number of days on which Claudine Gay stories were featured on the NYT with the number of Claudine Gay stories that the WP published. But, obviously, the same story can be featured on more than one day, so that isn't really a valid comparison. If you do an honest apples-to-apples comparison, then between 12 December and 2 January, excluding both dates, the WP ran six stories on Claudine Gay, and the NYT ran nine.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/search/?query=claudine+gay
https://www.nytimes.com/search?dropmab=false&query=%22claudine%20gay%22&sort=newest
The whole Israel thing is just nuts. They're making sure that in 20 years a large majority of the Democratic party won't have any emotional response to Isreal other than adversarial. Not only will the Holocaust be out of living memory, most Democrats won't remember before Netanyahu. I suspect military aid to Israel will end in my lifetime.
Who is "they" in 12? Israelis or ceasefire activists?
I mean Netanyahu and allied domestic political actors.
The Guardian, meanwhile, has published eleven stories on the resignation of a senior official at a foreign university. It has published only a single story about higher education so far this year that is not about Claudine Gay.
I'm sure the cease-fire activists are alienating some, but as Israel keeps the attack going, that's going to be a smaller issue among Democrats.
Meanwhile calls for ethnic cleansing and genocide of Gazans up and down the Israeli government are getting nowhere the same press in the NYT or elsewhere in the American press.
No one should know who the president of Harvard is unless you're attending or working at Harvard and even then maybe only about half of them should.
After the terrifying wringer on citation and attribution that they put us through during freshman week, complete with "So and so heard that such and such got Ad Boarded during the first week and sent home already!" urban legends, one is unmoved to see the university administration hoist by its own petard (Shakespeare, W., various).
I agree with Cheryl Rofer at LGM that as soon as you're debating the finer details of academic citations you're losing. That was all an excuse, they don't give a single shit about academic integrity. They've already said MIT's president is up next despite her giving more pro-Israel answers and there being no question of her publication record. They just want to remove anyone remotely progressive from leadership of elite institutions, and all the better if they're a woman or minority.
OTOH I lost some respect for Rofer yesterday when she turned up at the new blue place as a believer in the "NIH invents drugs and pharma takes all the profits" canard.
I lost some respect for Cheryl Rofer when I read, for the first and last time, one of her posts on her own blog, on the subject (nuclear history) which she is supposed to be an expert on, and which I am not supposed to be an expert on, and found her talking complete nonsense, and, worse, quoting approvingly other people talking complete nonsense.
I know there's whatshisname's rule about how everyone trusts the newspaper on every issue except those where they themselves know something, where it's obvious that the newspaper is talking rubbish. But Rofer's gone one better!
OTOOH Derek Lowe pointed her to his many debunkings of the subject and she was open to adjusting her beliefs (fuck you I'm not saying priors) so she's not close minded about things.
Don't think she'd listen to your opinion on nukes though.
My opinion on nuclear weapons is that the Constitution says I can have some if I want.
"Don't think she'd listen to your opinion on nukes though."
In this case she did, to her credit, because she was wrong and I was right. :)
Seconding 5. Scientist head of Stanford caught by student newspaper for meaningful plagiarism was inside baseball, this whole thing is one more sign of media failure. Not sure how much is due to shouty rightwingers and how much due to billionaire donor efforts to make this happen, their voices reach not just boards that run Universities, but publishers also. Ackman and Huntsman are the two donors I've seen named with supporting details.
She was pretty rude and arrogant in general, though
One part I found hilarious is the crazed hedge fund Harvard donor who called for firing Gay, and is now calling for replacing the Harvard board (excuse me, Overseers), is also calling for firing Kornbluth (MIT pres), despite the fact that he has never contributed anything to MIT. I can't think of anyone MIT is more likely to tell to fuck off than a loudmouth Harvard-only donor.
31- correcting herself twice when subject to criticism puts her in like the top 0.1% of reasonable internet people.
I still don't get how Britney Spears was kept in a conservatorship for so long. She was obviously not going to live a life of quiet contemplation and careful wealth management, but that's not supposed to be the standard.
38 and would love to read the back and forth
37: I haven't seen the documentary (/ies?), but it seems to be agreed across sources that her legal counsel never requested the conservatorship to end until recently, although she personally said it should be ended (or at least the conservators completely swapped out). At some point there was new counsel who delved into the issue, and once that happened it was a road to freedom in just a year or two.
One explanation I found is that previously, the conservators were in the position to approve fees for her own lawyer and that once someone new and completely independent was picked, they started actually working for the end of the conservatorship, implying malign influence, or even a corrupt unspoken understanding (the longer she stays under, the more fees there are to collect). Probably also some admixture of getting the previous lawyer to genuinely think preserving the conservatorship was in her best interest, at least enough belief to testify to any ethics inquiry later.
I was surprised. I saw that Penn caved but figured that Harvard would smooth things over/calm everything down without her resigning.
34: There are two governing boards. The Overseers and the Corporation which I think is the same as "the Fellows of Harvard College". As in "The President and Felllows of Harvard College". The Overseers are elected by alums. The Corporation is the super secret one.
Isn't one just the college and the other is the entire university?
I think the college is called "Haverford".
Going back over the New Yorker article. When it was all starting, she tried to get multiple other lawyers to break her out, and all those failed, to the point of one of them being disbarred for "attempting to represent Spears without having obtained consent to do so" (and presumably the conservatorship was the only party that could have consented?). Then it seems like her father used levers like isolation, access to children, medications, etc. to wear her down into longer-term compliance.
Her lawyer was Sam Ingham, whose salary (by the end) for the full-time role was $520,000. "Lisa MacCarley, an estate-and-probate lawyer in Los Angeles who has become something of a 'mascot,' as she put it, for the #FreeBritney movement, describes the city's probate-court system as plagued by cronyism, with judges appointing advocates from a small list of favored lawyers. Ingham, she said, 'has made a lot of money bullshitting people.'"
Yeah. Those things in 44.1 seem crimey.
37: This was not explicit in the book, but I suspect they kept her fairly sedated. She was definitely micromanaged down to what she ate. I think that plus some well-placed lies about what she was legally allowed to do would keep her from realizing what it would take to end it. She says eventually she just literally picked up the phone and called 911 and reported conservatorship abuse.
the "why" is definitely that everyone was paid handsomely out of her estate.
some well-placed lies about what she was legally allowed to do would keep her from realizing what it would take to end it
I mean, she tried multiple times in year 1. I think she may have perceived herself as having warred and lost, and to have no remaining options.
Hating the fuck out of the NY Times is definitely already my old-man signature issue. The fact that they join so willingly in every manufactured right-wing panic, and this time while an actual ethnic-cleansing is going on (which they also...well...) elicits a lot of useless rage.
Speaking of Ackman:
https://x.com/jakeswearingen/status/1742992858288705564
I feel like we're about to get a deluge of plagiarism stories like that. Seems like a good thing.
48: But she had the threat of loss of custody of her kids hanging over her head then, and was desperate to see them.
I thought only Russian mothers loved their children.
Cosign 49. They have good recipes. Other than that, the fire.
Now that Britney Spears announced that she is officially done with the music business, could she be the next President of Harvard?
Also...about the plagiarism -- could any normal professor get in trouble for using the same wording in an acknowledgments section? I don't know anything about academia, but my sense was that at first everyone was saying this was nothing. Then they found more examples of the same kind of thing -- if you add nothing to nothing a whole bunch of times doesn't it still add up to nothing? Or is that Old Math?
When an entity as unlikable as the NYT goes after an entity as unlikable as Harvard it's difficult to choose who to root for, like the time the Saudis blackmailed Bezos with dick pics.
56: it seems to me that a lot of it was nothing, but enough of it wasn't (even though it was minor) that it forced their hand.
I'm more exercised by how open a con it all is. Chris Rufo writes almost literally "I am campaigning to push Those Woke People out of power by ginning up scandal" and the big papers say not "How high?" but "May I come down now, sir?"
Rufo is such a bizarre figure. He acts like a literal cartoon villain outlining his evil plans and everyone just goes ahead and lets him (or helps him!) fulfill them.
Agree with 58. Some of it is totally fine (but maybe technically breaks rules made for undergrads), some of it is lazy and poor practice but not really misconduct, but some of it is clear misconduct (even if it'd only get you a warning).
It's kind of like literacy poll tests. Stress-test Black people to failure (if you don't find one thing, you'll eventually find another, and create a cloud of little things that look like wrongness), elevate white people via lack of scrutiny.
62, right, there's no way a white university president would lose her job over this exact same thing.
I'm watching Matt Harvey on Jeopardy as we speak. How do you like that!
61: which part is clear misconduct, do you think? I've looked pretty carefully at a lot of the allegations (maybe not all of them? I don't know) and haven't found anything that I'd definitely describe as "academic misconduct" or "plagiarism," much less "clear misconduct." I'm genuinely open to new evidence and/or to being wrong, so please don't read the above question as leading. Same with this question: what standard are you using for "clear misconduct"?
I think the consistent options are:
a) none of what she did was plagiarism or misconduct, and she should have stayed as president
b) none of what she did was plagiarism or misconduct, but she should have resigned as president anyway for other reasons (screwing up her answer to Congress)
c) she committed plagiarism or misconduct, and therefore she should have resigned as president
There is a fourth option, which seems to be favoured by quite a lot of people, but which doesn't seem very consistent:
d) she committed plagiarism or misconduct, of the type that the university punishes undergraduates for, but she should have stayed as president because it's wrong to hold the president of the university to the same standard
There is also a fifth option which nobody seems to favour:
e) she committed plagiarism or misconduct and therefore she shouldn't still have a job at Harvard at all
Another bizarre discovery I have made as a result of this is that Harvard has a thing called an Honor Council (Ehresgericht*) in which students anonymously judge their fellow students for violations of the university's Code of Honor. The website is unclear on whether they wear some sort of mask while doing so.
*this definitely breaches Ajay's Law that "any policy proposal which sounds ominous when translated into German should not be put into operation".
Ackman argues for option e of course.
Doesn't everything sound ominous when translated to German? The Bart, the.
70: similarly, anything that looks like this when used to prompt a state-of-the-art image generating diffusion model should be treated with caution:
69: What about an option where e) a few of the allegations look like sloppy citations and lazy paraphrasing, of the sort where if an editor had noticed it at the time the editor would have had her fix it, and a student would have been treated comparably, but it is demented to go through a mid-career academic's entire publication history and say that they are not fit for a responsible job because a few instances of sloppiness can be found over the course of their career.
Even the few identified incidents that really are something that should have been fixed if caught at the time aren't the sort of thing that indicates intellectual theft or failure to credit the originator of an idea, which might be meaningful even if it only happened once. They're the sort of thing undergraduates are taught not to do, not the sort of thing that undergraduates are meaningfully punished for.
The implicit claim that "being the president of Harvard is special, such that their entire record must be sparklingly unflawed" is nuts. No one does only perfectly conscientiously accurate work at literally every occasion throughout their career, and a record completely clean from that sort of error is not a qualification for a high level job.
69.d Firing is not the only way to punish someone. A student would not have been kicked out for any of this. Most likely everything here is in the "stern talking to" category and requiring a rewrite. I wouldn't even fail a student in a class for this stuff (and I have failed people for plagiarism!) let alone expulsion (which I don't decide, but this clearly isn't anywhere close to that).
68: From the crimson article, I'd say the first example from Palmquist&Vost, the one from Swain, and the second Reid Andrews one, and the Covin one are all reasonably clear cut instances of plagiarism.
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/12/12/allegations-plagiarism-gay-dissertation/
73 is about where I am. The best examples are sloppy lit review - even the verbatim ones I've seen are cited, but not enclosed in quotes. The worst examples are someone using an AI scraper and declaring that two words in common are plagiarism. That's not something that gets undergrads kicked out of Harvard. Part of using plagiarism software is knowing how to evaluate false positives.
And I think it's worth emphasizing that no one cares about this at all outside of her Congressional answers. The poll tax analogy is right, but it's also like the line bout how if you give a healthy-seeming person an MRI you'll find at least a few things wrong.
At the end of the day, the president is primarily a PR and fundraising position, and someone whose ability to fulfill those roles has been hopelessly compromised is going to be fired. See also the Wisconsin porn guy, who didn't do anything wrong, but of course he got fired. So I don't really have a problem with the firing. That said I think it's dumb that people care so much, and I don't think this level of plagiarism should merit serious consequences for anyone in jobs that aren't primarily about fundraising and PR.
Right, but the likely outcome of this is a) my legislature going after tenure b) the legislature definitely going after DEI offices and c) plagiarism software being used on any politically unpopular academic or university president.
76.2 I'm not sure that's really right. Seems like the zealots have wanted to take her down since she was appointed.
I live in a world where plagiarism is nearly always a virtue, though, so nothing I have to say on that subject should be credited at all.
a and b were already happening before this, and as for c I assume your university president is a Republican? So it doesn't seem like such a big deal to me. I'd love for my university president to be fired for plagiarism!
80: our dude is an EdD so I just assume his dissertation is plagiarized, ha, but I'm allowed my prejudices. Also a good ole boy so he will be fine. Hope my colleagues working in politically sensitive areas never use literary allusions!
What about an option where e) a few of the allegations look like sloppy citations and lazy paraphrasing, of the sort where if an editor had noticed it at the time the editor would have had her fix it, and a student would have been treated comparably, but it is demented to go through a mid-career academic's entire publication history and say that they are not fit for a responsible job because a few instances of sloppiness can be found over the course of their career.
That would be option a, no? It's sloppy work, like spelling mistakes or mislabelling a chart or something, but it's not misconduct in any way.
Palmquist&Vost- similar wording but the conclusion in the exact opposite! How can that be stealing their ideas?
the one from Swain- not sure which, but one of these is just stating a fact, and the other is defining terms. Those are necessarily going to be very similar in such a short passage.
and the second Reid Andrews one- this is the only one I could see an argument since it's a fairly original concept and identical wording. But again it's a fragment of a sentence which I'd consider sloppy, not stealing a significant part of the writing. The paper was cited, the highlighted identical part just wasn't in quotation marks.
81: That's funny because it's true. Probably.
82: I distinguish between plagiarism and misconduct. It's definitely not misconduct. Some of it isn't plagiarism. Some of it is plagiarism of the kind that would get knocked off a few points on a rubric but wouldn't lead to an entire academic hearing. If you're calling that a), okay.
Maybe we need to have two separate terms - plagiarism, for the sloppy, accidental, and trivial, and plaguiarism, for the deliberate and serious cases.
Has someone run everything this Mr. Rufo has published through the appropriate software?
77: That logic also explains why it could be ok to fire Gay because she is Black.
88: They've found lots of plagiarism in his wife's writings.
Right. The details of whether or not plagiarism happened are so incidental to the obvious hatchet job. And from a group that prides itself on worshiping the most flagrantly flawed people.
It reminds me of how only Martha Stewart goes to prison.
A guy I went to high school with went to prison. He killed a guy, but was only convicted for hiding the body.
I find 86 confusing, I thought "misconduct" is a catch-all word that includes all plagiarism, as well as all other things you're not supposed to do, and not some special level of terribleness.
93: Yep. One of the clearest examples. But there was also clear "wrongdoing" so outside the context of the way the actual fucking world works, fuckhole fuckwits can argue that justice prevailed.
94: I don't care what any of you snowflakes say, I do not want that guy to be president of Harvard.
It's only misconduct in the northeastern US, otherwise it's sparkling academic dishonesty.
Yeah. He put the 14 words on Facebook, so I unfriended him.
95: I don't think of it as a catch-all. But not wedded to the distinction, as long as we recognizing that using "maximum and minimum possibilities" isn't the same as lifting whole passages, or falsifying data.
75: thanks. None of those examples would rise to the level of plagiarism or misconduct before the relevant Academic Senate committee here, I'm nearly certain, though there might be dissenting opinion. In other words, she wouldn't have been sanctioned for misconduct here (and I would have agreed with that outcome).
I'm still curious to learn the basis for your conclusions. Your university's faculty code of conduct? Your experience on the relevant committee at your university? Or just your sense of what's what? I ask because everyone I've seen opining on these issues seems to have rooted their conclusions in the latter, and I understand that impulse--we all think we know academic misconduct or plagiarism when we see it--but I think it's a mistake. We have processes for adjudicating these sorts of disputes. We should absolutely insist that we rely on those rather than on Christopher Rufo's, Elise Stefanik's, Ross Douthat's, or even John McWhorter's ever-shifting goalposts.
Anyway, this is all bullshit, because the plagiarism allegations were, as others have noted, just a lever for achieving a political goal. Forces of revanchism wanted her out from the moment she was appointed, and they pounced after her Congressional testimony. But I still think ceding the procedural ground of determining misconduct is bad news for what's left of shared governance in universities.
49: Hating the fuck out of the NY Times is definitely already my old-man signature issue.
Welcome to the club. I have so worn out my family on this subject that I received (from I forget who) an as yet unworn NY Times hoodie several Christmases back.
My NYC metro area-native wife will never give up that subscription so I get to kvetch about while freeriding. Overall my feelings are a bit more complex about the overall paper than the national politics section which has been mostly pure hot garbage since at least the early 90s. But it does seem that more of it is going to shit. In the 90s/00s the opinion section* was generally better than the news, but they have been mostly loading up with the Bret Stephens types since then. I do not recall them being so "knee jerk take the bait simpletons" on the cultural issues back then, but maybe I was not paying close attention; they certainly would take the bait on general Republican-floated political issues.
One area that I do think they have actually gotten better on starting sometime last decade was Warming/Climate Change. And if you dig a bit they have some quite good stuff on a variety of topics; they've had some of the best in-depth reporting on Gaza, Charlie Savage is generally quite good on legal stuff (but the Haberman, Jonathan Swan, other random asshole Trump-fed stuff often gets more prominent play). They just did an excellent deep dive on the machinations behind Dobbs. But almost none of these "catch fire" and become the subjects of repeated stories and amplification by there opinion writers the way this situation, "but her emails", Whitewater, etc developed.
*Well, aside from the Three Morons From Hell (Dowd, Brooks, Friedman),
**
Also: students and faculty are held to entirely different standards when it comes to conduct here and most places I know. There are typically faculty codes of conduct. There are typically student codes of conduct. Allegations of misconduct are typically adjudicated by different bodies within universities for faculty and students. And when the adjudication of misconduct is appealed beyond the walls of universities, the laws covering employees, including faculty, and students are entirely different. (I mention this only because I don't understand why people keep insisting that students at Harvard would be disciplined for what Gay did. That's either true or it's not--though I'd be willing to bet quite a lot that if it's true, the discipline would be VERY minor--but it's not particularly relevant.)
I haven't served on the relevant committees yet, so I don't have a strong basis for my conclusions. I thought that copy-pasting from someone else's work without attribution or quotation is by definition plagiarism. As I said I don't think there's anything here that I would have reported (in particular, nothing here is long enough or weird enough that I would have every found it, I've only caught copying when it's weird stuff like copying over wikipedia's link symbol or copying a typo where the symbol alpha got replaced by the word alpha because the author forgot a backslash), and at any rate I completely agree that if reported nothing here would get anything sanctions worse than a warning. But to me there's a difference between "doing something that breaks the rules but in a way that's so minor that it wouldn't ordinarily be punished" and "not breaking the rules."
See, 104 is quite an important angle. Academics are actually surprised and upset by the suggestion that they should be held to the same standard as their students when it comes to plagiarism - of course minor things like lifting a sentence or two without attribution should not be held against an academic. Stealing someone's work, someone's ideas, is serious malpractice. But lifting a description of method verbatim is nowhere near the same thing. It's so ludicrous to criticise an academic for doing this that such criticism is prima facie evidence of racism, or revanchism, or something similarly awful.
Meanwhile (and rightly, according to academics), their students are told something much more threatening: "Quotations must be placed properly within quotation marks and must be cited fully. In addition, all paraphrased material must be acknowledged completely. Whenever ideas or facts are derived from a student's reading and research or from a student's own writings, the sources must be indicated... Students who, for whatever reason, submit work either not their own or without clear attribution to its sources will be subject to disciplinary action, up to and including requirement to withdraw from the College. Students who have been found responsible for any violation of these standards will not be permitted to submit course evaluation of the course in which the infraction occurred."
In normal organisations there's an expectation (whether fulfilled or not) that everyone is held to the same standard; if there's any difference, the higher-ranked members actually have to follow stricter standards. (A junior who fails a drug test will be disciplined; a senior will be sacked. For example.) If you're enforcing a standard on others, we expect you to follow it yourself.
Academic culture is very different, and I think what we're seeing now is that non-academics didn't understand - until this incident - just how different it is.
Looking at the broader national political media picture, to me the most maddening aspect is (as alluded to throughout this thread) their absolute refusal to acknowledge that their editorial choices of what to pursue/publish/highlight often represents a very strong editorial political bias even if the subsequent coverage is all strictly "fact-based". It becomes per Jay Rosen The View From Nowhere. When in cases like this there is a definite there there. Also see "Drudge is their assignment editor" from back in the day.
A junior who fails a drug test will be disciplined; a senior will be sacked.
The seniors never take a drug test except with a very specific cause. Juniors get tested routinely and fired for failure right up until they found they couldn't replace pot users at some jobs unless they raised salaries.
106.2: Literally nothing here would get any student punished. You're either misunderstanding what happened here or misreading those rules, but it simply isn't the case the students are held to a higher standard than Gay.
Tell them to come to California. It became illegal on Monday to discriminate based on marijuana use off the job, and to do pee tests which detect weeks-ago use.
Citation styles differ, wasn't she using APA? God I fucking hate APA and was almost roped into teaching it at my current job where it's the standard citation style but thankfully escaped.
Literally nothing here would get any student punished.
That's fine, then, if it's true, but a member of the Honor Council disagrees. They say, based on their own experience of judging such cases, that a student definitely would have been punished for what Gay did. Maybe they're lying, I don't know.
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/12/31/honor-council-member-gay/
Also I agree with LB's 73 and what vw has written here but mostly I resent having been made to know about this at all.
The few examples I looked at when my Trumper dad sent me the initial Rufo tweet seemed fine to me, maybe a couple were sloppy in a lit review manner. But I have far better things to do with my time than going through every single example they throw against the wall.
I read that op-ed and found it pretty unconvincing. I'm not sure I'd say they're lying exactly, but I do think they're talking about punishments for plagiarism in general and failing to engage with the specifics of this case at all. I also don't think there's anything here that would even have gotten to that committee.
Yeah, and "roughly 16 percent of students who have appeared before us have been required to withdraw" begs the question of how many cases of those identified are brought before the council.
The thing about the threatening bolded language in 106 is that it's describing a range of punishments applicable to plagiarism generally. That is absolutely not saying or implying that any conduct whatsoever that could be called plagiarism merits punishments at the upper end of the range. I have not heard anyone credible in a position to know say that an undergraduate or a grad student would have been punished harshly for conduct like Gay's.
It is completely absurd to imagine that a Harvard undergrad would be expelled for the sort of minor sloppiness Claudine Gay was accused of. It is also maybe not surprising that a Harvard undergrad would be annoying and self-righteous about this sort of thing.
Even the oped is saying that what makes it a big deal is the number of incidents, which is nonsense in context. The number of incidents in Gay's case is inflated by the inclusion of a lot of things that aren't problems at all, and the remainder are the result of political enemies combing through her entire publication history. That kind of motivated investigation of everything they've ever written doesn't happen to undergrads coming before the Honor Board.
MY had a story about how they refuse to do that kind of retroactive investigation of student's work for plagiarism:
https://x.com/mattyglesias/status/1734762995983568950
We found one possibly valid problem and 354 bullshit instances. That means there are hundreds of examples!
Also in the undergrad context "multiple incidents" usually means they were already caught and punished (or warned) once and then went and did it again. Which is not parallel at all.
I would like to say that it's completely obvious to anyone in academia that this is purely a politically motivated attack on a successful Black woman, but I know lots of actual academics who are up in arms about the plagiarism thing. They all have in common that they are kinda conservative old white dudes, and (mostly) mediocre researchers, and often I think they didn't even look at the supposed examples of plagiarism.
The main thing I learned is that if rich fucks want to knock you down, they can. This isn't new information, but it's good to heed the reminder. Fill your IRA in case they come for you. Or you get disabled or too frustrated to not tell everyone to go fuck themselves.
For my friends, everything. For my enemies, the law!
The US is becoming more like latin america with each passing year-- the revolutions of independence from Spain there failed to create a real middle class in most countries. As the middle class here withers, maybe the change shouldn't be surprising. The sentiment is originally from a Peruvian president, check out his hat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%93scar_R._Benavides
Welcome to the club
Why is the club chairmain giving me nuance! Do not want!
it's completely obvious to anyone in academia that this is purely a politically motivated attack on a successful Black woman
This is 100% of my thought on this matter (well, it's also motivated by trying to silence any humanization of Palestinians). If you're looking at whether any of these allegations is actually plagiarism, Rufo is laughing at you.
106: if an undergraduate cited the work a sentence later and failed to enclose it in quotes, I would not be pursuing disciplinary action. I'd knock off some points and expect they'd sort it out on the next paper. If they didn't cite it at all, it's at most a zero for the assignment and a conversation unless it becomes a pattern and then it goes to the dean. If Copyleaks tossed up a one sentence match in an otherwise fine paragraph I would ignore it entirely.
For my friends, everything. For my enemies, the law!
Good line. I also found a variant from Mexico: "For my friends, justice and mercy. For my enemies, the law is the law." (my free translation of la ley a secas, there's probably a better one.)
In normal organisations there's an expectation (whether fulfilled or not) that everyone is held to the same standard
I wonder if, other than in the abstract, this is true. Again, even in the eyes of the law--which is to say, when such matters are adjudicated beyond the walls of universities--disciplining students and employees is a very different thing. So, sure, universities are weird. There's absolutely no question about that. Maybe they would be better if their institutional culture and policies were better aligned with other large corporations? They've certainly moved in that direction over the last half century. In some cases, the results have been salutary. In others, things have gotten worse. Regardless, I think, in part based on experience, that what you're saying may be wrong. I think other organizations also have different standards of conduct for different job classifications, and especially so if they have groups as different in their roles as faculty and students. But maybe not.
Further to 21, the NYT has moved on from 73 dog bites man stories to "Dog hasn't done anything wrong but might still be a bad dog, some say."
118: lecture I got at Harvard during orientation week about plagiarism was pretty terrifying. I thought I was going to slip up and get kicked out. It was frightening enough that my expository writing teacher said that all of the Freshman Expos instructors had been talking about it among themselves and felt compelled to give us an example of plagiarism that would warrant censure to calm our nerves.
I don't think she should have stepped down. I'm mad about the donors. I thought Harvard was rich enough that they would stand up to this, unlike, say U Penn. My godmother worked for the Board Overseers and interacted with a lot of the Visiting Committees. They used to rely on help from one of the managing partners at Hale and Dorr who were decent-sized donors and able to smooth things over. Of course, Wilmer Hale screwed up the Congressional testimony.
But I agree with essear et al. that this is a politically motivated attack on a successful black woman, and I'm angry about it.
Penn is also extremely wealthy. Wharton and donors of are a horrible subset, but there's not much resistance to simply banning the word Palestine on that campus, which is what Huntsman wants. How much is enough for an endowment?
It's less about money and more, a frequently-obnoxious.attitude, that Harvard is so great that it doesn't need to follow the rules and shoukd set its own standards, e.g. the medical school dropped out of the US News rankings; it's not going to affect their reputation.
130: Following on their early December article about her leading with the same pic. Different "reporter" however, this time its the egregious Jeremy Peters.
Peters recently did a Harvard beat piece headlined "Feeling Alone and Estranged, Many Jews at Harvard Wonder What's Next.
The article included this sentence:
For students who are feeling increasingly isolated iit did not help that many of their Jewish peers had joined the pro-Palestinian demonstrations.
OK, Jeremy/NYT, let's say for the sake of argument that recent Jewish student experience at Harvard does how would this fact not lead you to expand the article to something like "Mixed Experiences for Jewish Students at Harvard" or some such. Rank viewpoint bias in an almost comical form.
How are Palestinian American students feeling about recent events?
I would expect that a significant portion of the corporation was unhappy with Gay's congressional remarks to begin with and that this might play a role in why they stopped backing her rather than going into full "fuck you, you can't tell me what to do, I'm Harvard"-mode."
134: The political reporter who wrote an article about how Elon Musk's political beliefs are unclassifiable wrote a tendentious article? That's unpossible!
The Skeet of the article from the NYT account was the first ratio I've seen there so it's getting quite appropriately dragged. Currently about 9x.
137: Right. Forgot that was him. And he's just been utterly predictable on the "free speech wars."
135: Yes good point, even more appropriately if there needs to be a Harvard student's experience to broaden it
Support for 91. Much, more plagiarism.
108: back in the day, shiv's employer's workaround for random drug testing was to "randomly" test shiv a little more often than statistically plausible, because he was clean. One of the fun things about economically depressed areas is how few young men could pass a piss test to get hired.
As Apo put it when there was a report a companies stopping drug tests, "Congratulations to drugs for winning the war on drugs."
OK. The Ackman/Oxman angle just accelerated on several fronts. Ackman decries attacks on his family and vows to review everyone at MIT against their plagiarism standards.
And... They are both getting some limelight from the Epstein releases.
In newly revealed emails, hedge fund manager Bill Ackman urged former MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito to avoid naming his wife -- MIT professor Neri Oxman -- when discussing Jeffrey Epstein, the Boston Globe reports.Have not had a chance to really look at anything in detail, but also apparently some of her students who participated in creating a gift for Epstein after he donated $125,000 to her lab felt pressured to do so.
And the Times story (not Peters) on 143.1 includes this utterly fucking bizarre sentence given these particular accusations and Ackman's response:
It was unclear whether he [Ackman - JPS] was targeting Dr. Kornbluth because his wife had received her Ph.D. at the university or because of what he considered Dr. Kornbluth's inadequate denunciation of antisemitism at a congressional hearing last month.
Just fucking incredible all the way around.
144: Oh wait, I read down further and they quote Alan Dershowitz!!!!????!!! on the weaponization of plagiarism. (Dershowitz had a plagiarism run-in with Harvard in the past.)
The nefarious Epstein-plagiarism axis finally emerging into the light of day.
Lot of Dershowitz in the news these days. He's allegedly also defending Israel against war crimes charges.
I am recalling the three Palestinian-American students up in Burlington who were shot last month. The one who goes to Brown took a bullet to the spine and is paralyzed from the chest down.
I think the Stanford student who broke the story about the ex-Stanford President (but apparently still fully tenured professor) is the son of an NYT political reporter. Also, IIRC, the ex-Stanford President held on for something like a year, despite mounting evidence and a series of retractions*, and the university went through a formal investigation and produced a report, at which point he finally resigned (as president). By that time some important university business had backed up, including multiple searches for high-level administrative positions, because people weren't sure if the university president was going to stay the university president**, and that's kind of important if your job will be directly working with whoever that is.
*I think he even created his own "I didn't commit academic misconduct, please believe me" website at one point. From what I understand, there's clear evidence that some figures and images in research articles had been manipulated, but it has not been established who (among the co-authors or others involved in the work) did the manipulations. But the ex-pres was supposed to be responsible for the work as a whole.
**Reading between the lines, probably people were expecting him to go eventually, because it was obvious there was something wrong with his research.
148: Did not know that. Seems it was Peter Baker's son.
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Into the Inferno is eerily reminiscent of Evangelion.
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OT: I bought a new Microplane and it has really revolutionized my ability to zest things.
I know everyone is tired of this thing, but NYT's coverage of it and related stuff just continues to fascinate me. Yet other reporters at the Times have now written a recap of how she lost support from the board. I love their passive voice here: Newspaper articles about Dr. Gay and the board kept coming.> In looking for the various articles I found one from early December by yet other NYT reporters that did a pretty good background (nuance!) on Ackman's long-standing beefs with Harvard and Gay.
And then this sentence on Ack/Oxman continues to boggle:
It was unclear whether he was targeting Dr. Kornbluth because his wife had received her Ph.D. at the university or because of what he considered Dr. Kornbluth's inadequate denunciation of antisemitism at a congressional hearing last month.
Oxman is a tenured prof in the Media Lab there right now.
This article "Putting the Racist Crusade against Harvard's Dr. Claudine Gay in Context" is quite good, and provides data comparing her academic achievements versus other Harvard presidents putting the lie to Ackman et al's insistence that she was a "DEI" hire.
One element that is hugely galling is that there is no lower bar in punditry and intelligentsia than being centrist/libertarian right wing. Just a parade of fucking hacks.
And a final "fuck you" to Emma Green with her condescending interview with an academic who Gay "plagiarized" and who defended her.
Him:
What happened to me in this controversy is the perfect illustration of why others have been avoiding the word "plagiarism." My initial response was entirely supportive of Claudine. Yes, it was technically plagiarism, but this is no big deal. And then the right-wing activist Christopher Rufo plucks out the beginning of that sentence and says, Another scholar accuses Claudine Gay of plagiarism. Now, he didn't lie. I did call it "plagiarism." I hadn't framed it as an accusation, but I guess the verb sort of fits. But he was able to get leverage out of something I said, taken out of context, that I then spent two days on Twitter rebutting. So, yeah, in retrospect, do I regret using the word "plagiarism," given how it was exploited? Maybe.
Her: "Plagiarism! Plagiarist! Why not call it that? Apology ? Should be fire? Not qualified. Blah, blah, blah."
I successfully ignored the whole fucking thing for so long and now it's yet another ragegasm.
His meltdown on Twitter is epic. Dude paid for the blue check which expands the character limit to who knows what and he still had to thread his unhinged mental vomit. He says he's going to us "AI" to check every academic and journalist for missing quotation marks and get them all fired and have their funding canceled.
I bet that in his head it sounded like Liam Nesson saying he has a particular set of skills.
The only thing that can move us on to a new national conversation is the NYT running their "is Taylor Swift queer?" editorial.
Counting publications across different disciplines is completely meaningless. Especially if some people are in disciplines where you write books and others are not. Counting citations across disciplines isn't much better either.
But it doesn't really matter because it's not like the quality of their scholarship is a significant factor in picking a president. Of course their are amazing scholars who move into administrative roles, but they're being chosen based on their ability to perform in administrative and fundraising roles, which has very little in common with doing scholarship.
"And it's new, the shape of your body"
Swift ruined the conversion therapy-umbrella business, but I don't see how that means she's speaking some kind of coded language. But then I would miss any codes.
This is not going to add anything meaningful to the discussion, and it's a banned analogy, but I thought of it falling asleep last night and it's stuck in my head so I'll type it out.
One of the things that people keep bringing up is (following is not a real quote) "Undergraduates at least get told that any identifiable 'plagiarism' at all is a huge awful deal they'll get harshly punished for, and maybe they do get harshly punished for that sort of thing. Everyone agrees that some of the things identified in Gay's work are plagiarism in some sense, even if they're not super serious: shouldn't she be held to a higher standard than a poor innocent little undergrad who doesn't know the rules yet?"
The analogy that occurred to me, because Newt just went through this last week, is taking a drivers license road test. How many people out there, particularly good, comfortable drivers, think they would pass a road test if they drove exactly the way they do on a daily basis without adjusting their behavior to the specific demands of the road test? Like, e.g., rolling at super low speed through a stop sign when no one's in sight -- that's normal driving but you'd flunk a road test for it. Or signaling every turn in a parking lot.
Some of the things that would make a comfortable driver flunk a road test are genuinely fine -- if you're getting into your own car you probably don't need to make a performance of checking the mirrors every time you get in, because they're already set correctly and if they're not fixing them as you drive is no big deal. Others are genuinely bad, like running stop signs, but importantly or venially bad is a matter of degree: 3 mph and no one in sight is very very different from 40 in traffic. Overall, though, anyone looking at a licensed driver and saying "You just did something they would have made a kid flunk their road test: you should lose your license. A competent adult driver should be held to a higher standard than someone who's just learning," would be out of their mind.
Analogies aside, while plagiarism is the same, the context isn't, and that matters for judging whether the plagiarism is intentional or unintentional, which is matters a lot to Honors Boards and similar. Students are meant to be learning how to write and how to paraphrase, and "can you show me you read the text" is quite a lot of undergrad papers of the kind that get plagiarized.
The context also matters a lot for self-plagiarism, which in the undergrad context means that one can't turn in the same paper for more than one course, and there's not really a similar analogue in academic publishing. "Don't write more than one paper on a dataset" doesn't fly and neither does "never turn your article into a book."
160: Yes, he has that chart which pops out and a brief discussion of it, but the much larger part his discussion on her academic cred is focused very specifically on assessment *within* her field.
And as you say academic cred ain't everything for a position like hers, but I think the article is pointing out yhat even on the chosen narrow playing field of the critics it is baloney.
It's not the main point, but because I'm a petty, spiteful person, I enjoyed the bit where he found an unattributed quote in a Larry Summers paper. Which was clearly a NBD typo, but isn't that the point?
I'm going to repeat myself -- nearly always a virtue.
OK, copyright is important, but we have developed a series of safeguards and exceptions that allow the essential ideas and truths to escape 'ownership.' This academic obsession with who said those exact words sometimes just seems impossibly trivial.
There have been enough comments on the site that a great many are going to have phrases that are identical to other comments posted over the years. Let's all post our SAT scores, out monthly paychecks, and all the instances our comments duplicated, for at least 8 words in a row, someone else's.
I stole the "void where prohibited" joke from Stanley and I'm going to do it again.
This academic obsession with who said those exact words sometimes just seems impossibly trivial.
Like you, I'll repeat myself: this isn't our obsession. Most universities have committees or other bodies that adjudicate conduct disputes among faculty and students. They generally mete out only minor punishments for minor offenses, including misplaced or missing quotation marks--in the event they mete out any punishment at all.
At least three things are happening now: the donor class has realized that, even when big money goes to a universities, universities retain control over critical issues like delivering the curriculum and policing misconduct, and that's not acceptable to people who are so rich that they're very rarely told no; Republicans and movement conservatives have realized that universities offer a useful front for their culture wars, and they're happy to make common cause with the donor class, whose activists often skew authoritarian or even fascist; and university leaders have been slow to realize that the first two things are happening and are increasingly coordinated, and these leaders have been slower to organize themselves to push back against mounting pressure to erode faculty prerogatives--very likely because their interests are less and less aligned with those of the faculty.
Also: related to everything I said above, the backlash against DEI and antiracism more broadly is gathering steam as we get further and further removed from the murder of George Floyd (and other similar atrocities), and, for a variety of reasons, that backlash is currently focused on universities.
One issue is that *teaching* requires some rules which are somewhat different from other situations. In many situations the right thing to do is just hire someone else to solve a problem for you, but obviously that doesn't lead to you *learning*. So there need to be some rules about cheating in a classroom context which are not appropriate everywhere. Some of the rules about student plagiarism are like this, the goal is to make the student learn rather than just rely on someone else having already learned it.
In research the issue is a bit different. There the issue is that credit for ideas is the thing that determines professional success (not money or winning cases or whatever else). So anything that undermines correct assignment if credit for ideas is bad behavior. Some forms of plagiarism lead to problems in this direction (though most stealing of intellectual credit isn't done by actual plagiarism). But no one actually cares about the kind of minor plagiarism not about actual new ideas.
(A thesis is a bit of a weird in between case, it's both research and part of training. A student is supposed to understand what's in their thesis to get a PhD, and plagiarism often indicates that they don't understand.)
Right. Discussions of plagiarism are funny for me because in my professional life I am expected to reuse and rework old documents without any concern for the original authorship -- the only thing important about a legal brief is if it's correct and persuasive. Who wrote it is neither here nor there. (Who is responsible for its correctness is important -- if you sign it you're committing to its truth and accuracy -- but that doesn't mean you wrote the whole thing, just that you checked it.)
People talking about plagiarism as if it means anything objective out of context seem to me to be confused.
Oh, I agree, vw. It's unfortunate that academic norms, created for purposes described in 172, can so easily be weaponized. I guess it's true that if it wasn't for the minor issues with Gay's work it would be something else, but wording the norm in objective terms -- so important for due process for punishing genuine offenders -- leads a situation where bad faith actors can easily use it. As 172.2 shows, the sin isn't copying words, it's stealing ideas, and if the author of the ideas doesn't think they've been stolen, then there's no foul. Except that the foul has been defined as copying words, which even software can find and highlight.
173: it varies by discipline, too. I think part of this is that journalists think of themselves as crafting beautiful words and obsessed with accurate attribution. People in quant fields, not so much, because boilerplate is boilerplate.
175: and yet, journalists regularly steal ideas from scholars without attribution. So long as they, the journalists, put the quotation marks in the right place, they're in the clear!
173 What would the world be like if we had to use cites and quotes for our objections to interrogatories?
Exactly, its journalists (not academics) obsessed with stealing words (since stealing ideas with new words is 95% of what they do).
Like the NYTimes is notorious for not crediting smaller newspapers that broke stories.
179: Absolutely. Was just getting on to point that out. For me that is an ironic aspect to their lawsuit against OpenAI.
Not the Times (New Yorker), but in the self-regarding Emma Green interview I mentioned above leads one question with.
As a journalist, I feel like plagiarism is one of the worst possible sins I could commit. It would be an absolute nightmare if I accidentally copied someone's work or if I were accused of doing so.
Gay's former colleague (and supposed victim of plagiarism) expresses the ideas not words idea and she follows with a quick movement of the goalposts.
It almost seems like you're suggesting that it's more serious when students do word-stealing than when academics do word-stealing because ultimately the game for academics is the ideas, not the words. Don't you think there's something to be said for modelling for students the codes of ethics you expect them to uphold? Shouldn't academics be held to a higher standard of performance than undergrads
And 180.last is missing two key points, one is that undergrads aren't held to the kind of standards that journalists imagine they are, and two that there are valid pedagogical reasons for clear rules around assignments in a learning setting.
In drug discovery it's a completely valid and common approach to steal others' ideas to the extent the law allows. If someone screws up their patent and doesn't protect an effective compound it's certain someone else will try to grab it. There are teams at most companies whose job is to find those holes in patents, and teams whose job is to write patents thoroughly enough to prevent it.
Let's all post our SAT scores, out monthly paychecks, and all the instances our comments duplicated, for at least 8 words in a row, someone else's.
They have evil alien mecha sheep?
OK, here we go from the ethics of plagiarism reporting front:
Semafor has learned that the report has caused serious divisions within the top echelons of Axel Springer, BI's German owner. Some company leaders have debated whether Ackman's wife was fair game for reporting, and have been concerned that the report could be construed as antisemitic and anti-Zionist. (Oxman was born and raised in Israel.)
In a statement to Semafor, Axel Springer spokesperson Adib Sisani said that while the facts of BI's report have not been disputed, over the past few days "questions have been raised about the motivation and the process leading up to the reporting -- questions that we take very seriously
I wonder if BI staff have to sign the special Springer Verlag contract that says you have to love the United States and Israel?
it's not like the quality of their scholarship is a significant factor in picking a president. Of course their are amazing scholars who move into administrative roles, but they're being chosen based on their ability to perform in administrative and fundraising roles
That's a great point! So it's daft to judge her on academic ability. The job's half "running a big organisation" and half "not pissing off immensely wealthy donors.
And did she do well on the vital work of not pissing off immensely wealthy donors? Or was she more of a "needs improvement"?
Exactly, its journalists (not academics) obsessed with stealing words (since stealing ideas with new words is 95% of what they do).
It's lovely that you have thoughts in your brain about what journalists do. Have you ever been a journalist or talked to any journalists at all?
And did she do well on the vital work of not pissing off immensely wealthy donors?
Obviously, that is what happened. But it's important to be clear that the cause of her resignation was donors exerting their ideological control over Harvard's public statements, not that anyone actually discovered that she'd committed academic wrongdoing that made her unworthy of the job.
College presidents don't only cater to the donors -- ideally they maintain at least a facade of independence, so that the college can appear to be an organization primarily devoted to the advancement of learning, rather than a political tool of the rich. Gay failed at threading that needle, and the donors clamped down and got rid of her. And it's bad to pretend that didn't happen, which is what the phony plagiarism scandal is about.
Yeah. Ackman is trying to hide having crushed someone with a naked display of power for political views because it looks bad to have billionaires crushing people for their political views.
And to be clear, the political view that required her ouster was something like "our free speech policy requires us to consider the context of even horrifying-sounding speech before we take action against it." Which was shaped by her experience as a Harvard student during a period where it was made clear that Confederate flags and slogans were protected by Harvard's free speech policy.
But it's important to be clear that the cause of her resignation was donors exerting their ideological control over Harvard's public statements
As happened to Magill at Penn?
Pretty much, although I admit I haven't paid as much attention to Penn because it's gotten less coverage, so if there's some subtlety you're referring to I probably don't know what you're talking about.
Personally, I think we're on a path that ends with finding out "You can't tell me what to say" is more popular with Americans than "Don't murder Palestinian civilians".
Back in 168/170: This academic obsession with who said those exact words sometimes just seems impossibly trivial. -- it occurred to me yesterday that part (not all! but part!) of what's going on is that while accidentally failing to use quotation marks in direct quotes from cited sources in a boring lit-review section of a dissertation is something that most academics here and elsewhere are treating as a fairly minor offense ("knock it off/edit better/I'm docking you points on the assignment") vs plagiarism of actual research, this is the exact opposite of how journalists approach things, where nobody cites where they get their ideas but lifting language from other reports is a huge embarrassment--if not on the level of inventing quotes--that can get you fired.
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Afterwards he felt a glimmer of achievement. But in terms of satisfaction it was hardly more substantial or sustaining than the afterglow of a good shit.|>
190: it's also a pretty ducking sensible policy? Like what was she supposed to say to that ridiculous hypothetical?
The former dean of HMS, Jeffrey Flier, is a cranky conservative. He winds up in my feed, because I follow some physicians on twitter. I now learn that the former dean Harry Lewis(a computer scientist) is quite concerned about the leftward shift on the faculty which he blames on the fact that they can teach whatever they want now.
I do remember that a classmate of mine took a philosophy course from John Rawls; I think it was the last undergraduate course he taught. A Theory of Justice was taught by Michael Sandel in his course on Justice. Rawls himself did not include his own work in his syllabus. But was that about a shift in faculty culture between then and now or more about Rawls's personality?
It's lovely that you have thoughts in your brain about what journalists do. Have you ever been a journalist or talked to any journalists at all?
Not so lovely, no. But anyway, yes, sort of. And yes, quite often. Some of my best friends, etc.
Noticing that the few articles I've seen on Oxman frame it as Business Insider "attacking" or "going after" her/Ackman.
I think the Stanford student who broke the story about the ex-Stanford President (but apparently still fully tenured professor) is the son of an NYT political reporter.
Worse than that: both parents are political reporters (Peter Baker and Susan Glasser).
Not that I know anything negative about that Stanford student, but two parents with the exact same profession/industry seems more conductive to odd upbringing than most, at least limiting to stable households. Viz. SBF, both of whose parents are Stanford law professors.
Make that profession and industry, not / as in "or". A criminal defense attorney and a corporate contract counsel put together are probably minimally weird.
Like all right-minded Americans, I am onboard with the JP Stormcrow media critique, but I have to take exception to the discussion of the Emma Green interview linked in 155 and discussed in 180. The issues raised in that piece are hard to distinguish from the issues raised in this very comment thread -- a thread I take to be chock-full of people smarter than the median New Yorker reader (who I take to be very smart). Journalists properly ask pointed questions that illuminate the concerns of intelligent, fair-minded people.
Green's job was to tease out the subtleties of Professor Voss's view on "plagiarism" (which is the term he used). She accomplished that.
The printed interview format is often lazy and has become entirely too common. This piece would have been improved by removing Green's explicit input and organizing it as a news report. But it was a pretty good interview.
Not that I know anything negative about that Stanford student, but two parents with the exact same profession/industry seems more conductive to odd upbringing than most, at least limiting to stable households
The Geeblets get told this from time to time.
Let me see, isn't Jammies teaching high school? That's pretty different from college teaching imo. At least as a full-on career.
204: I probably was a but hypercritical.
206: fair, but we're both primarily teaching math to teenagers, so it seems similar.
As long as I'm defending the vile mainstream media, here's a gift link to yet another superb column by Michelle Goldberg in the NYT.
The column is pegged to Mitt Romney's assertion that Trump's assault on democracy is old news, and that Biden needs to come up with a better line of attack.
Goldberg illuminates what the president seeks to accomplish:
Biden has set himself the task of trying to jolt the country out of its learned helplessness in the face of Trump's exhausting provocations.
She quotes Biden: "The truth is under assault in America ...". And she arrives at the correct conclusion:
If hammering away at this reality is an ineffective campaign strategy, we're already lost.
I like the rhetoric and understand the sentiment, but I'm not sure "the truth" has ever been a particularly big winner at the highest levels of American politics. That's not to say Biden shouldn't keep hammering away at Trump, of course, including with the truth, or that that's exclusively what he's doing.
My comment was a dumb expression of anxiety about the election rather than any kind of thoughtful statement about anything, including political history. I'd erase it if I could. Sorry.
Someone should put up a cat picture for you.
One thing I really liked about Goldberg's piece is that she carefully avoids the pundit fallacy: "[T]hat belief that what a politician needs to do to improve his or her political standing is do what the pundit wants substantively." *
Whether it works or not, I think the Democrats must finally acknowledge there is no compromise with insurrection. "This far; no further." **
*Quoting Yglesias.
**Quoting Captain Picard and/or the Apostle Paul.