Difficulty in confronting racial hatred and rigor: The Harvard Corporation’s first black president did not respond to her resignation letter
Gay, a political scientist who focuses on Black politics and was the first Black president of Harvard, did not address the allegations in her resignation letter, submitted “after consultation” with members of Harvard’s primary governing board, known as the Harvard Corporation. She wrote that having doubt cast on her commitments to confronting hate and to uphold scholarly rigor has been distressing.
“Amidst all of this, it has been distressing to have doubt cast on my commitments to confronting hate and to upholding scholarly rigor — two bedrock values that are fundamental to who I am,” she wrote, “and frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus.”
The irony, Tomar says, is that Gay’s alleged problems are likely to be revealed now due to the amount of data that gets fed into artificial intelligence programs.
He predicts a slew of academic leaders will likely be outed in similar fashion. He doesn’t feel much sympathy for those caught violating institutions policies, but he does not think it is a good idea to focus on that.
“We may be able to retroactively discover what somebody did in the 1990s. He wondered if we shouldn’t be more concerned about what the person who was graduating next year is doing.
Why Did Gay’s Papers Go Unnoticed? The Misleading Case of Dave Tomar, a Professional Cheating in Higher Education
Meanwhile, Gay defended herself and attacked her critics. In a Times Opinion guest essay, the former Harvard president writes that her ouster was about more than the plagiarism allegations against her. The bigger issue, she contends, is fear of generational and cultural change at top institutions:
The Washington FreeBeacon reported on Monday that there were problems with four of Gay’s published papers.
“Supervisors should bear some responsibility for mentoring and shepherding the student to ensure that the quality of the work that they produce is high,” Eaton said.
Additionally, Ph.D. dissertations go through several steps of verification, including being reviewed by a supervisor, an examination committee and peers.
Sarah Elaine Eaton says allegations of plagiarism are mostly handled manually.
Tomar began his career as a professional cheater during this pre-internet time. He said that it was easy to get away with using technology before the educators were well-versed in it.
The professors were encouraged to use their intuition if they felt that something was off with an assignment without the plagiarism detection software programs. To help them assess a student’s grasp of material, they were urged to hold one-on-one meetings.
That was largely due to the absence of plagiarism detection technology, he said, noting that the 1990s and even early 2000s were the nascent days of the internet. Research was still conducted in physical libraries using card catalogs. Papers are usually written by hand then typed into a computer or word processor. The few software tools that were available back then are not as sophisticated as what we have today.
The author of “The Complete Guide To Contract Cheating in Higher Education” says the alarm bells were not rung as much 20 years ago. “It’s a no-brainer to me that she was just sort of right ahead of the curve of detection at the time.”
Dave Tomar, a self-described “professional cheat” who spent about a decade ghost-writing academic papers for undergrads and post-doctoral students, said it’s easy to understand how Gay’s writing went undetected for so long.
There are many head of academic institutions who have been ousted by allegations of plagiarism. Marc Tessier-Lavigne resigned last year as Stanford’s president after an investigation found several academic reports he authored contained manipulated data. The University of South Carolina’s president resigned in 2021, after plagiarizing part of a speech.
Sally Kornbluth is the only one of three university presidents still in her job and she was asked in December in a congressional hearing if she still had her job. Dr. Gay replied that it might, “depending on the context,” a formulation she reiterated when Ms. Stefanik rephrased the question. Dr. Gay apologized for her comments that made her and other witnesses part of an overnight meme about the insensitivity and cluelessness of elite academic leadership.
I made mistakes. All people of good conscience understand that Hamas is a terrorist organization and that it seeks to destroy the Jewish state. I fell into a well- laid trap at a congressional hearing. I neglected to say that calls for the genocide of Jewish people are not okay and that I would use every possible means to protect students from that kind of hate.
After Dr. Gay resigned from his job, Rufo explained in an interview how he was going to bury the controversy at higher education’s prestigious universities. His partners included members of Congress, wealthy donors, journalists, media and a bloodthirsty audience. Riding high on success, Rufo said his strategy could push the conservative movement back into what he considers its rightful place: the top of America’s most powerful cultural institutions.
My goal is to deny demagogues an opportunity to further weaponize my presidency in their attempt to undermine Harvard’s ideals.
The fight over d.e.i. in the C-suite: revealing the associates of Jeffrey Epstein and other misdemeanors
Some are pushing back. The billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban challenged Musk in a series of posts on X, defending the three principles of D.E.I. as good for business:
I would like to urge a broader caution: At tense moments, we should be more skeptical of the loudest and most extreme voices in our culture than we have ever been. Too often they are pursuing self-serving agendas that should be met with more questions and less credulity.
In other university news, Sally Kornbluth, M.I.T.’s president who also faces calls to resign, announced four focuses for the school, including better understanding of free speech on campus and ensuring the efficacy of D.E.I. programs. The head of the governing body of Harvard is resisting calls to resign over the Gay controversy.
Several associates of Jeffrey Epstein are mentioned in new documents. The documents released as part of a federal judge’s order identify people who were associated with the disgraced financier, bringing new context into his relationships over the years. Neither Clinton nor Trump have been accused of committing crimes, although Andrew settled a lawsuit by an accuser. But the documents revealed few, if any, new smoking guns.
Source: The Fight Over D.E.I. in the C-suite
Xerox and SpaceX will be forced to close, shut down, and the public will see the consequences of the firing of Elon Musk
SpaceX illegally fired employees critical of Elon Musk, a regulator finds. Eight workers who had circulated a letter calling on the company to distance itself from Musk’s social media posts, were wrongly dismissed, according to the National Labor Relations Board. The case will head to an administrative judicial hearing in March.
The jobs will be cut by Xerox. The company will lay off 15 percent of its global work force as it focuses on business services and away from its core line of selling photocopiers. On the news, shares in Xerox fell more than 12 percent.
Scholars who study plagiarism, however, say the claims that have come to light thus far are troubling. According to a psychologist who studies plagiarism at St John’s University in New York City, there appear to have been some small changes in the way the student wrote. But verifying those violations, and determining their severity, would require an investigation that takes into account the full body of Gay’s academic work, he adds.
“Frankly, this should have happened before she was hired,” Roig says. Would you want the president of one of the most prestigious universities in the world to have committed any of these transgressions?
Accusations of plagiarism need to be investigated regardless of who makes them, but the political spectacle that played out in this case effectively short-circuited the normal academic process for handling potential academic misconduct, says Irene Mulvey, president of the American Association of University Professors, based in Washington DC. The case represents yet another troubling example of political interference in higher education that is unfortunately on the rise, Mulvey says, and academics everywhere should take note.
Amalgamated University Board Governing Board of the Ivy League University Elizabeth Magill Remnant after the Irregular Attacks
Gay will now return to her role as a faculty member at Harvard, and provost Alan Garber will serve as the interim president while the board seeks a permanent replacement.
Gay is the second president of an Ivy League university to resign in the past month. Elizabeth Magill stepped down from her job at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia within a week after testifying on Capitol Hill with Harvard’s Gay and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology president. On December 5th, all three faced questions from Republicans in the US House of Representatives about the handling of antisemitism on campus following the attacks by Hamas on Israel and the subsequent invasion of Gaza. Their legalistic responses about freedom of speech and condemnation of antisemitism caused outrage.
Gay handed in his resignation to the board on 2 January. It said in a statement that, although Gay had “acknowledged missteps and has taken responsibility for them”, it had determined her resignation to be in the best interest of the university. The attacks on Gay’s character, which included racist emails and phone calls, were condemned by the board.