Higher education
January 25, 2024 — Scott Johnson
Reading the eminent historian Niall Ferguson’s great Free Press column “The treason of the intellectuals” last month, I was struck by this passage: It might be thought extraordinary that the most prestigious universities in the world should have been infected so rapidly with a politics imbued with antisemitism. Yet exactly the same thing has happened before. A hundred years ago, in the 1920s, by far the best universities in the
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January 20, 2024 — Scott Johnson
James Piereson contributes to understanding the deep meaning of Claudine Gay and the regime of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in his New Criterion column “DEI boomerang.” The title does not do it justice. Here is the concluding chunk: College presidents, if they are not members of the Democratic Party, invariably come into office pledging to enlarge the diversity regime, which further cements the party–academic alliance. College faculties are overwhelmingly Democratic
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January 17, 2024 — John Hinderaker
It is slowly dawning on liberals across America that DEI is, in most contexts, illegal. The whole point of DEI is to discriminate against disfavored groups, and in favor of preferred groups. Liberals have a hard time understanding that there is anything wrong with this, but the courts–most notably, recently, in the Harvard and UNC cases–are beginning to set them straight. In many states, legislators aren’t waiting for litigation to
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January 9, 2024 — Scott Johnson
Peter Boghossian thinks the time is ripe to revisit the investigation of academic grievance studies that he conducted in 2017 and 2018 with his fellow iconoclasts James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose. For background read the New Discourses post “The Grievance Studies Project.” Check out Boghossian’s current set of linked tweets beginning with the one below by clicking on the time/date. Several of the tweets include a video excerpt from the
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January 3, 2024 — John Hinderaker
Bill Ackman is the wealthy Harvard alumnus who has taken the lead in trying to reform that institution. In the wake of Claudine Gay’s self-destruction, he wrote this lengthy Twitter post in which he diagnoses the sickness of institutions like Harvard. It is very good, and appropriately uncompromising in its denunciation of the totalitarian DEI culture that prevails on campuses and elsewhere. Money quote: DEI is inherently a racist and
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January 2, 2024 — Scott Johnson
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
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January 2, 2024 — Scott Johnson
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
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December 23, 2023 — Scott Johnson
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
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December 21, 2023 — Scott Johnson
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
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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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