I’m genuinely curious about the question raised by the OP.
Harvard is really really strict about plagiarism. Students get into serious trouble for fairly minor plagiarism. It’s pretty hard to maintain that stance when the president is found to have engaged in plagiarism. Even minor plagiarism.
I was pretty sure it was just a matter of time when i first heard the charges.
I’m withdrawing my moderation note. I still believe that @FinsToTheLeft misunderstood the comment he quoted. But after discussion with him, i don’t think it was intentional. So it’s something that should be dealt with by discussion, not moderation.
My apologies to @FinsToTheLeft
Thank you and I too am out of this.
FWIW the “gotcha” should have been a softball to handle. And she deserved to be criticized for that answer.
It was also appropriate for the Board to rally in support of that not being a dismissal level mistake.
And in the case conservatives have a point that some speech is less tolerated than other speech on many campuses, some sensitivities are respected more than others. That’s beyond her though.
Maybe her … repetitive failure to properly attribute… would never have been attended to without that flub and the reaction that was not only from conservatives with axes to grind. But it really isn’t possible to ignore something that a student would be disciplined for. Leadership need be held to higher not laxer standards. Doing porn I can defend as fine for a university leader to do. Plagiarism as more than a one off bit of sloppiness I cannot.
I just found a document possibly equivalent to the Harvard Code of Conduct mentioned by several posters:
University-Wide Statement on Rights and Responsibilities
If one walks up to another Harvard student and repeatedly says “from the river to the sea,” whenever they see them, it is personal, and thus seems to me a violation. But so long as not directed at a individual, nor used to shout down other viewpoints, “from the river to the sea” seems consistent with the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, regardless of whether someone considers it a call to kill all Israelis and/or genocide advocacy.
When asked if you are allowed to advocate genocide, I think the default university answer has to be yes. But some Harvard schools have more restrictive speech codes. The Harvard Divinity School mandates speaking “with kindness and compassion.” I think political sloganeering violates that.
Elise Stefanik would not like my nuanced answer above. It was impossible to give an honest answer that Stefanik couldn’t spin as something disgraceful.
I’m trying to parse this in a way that isn’t offensive, and I just can’t. I don’t know where this idea came from that people with marginalized identities aren’t qualified for the work they are doing. It presupposes that a black woman couldn’t possibly be as qualified as a white man. She fucked up, but she fucked up in the way many white men have fucked up before, so there’s no reason to assume it’s because she was uniquely unqualified for the job.
Well, that’s the other edge of so-called DEI, AA, and other systems that aim for more proportional representation. It allows for the critique that a person got a position wholly or in part to fill a quota or to signal ideological alliance.
Of course it’s not as binary as “uniquely unqualified” or “couldn’t possibly be as qualified” vs the most qualified for the job. The truth and perceptions are bound to be somewhere in the middle.
Opinion | Claudine Gay and the Limits of Social Engineering at Harvard - The New York Times (nytimes.com) is one such opinion on the subject. I’m relatively confident that the NYT is on the short list of accepted sources. Now whether or not you agree with the opinion is not the point. The point is even if some may find the question offensive it is still a legitimate topic of conversation.
With regards to the plagiarism, I’m not really sure how bad it is/was and what Harvard’s standards are. I do find it funny that plagiarism has been subjected to the euphemism treadmill and that the leader of the institution got more grace than prospective students who had social media stuff leaked. Which brings me back to the point of capitulating to an online mob or cancel culture in general. I was against said capitulation because I have always felt it incentivized a witch hunt mentality and society. So many others were for it because they aligned with the witch hunters ideologically and against the witches. Well, as predicted it’s hard to control where a particular methodology will lead and far too often those arrogant enough to think they can control a tiger by holding its tail eventually get bit.
With today’s technology, a billionaire with an ax to grind and the right data can scour tremendous amounts of material looking for damning information to feed the mob.
I think just about everything is a legitimate topic of conversation, including Bret Stephens’s NY Times column (gift link here). However, opinion columns don’t get a Times endorsement for being printed there. And I question the claim that Gay lacks scholarly credentials required of a Harvard president. Googling a bit, I found several Harvard presidents, in living memory, who did not publish any books until after they had been Harvard president for years (James Conant and Nathan Pusey). Conant published many scholarly articles before becoming president, but, unless I am missing something, Pusey, president from 1953 to 1971, only had one scholarly article ever published in his field. So what? He started out as a liberal arts teacher, and then went into academic administration.
In my value system, racial discrimination, including reverse discrimination, is high on the list of what you should never do. So I am against some policies Gay championed. But claiming she was poorly qualified is mistaken. As dean of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, she was highly qualified to become president.
Last month, Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker published an op-ed criticizing Gay without unfounded speculation on why she was hired:
Yeah, she was unambiguously qualified for the job.
I think multiple cases of plagiarism call this seriously into question.
In the HR world this has already begun to cause ripples as people point to this as an example of why Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is a bunch of baloney. Like @octopus said, there are a lot of people who view any woman or minority in an important position as being there in part because of programs like Affirmative Action and DEI. But then I suspect many of those people are bigots and wouldn’t think a woman or minority in that position was qualified, so I won’t be losing any sleep over it.
I’m not sure of that. I think it’s more along the Al Capone lines: it was easier to prove plagiarism than breach of the university’s conduct code, so she’s out.
The headline in my local paper, courtesy of National Post/Post-Media is “University head resigns over antisemitism furore.”
That’s how I’ve seen the story reported, not much focus on the plagiarism issue.
I will quietly wait for Conrad Black’s editorial decrying her removal due to cancel culture
I’m a Caucasian woman. And I still wonder if Claudine Gay got her job to fulfill some kind of racial and/or gender quota.
I’m also going to bow out of this conversation.
FWIW (white male if it matters) I perceive it is that she was considered objectively qualified, as were likely a decent pool of others. Her also being of intersectional identities that leadership representation is underserved in maybe helped out her above other qualified candidates.
And given that dealing with diversity … challenges … is a major issue for elite institutions, that the elite institutions are wanting to attract highly qualified diverse populations, having diversity at the leadership level serves those needs in a real way.
That said, if anything a white male in her position would have been more likely to have lost support earlier and no one should have survived the plagiarism bit of it is as bad as it sounds.
I believe some of us can compartmentalize: when they were selecting someone to carry out the administrative/managerial, fundraising, public-outreach and team-leadership jobs that are a College President’s operational function, her preparation and experience demonstrated qualification for that. Plus it was promotion from within, which counts favorably in such selections. The diversity considerations would then be a welcome bonus.
So, a College President does not need to be an academic research superstar – and in campuses where you can’t swing your arm without hitting a past or future Nobel contender, Cabinet Secretary or Professional Association Chair, often isn’t.
However, plagiarism is incompatible with holding a post of trust in an elite academic institution, independent of competence for the daily managerial tasks. Once plagiarism is proven and becomes divulged, then the “public face” and “mission leadership” parts of the job become unsustainable. Things that would get an undergraduate or a newb faculty member before a discipline board, are not something you let slide in the college president.
This is what gets me. The students are held to very strict standards on this. I would think the president of the university should be held to the same standards they impose on others attending/working at the school.
Especially such an elite school which claims the loftiest of standards.
Oopss
It’s funny how us Jews never seem to be included in those conversations.
Very well said; thank you.
In the Palestinian context Intifada refers to the First Intifada and the Second Intifada which were certainly not non-violent; that’s revisionist history and terrorism erasure.
Here’s one example of “aggressive no-nviolent resistence”.
Some of us on American campuses were Israeli. We aren’t worth less because of our dual citizenship. And besides, when the anti-semites get going, it suddenly turns out that even people who gave in to the Inquisition and converted a generation ago are suddenly too Jewish to be trusted…
Are you seriously telling me that if Jewish (or more likely, overzealous Christians) started chanting whatever dogwhistle the Ben Gvirites are using now [I think it’s that Gush Katif (abandoned settlements in Gaza) should have a beach view, which would mean demolishing much of Gaza] that we would tell Palestinian [or otherwise Arab or Muslim] “oh, don’t worry your little brown heads about it, they’re only talking about ethnically cleansing the Palestinians in Gaza, you guys are safe”? Or would that racist bullshit be rightly shut down immediately?