I previously said that if there must be a Civil War in the US it is better to fight it in the universities than on the streets or in the already overburdened institutions of government decision making and representation, the reason being that universities are the lairs of the monster, and the monster can be slain most economically in its lair.
Another aspect is the ‘sickness’ of plagiarism, which I believe is interwoven with the leftwing lowering of standards in academe. When I tried to bring in a standardised and innocuous statement for students at a university in Sydney about what constitutes plagiarism I was pilloried by colleagues. When I tried to actually implement the policy after finally pushing it through the Academic Committee (which I chaired) my Head of Department encouraged the guilty group of students and the Student Union to launch a complaint against me, which eventually led to my sacking and redundancy. That was the end of my career as an academic, but I was thus liberated to take the struggle to a different level. You only have to google ‘douglass north impersonal institutions’ and open the 4th search result to see the liberty of a denouement.
‘tis a Gay day today
First a good and comprehensive round up of the long awaited defenestration …
Extracts:
Kim Strassel (‘the great’):
I think that's a really important context here, which is that this resignation has to be viewed through the lens of a Harvard that's been under growing scrutiny for years. Also, this particular administrator, Claudine Gay — who's been very controversial at Harvard for years — even when she was still in the faculty there were a lot of instances of her working with students and activists to shut down the speech of other colleagues that disagreed with the reigning orthodoxy. I think that was what tripped her up in this hearing and all of these university presidents was the double standard. …
… This past week has been devoted to these incredibly technical arguments and discussions about what truly counts as plagiarism. The way the press and academics are so good at taking what is actually a pretty straightforward problem, as you just demonstrated by reading that quote and then muddying it up. So we've had a lot of discussions about whether or not this was truly plagiarism, whether it simply counted as inadequate citation. I saw another long article that tried to suggest that because some of the passages and some of her work had been taken out of more technical or statistical books, that technical information isn't held to as high a standard when it comes to plagiarism. I think you make a good point, and it was echoed by a group at Harvard in honors group whose job it is to look at student plagiarism, who came out and said, “This would be a problem if it was being done by students. Are we going to have similar levels of accountability here?”
This brings us back, Kyle, to what you started with, which was the question of the Harvard Corporation because I think that they are what's next here in that their credibility [is in shambles now] that they have defended her vigorously from the start of this. They claim that they had an independent review done of her work and that she passed it, but they have not been clear on exactly who conducted that independent review or exactly what the findings were. They've now issued this statement saying that yes, she engaged in some missteps without really explaining what they felt those missteps were, even as they hailed her as a great leader and lamented her leaving. I think that there's going to be a lot more focus now on calls for resignations for some of that corporation. You're already hearing it among staff, and I think some of the donors from outside, and activists are going to be asking whether or not there's going to be a similar level of accountability for the corporation that signed off on this hire in the first place and then refused to step up and do something for so long after things started to fall apart. …
… I think we should care and here's why. Not because it's elites talking to elites, but because, as we know in our society, often what you see happening in elite institutions trickles down into other places. What you have in the Ivy League at the moment is the worst expression of everything that's been going wrong on college campuses … which is not necessarily about policing speech. It's about the failure of administrators to explain to a younger generation that the way forward in life is not yelling at each other, not protesting, not harassing speakers who come to the schools, but rather engaging in debating in thoughtful ways, in intellectual ways. When that completely falls apart at the nation's highest level schools … you often see administrators at other schools following that lead. So we are hearing examples of this happening at schools all over the place, which is why you've had, for instance, some states proactively, places like Florida, now attempting to change the way curriculum is structured, try to put some new standards in place that put a new emphasis again on civil discourse and freedom of speech, but in a way where they're not acting as policemen in terms of every last word that is said, but rather trying to change behaviour and produce some grownups. So that's why I think we should care is that is it as bad everywhere as it is on Harvard? No, but is Harvard where we could be headed at far more schools if we don't address the situation? Yes. So I think in that regard, it's an important debate and discussion to be having.
Second, a good manifesto on victory and how to achieve it cleverly:
How We Squeezed Harvard to Push Claudine Gay Out
Conservatives can prevail in the culture wars by understanding how power works—and using it.
By Christopher F. Rufo
Jan. 3, 2024
The left has spent decades consolidating power across the institutions of American academic life. The crowning achievement of that effort was the diversity, equity and inclusion bureaucracy—constructed to perpetuate progressive dominance of higher education by keeping conservatives out of the professoriate. Claudine Gay was in some respects the apotheosis of this process. Last year, Ms. Gay, an African-American political scientist with a thin publishing history, became Harvard University’s 30th president. On Monday, following a sequence of scandals involving antisemitism and plagiarism, she resigned.
What changed? First, public support for DEI has cratered. Following the outpouring of sympathy on elite campuses for Hamas’s war of “decolonization” against Israel, many Americans—including many center-left liberals—became aware of the ideological rot within academic institutions. They began to question the sweet-sounding euphemisms of DEI and examine what they mean in practice.
Second, the political right has learned how to fight more effectively. As one of the journalists who first exposed the similarities between Ms. Gay’s published work and that of other scholars, I watched the political dynamics develop from the inside. The key, I learned, is that any activist campaign has three points of leverage: reputational, financial and political. For some institutions, one point of leverage is enough, but, for a powerful one such as Harvard, the “squeeze” must work across multiple angles.
This is precisely what happened. Journalists—including the independent reporter Christopher Brunet and the Washington Free Beacon’s Aaron Sibarium—applied reputational pressure, exposing Ms. Gay’s alleged plagiarism and Harvard’s scandalous effort to cover it up. Donors, led by hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman, applied financial pressure, withholding a billion dollars in contributions. And Congress, under the leadership of Rep. Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.), applied political pressure, exposing Ms. Gay’s equivocations on antisemitism and threatening consequences for inaction.
Throughout the campaign, I adopted the unorthodox approach of narrating the strategy in real time, explaining how conservatives could shape the media narrative and apply pressure to Harvard. Critics condemned me as a propagandist and bad-faith actor. Some of my allies also questioned the wisdom of telegraphing the campaign’s next moves. But there was a method to my madness. Conservatives face enormous disadvantages in public discourse—most significant, the progressive left’s near-monopoly on prestige media. By raising these dynamics to the surface, we can begin to challenge and subvert them.
It worked. After ignoring the story for more than a week, the center-left publications began to corroborate allegations of Ms. Gay’s plagiarism and raise questions about her leadership. The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Atlantic all published op-eds calling for Ms. Gay to resign.
The truth finally broke through: Ms. Gay was a scholar of not much distinction who climbed the ladder of diversity politics, built a DEI empire as a Harvard dean, and catered to the worst instincts of left-wing ideologues on campus.
The nation’s leading university had subordinated veritas to politics, compromising its mission. The only choice was to force Ms. Gay to step down.
While her resignation is a victory, it is only the beginning. If America is to reform its academic institutions, the symbolic fight over Harvard’s presidency must evolve into a deeper institutional fight. The Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci called this approach the “war of position,” a grueling form of trench warfare in which each concept, structure and institution must be challenged to change the culture.
There is a way forward. Conservatives have demonstrated an increasing sophistication in their successful campaigns against national brands such as Disney, Target, Bud Light and now Harvard. Legislators in Florida, Texas and other states have recently passed laws abolishing DEI in their state universities. Professors across the political spectrum are working on efforts to depoliticize academic administration, rebalance faculty politics, and restore truth as the guiding principle of American universities, including at Harvard.
There is another reason I have adopted the practice of openly narrating the inner workings of these campaigns: to teach and to embolden others. Niccolò Machiavelli wrote “The Prince” not for those who already knew how power worked, but for those who needed to know but didn’t yet understand. If there is any hope of stopping America’s cultural [sic] revolution, it must begin with a clear-eyed understanding of how to wield power and reshape institutions in the real world. Fantasy is no substitute for victory.
The successful campaign to topple Harvard’s president is about much more than Claudine Gay. It is about the great conflict between truth and ideology, colour-blindness and discrimination, good governance and failed leadership—a conflict that, if we are to preserve America’s core principles, conservatives must win.
Mr. Rufo is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of “America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything.”
My thanks to the Wall Street Journal … and [the conservative] Condorito
Dr Michael G. Heller
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