451 Comments

Good Riddance!

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Clearly Harvard doesn't believe in equality of outcomes.

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Does nobody listen to Peter Zeihan he predicted this months ago. The Americans are exiting the Middle East as fast as they can. They will only be interested in Israel from now on the rest of the Arab world has to either enter into a peace agreement with Israel or live with Iran running the show. Make up your minds now guys.

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Man. It's a bad parody, the Gay fiasco, dark comedy; total farce. It's exhausting to watch progressives constantly circle the wagons and lie, gaslight and pump endless bullshit into the discourse. Since Floyd, the left has lost their goddamn minds.

Here's my piece on Gay: https://michaelmohr.substack.com/p/the-problem-with-claudine-gay

Michael Mohr

Sincere American Writing

https://michaelmohr.substack.com/

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What is “this moment of extraordinary challenge” which Harvard must navigate?

It is astonishing that Gay can make her own personal failures out to be some kind of historical event outside of herself.

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Why on God's green earth are they going to pay Claudine Gay $900,000 per year going forward? A sociology professor with 11 plagiarized papers to her name? Can we get some investigative journalism on this story?

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>> "What will tomorrow bring?'

Now we know. It brought explosions in Iran that killed 100 people.

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Niall Ferguson can fuck right off, if that’s the same Bloomberg article Taibbi broke down on Racket the other day. Sure, yeah, he’s a “friend” who claims Americans are pussies for not wanting to go die fighting in Ukraine. How about you go send your kids to die now that you’re a UScit, Friend?!

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William F. Buckley reportedly said over 60 years ago he would "rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the telephone directory than by the Harvard University faculty.” This sordid episode, not just Gay's behavior but even more so the squalid behavior of the university leadership, surely demonstrate the wisdom of that assertion. One feels sorry for anyone so unfortunate as to be associated with such a pathetic institution.

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I understand the attitude, Bill, but there is too much fortune and good fortune at Harvard to dismiss it. Instead, we have to fight to make it what it should be: an enormous resource for scholarship and scholarships--55% of Harvard undergrads receive them. Harvard's libraries and labs are needed to keep young people as productive and innovative as possible. Sure, scorn is warranted today and has been for some time, but once we're done with that, let's force the despicable Harvard Corporation/Board to realize that Harvard belongs not to them but to the United States, and to the smallest minority in the world: people willing to devote themselves to intellectual pursuits.

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Thanks for disagreeing in such civilized fashion Heather.

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Of course. We have got to save our country together.

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Jan 3·edited Jan 3

We knew Gay all too well. She had a two-parent middle-class household and the very best American education at Phillips Exeter Academy, Stanford, and Harvard. She is married to a senior research analyst in the Department of Health and Research at Stanford who got his PhD in political science at Harvard. That someone as privileged as Gay chose to steal the work of so many others shows very bad character that exemplifies the epithet "entitlement." As in: "I am entitled to steal your words and claim them as mine." Moreover, she did so in academia, betraying a lack of intelligence and originality, along with the sense that she would never be held accountable for her theft. No wonder she couldn't handle antisemitism at Harvard: she hasn't the spine or words. An example should definitely be made of her for years and years and years as we struggle to maintain worthy academic standards in the United States.

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I read the Free Press to escape from biased reporting. On this issue, I also read an article in Harvard's student paper that questioned the extent of Gay's plagiarism and asked where the line is drawn. What is plagiarism? Is it false attribution, is it failing to use quotation marks, something else? What did she actually do? She should be held to the highest standard, but what is this standard, where is it reported and what are the facts to support the charges? I'd like to see the facts.

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Jan 4·edited Jan 4

Simone, the claims of plagiarism are well substantiated. The Crimson and Harvard's Board tried to deny them until they couldn't. Please note that some current Harvard students protested her presidency, correctly stating that they would have been expelled for committing such intellectual dishonesty. Gay is a fraud and has been for years, feeding off other academics, many of whom are African-American. Here is the MLA's definition of plagiarism: https://style.mla.org/plagiarism-and-academic-dishonesty/#:~:text=Copying%20a%20published%20or%20unpublished,giving%20proper%20credit%20is%20plagiarism. Here is a link to the current list of Gay's egregious intellectual theft so you may see it for yourself. This link comes from the FP article, so their reporting is factual, not biased, although perhaps they should be clearer by labeling the sources you have to click on "source." https://freebeacon.com/campus/harvard-president-claudine-gay-hit-with-six-new-charges-of-plagiarism/ Finally, this link shows a long list in yellow of lifted passages with the authors plagiarized mentioned below: https://freebeacon.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Complaint2.pdf

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Thank you for giving me this information.

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I appreciate your wanting it. We have to try hard these days to find facts instead of opinions. I hope Gay will be removed as a faculty member at Harvard. There are so many earnest, hard-working academics who deserve her position and salary.

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Gay should not be on the faculty at Harvard. DEI going sideways…

We’re (ie. USA) gradually being sucked into the war by Iranian proxies. Level Tehran and start over.

I am rooting for Haley, but we sure do miss Trump.

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“Our sense—and recent events have only reinforced it—is that Claudine Gay is only the symptom of a deeper rot, both at Harvard and across higher education more generally.”

“Our sense”? This is the definition of obvious, no? Has been for quite a long time now.

I’m disturbed at the quick victory laps being taken while Gay retains her $900K salary and just slides into another position at Harvard.

And I’m disturbed at how much Rufo seems to be making this about how fabulous he is (a real danger with him, I think), and how half of this piece focuses on one journalist involved. On the one hand, I think it’s valuable, in that we need more smart people going into journalism, jazzed at the prospect of doing important investigative work. On the other hand, we don’t want journalists who make themselves the story... that is a big part of how journalism originally fell apart, IMO.

As much credit as people like Rufo, Taibbi, Shellenberger, Weiss, et al deserve when it comes to trying to resuscitate journalism in the West, there is a fine line to walk here, and I’m worried that some in the profession aren’t doing a great job at keeping egos and personalities in check... and that this will only hurt the effort. And rebuilding a robust press is such a critical part of saving the West from itself at the moment.

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Claudine Gay got her Ph.D. from Harvard. The claims are that her dissertation contains plagiarisms. If so, Harvard should consider revoking that degree based on the fact that she cheated.

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Her resignation is a pyrrhic victory. It won't change the educational context, and certainly not the biases of the staff and students. The only way to address this is two pronged:

1) Back to basics starting with the youngest grades and through High School.

2) Color blind hiring and promotion a-la Martin Luther Kings' words, based only on verified scholarship and ability.

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