Higher education

Exit Claudine Gay

Featured image If Claudine Gay’s transgressions were reasonably defensible, she would remain as Harvard’s president in good standing. She would continue to wield her authority to enforce the dictates of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (and to include you out). The university bought her the best lawyers money could buy to help fashion her congressional testimony on campus anti-Semitism. The university went to the well again for her when the New York Post »

What Claudine Longet did to Spider Sabich…

Featured image Someone or other continues the examination of Claudine Gay’s scholarly output prior to her accession to the Harvard presidency — some 17 articles in all. The Washington Free Beacon’s Aaron Sibarium reports that six new instances of plagiarism have been cited in the complaint filed with Harvard yesterday. Sibarium reviews the record to date along with the new allegations: Seven of Gay’s 17 published works have already been impacted by »

Gay shambolism

Featured image Students of ancient history may recall that Harvard President Claudine Gay’s plagiarism scandal began with a late October inquiry by the New York Post to Gay and Harvard specifying incidents of what we have come to know as “inadequate citation” in Gay’s work. The Post submitted its inquiry and awaited their response. Harvard deceitfully asked the Post for more time to respond. The response was a 15-page letter from the »

Claudine Gay in context

Featured image The case of Harvard President Claudine Gay persists. It represents the multifaceted and overdetermined disgrace of Harvard. Today, for example, Ryan Mills and Zach Kessel report at NRO that “Scholars Say They Were Plagiarized by Claudine Gay, Ignored by Harvard Investigation.” It’s an excellent story, though it is behind NRO’s paywall. Today Jennifer Schuessler delivers the sad news to readers of the New York Times in “Harvard Finds More Instances »

Claudine Gay’s way with words

Featured image Peter Wood is president of the National Association of Scholars and former Boston University professor of anthropology. At BU he also held a variety of administrative positions, including associate provost and president’s chief of staff. In his December 15 Spectator column “Claudine Gay’s way with words” (behind the Spectator paywall), Wood draws on his experience in academia to examine the case of the Harvard president: Gay made a practice of »

The deep meaning of “proactive”

Featured image In its statement vowing to back Harvard President Claudine Gay today, tomorrow, and forever, the Harvard Fellows took up the issue of Gay’s plagiarism. The Fellows asserted that Gay “is proactively requesting four corrections in two articles to insert citations and quotation marks that were omitted from the original publications.” I translated “proactively” as meaning “when she was caught.” I stand by my translation. The statement dated Gay’s proactive voyage »

Gay plagiarist

Featured image In addition to her other failings, Harvard President Claudine Gay is a plagiarist. Aaron Sibarium provides the ocular proof in the Free Beacon story “‘This is Definitely Plagiarism’: Harvard University President Claudine Gay Copied Entire Paragraphs From Others’ Academic Work and Claimed Them as Her Own.” This morning Harvard has disseminated the following statement under the names of the Fellows of Harvard College (omitted below): Dear Members of the Harvard »

Her name was Magill

Featured image And, to borrow a phrase from “Rocky Raccoon,” she called herself Liz. Liz Magill is the former president of the University of Pennsylvania. Along with board chairman Scott Bok, Magill resigned yesterday from her position in the wake of her testimony responding to questions posed by Rep. Elise Stefanik at a House committee hearing last week. The New York Post reports that their resignations were “voluntary.” Magill will remain a »

Bill Ackman comments

Featured image Bill Ackman is the founder and chief executive officer of the Pershing Square Capital Management hedge fund and an alumnus of Harvard College as well as the Harvard Business School. I’m sure he has generously supported the university in the past, but he has now taken a position of leadership urging alumni to oppose the campus intifada. Yesterday Ackman watched the testimony of the university presidents before the House Committee »

Civic Education, at the Highest Level

Featured image Some readers may recall my earlier announcement that next semester (starting in January) I’ll be filling the very large shoes of Prof. Ted McAllister at Pepperdine University’s School of Public Policy. (Ted sadly passed away after a long illness last winter.) I gave a talk to the incoming class of graduate students back in August, which I turned into a podcast here (in case you were living in a cave »

Thought for the day

Featured image John Tierney is the former long-time New York Times reporter and columnist. He is now a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal and can therefore say things like this: Harvard’s abysmal [FIRE free-speech ranking] is based partly on a series of censorship incidents at the school and partly on its students’ answers to questions in a national survey of 55,000 students. At Harvard, three-quarters of students didn’t feel »

Thought for the day

Featured image Our own Steven Hayward with a truth blast in the New York Post: Normal human beings not handicapped by a contempora[ry] college education may be wondering why the pro-Hamas academics coming out of the woodwork make their chief complaint that Jews are “colonizers.” It has long been tiresome to review the lengthy history of Jews living in “Judea” (as the Romans called the Holy Land when they occupied it) centuries »

An open letter from Fern Oppenheim

Featured image I visited Israel in 2007 as the guest of a program sponsored by the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. Fern Oppenheim was the host of our small group. She opened every door we wanted to enter and a few we didn’t even know existed. Fern has now written “An Open Letter to Presidents of American Universities and Colleges That Are Too Numerous to Name.” You know who »

Time to Close Harvard?

Featured image One of the lingering controversies over here in Hungary is the actions Prime Minister Viktor Orban took several years ago to kick Central European University (CEU) out of the country. CEU was founded by George Soros in the early 1990s. As The Atlantic described it, “Soros had conceived the school during the dying days of communism to train a generation of technocrats who would write new constitutions, privatize state enterprises, »

Dear Professor Trafton

Featured image I am deeply saddened to report that Professor Dain Trafton died yesterday in Exeter, New Hampshire. Professor Trafton’s wife, Vera Trafton, wrote me from the hospital earlier this week and alluded to his health challenges. She thought hearing from a few of his former students might help bring him back. Over the course of my four years at Dartmouth I got close to Professor Trafton in a variety of ways »

XiYue Wang’s story

Featured image I touched on the enraging story of XiYue Wang in “The Princeton historian mugged by Princeton.” The Middle East Forum invited Wang to tell the story of his captivity in Iran to a Washington audience. I have posted the video below. MEF’s Clifford Smith converts Wang’s speech into an excellent narrative account in the post “Academic Perfidy and Diplomatic Appeasement Embolden the Islamic Republic.” Listening to Wang’s speech, I confess »

Don’t forgive this!

Featured image FOX 9 is the Twin Cities Fox affiliate. Via Twitter, I see that it has gone deep on the Supreme Court case holding that President Biden lacked the authority to forgive some $430 billion in student debt with the wave of a pen. FOX 9’s Corin Hoggard covers the “story” “Burden of student debt heavier for minorities after Supreme Court ruling.” Hoggard overlooks the constitutional issue addressed by the Court »