Higher education
December 20, 2023 — Scott Johnson
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
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December 13, 2023 — Scott Johnson
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
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December 12, 2023 — Scott Johnson
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
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December 10, 2023 — Scott Johnson
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
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December 6, 2023 — Scott Johnson
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
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November 23, 2023 — Steven Hayward
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
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November 5, 2023 — Scott Johnson
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
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October 23, 2023 — Scott Johnson
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
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October 13, 2023 — Scott Johnson
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
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October 9, 2023 — Steven Hayward
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,
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August 26, 2023 — Scott Johnson
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
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July 9, 2023 — Scott Johnson
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
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July 2, 2023 — Scott Johnson
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
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June 30, 2023 — Scott Johnson
I thought that President Biden’s claim of authority to wipe out some $430 billion in student debt under the HEROES Act was absurd. As I noted when President Biden exercised his purported authority to confer the giveaway, the issue of standing was key to the outcome of the two cases challenging Biden’s purported authority. Today the Supreme recognized Missouri’s standing and held 6-3 in Nebraska v. Biden that the HEROES
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June 30, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Within an hour of the release of the Supreme Court decision in the “affirmative action” cases yesterday, President Biden stepped forth with his pitty-pat steps to mumble his disparagement of it. The White House has posted the transcript of his halting remarks here. Biden spoke about the effects of the “affirmative action” regime with the confidence of a guidance counselor, but not the candor. On that point, he regurgitated the
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June 27, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Tirien Steinbach is an attorney who has served as associate dean for diversity, equity and inclusion at Stanford Law School. You may recall the role she played in the shoutdown of Fifth Circuit Judge Kyle Duncan at the law school. She took the lectern at the event to lecture Judge Duncan in support of the shoutdown. Steve Hayward and I covered the story in a series of posts that are
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June 13, 2023 — Steven Hayward
This news item caught my eye: Secretary Cardona cancels UW commencement speech amid researchers strike Hours before he was scheduled to give the commencement speech to the University of Washington’s graduating class of students, U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona canceled his appearance, citing a strike by graduate and postdoctoral researchers. “Secretary Cardona will not cross the picket line to give the commencement address,” a spokesperson for Cardona said in
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