This is from a Harvard Crimson article about Alan Garber:
"Graduating from the College in 1976 summa cum laude in Economics, Garber later received his masters and doctorate in Economics from Harvard while concurrently pursuing a medical degree from Stanford. He remained a clinical fellow at Harvard until 1986, when he joined Stanford’s faculty as an assistant professor.
Over the course of his academic career, Garber published over 150 academic papers and has accumulated nearly 20,000 citations for his work bridging the fields of medicine and economics, beginning with his 1982 Harvard dissertation titled “Costs and Control of Antibiotic Resistance.”
Terrific guy but I doubt he will become president because he’s too old (69) and Jewish. I think Bacow was 67 when he became president and did not intend to spend the full ten years that is I think customary among those who don’t take a forced exit like Summers or Gay.
I think any president of Harvard will be caught in the crossfire between the DEI constituencies (among students, among the faculty, and activists generally) and alumni (probably above the age of 30 or 35), many faculty members and donors. I know quite a few otherwise liberal faculty and administrative folks at Harvard and elsewhere who shake their heads ruefully about what now can’t be said. I suspect that the pendulum may swing back a little bit, but the fact that the right wing came on so strongly in ejecting Gay will make some of the DEI folks really dig in their heels.
Here is an article about a Harvard alum who is a San Francisco seed VC investor who decided to run for the Harvard Board of Overseers because of his disenchantment with what is happening at Harvard.
A year from today we will need to check the Harvard honor council statistics. Gay’s continuation on that faculty puts that council in a very awkward position regarding hearings on plagiarism allegations. I predict there will be very few referrals, and no convictions, of Harvard students for plagiarism for the forseeable future.
More background on Claudine Gay. https://twitter.com/wesyang/status/1738332863328616544
“Carol Swain grew up in a shack without running water with 11 brothers and sisters. … Claudine Gay is the scioness of one of Haiti’s wealthiest families and a graduate of Exeter.”
It’s all about privileged elites (who expect to get away with anything, hence plagiarism) preserving their wealth and power, and divide-and-conquer strategies like DEI (CRT, SEL, antiracism, wokeism etc) are all part of that. People are starting to wake up, and Harvard has to do much more to address its reputational damage.
A very interesting read and exercise in advanced CYA.
She writes:
" My hope is that by stepping down I will deny demagogues the opportunity to further weaponize my presidency in their campaign to undermine the ideals animating Harvard since its founding: excellence, openness, independence, truth."
Most of the calls for her resignation from the large donors have highlighted Harvard’s departure from those very ideals.
also:
“Campaigns of this kind often start with attacks on education and expertise, because these are the tools that best equip communities to see through propaganda.”
If anything the “campaign” has been to return to academics and expertise.
And…
“Throughout this work, I asked questions that had not been asked, used then-cutting-edge quantitative research methods and established a new understanding of representation in American politics. This work was published in the nation’s top political science journals and spawned important research by other scholars.”
The only problem was that many of her publications plagiarized material.
I do fully support her closing paragraph:
“College campuses in our country must remain places where students can learn, share and grow together, not spaces where proxy battles and political grandstanding take root. Universities must remain independent venues where courage and reason unite to advance truth, no matter what forces set against them.”
I hope that Harvard (and other schools) find presidents that drive for such environment - and Gay is not the person for that.
Well, according to Bill Ackman, Harvard should be looking to business for a president as opposed to elevating academics. On this I don’t disagree - I’m not sure what the number of academic publications/citations has to do with one’s ability to be a good college president. Claudine Gay had a lot of issues relative to her performance but lack of “sufficient” academic citations was not one of them - if she’d done a great job (she didn’t), who cares?
My post was made in response to those who defended Gay by saying, “all of a sudden everyone is an expert in political science who can judge her work and declare that she is not qualified as a scholar.” I’m not an expert in the field, so I linked the Princeton article comparing political scientists in terms of their citation counts, and where does Gay fall among them. I apologize for not providing more context.
Perhaps the problem was that she was marketed as a scholar-if she had a storied career in business, law, politics or even administration, then her citation numbers wouldnt matter. But she was pitched as a prominent scholar without the data to back that up.
“ It is not lost on me that I make an ideal canvas for projecting every anxiety about the generational and demographic changes unfolding on American campuses: a Black woman selected to lead a storied institution. ”
After much internal discussion, the team was planning on leaving this thread closed since the topic as outlined in the original post has reached its conclusion and the posts in the last day or so have been simply rehash and debate.
However, since Claudine Gay has a guest column in today’s NYT (which perhaps someone has a guest link to share), we’ll reopen temporarily to allow further discussion, but not debate.
Once this conversation is exhausted, a user is welcome to open a new thread to discuss the search for a new president and next steps for the Harvard Corporation. That thread, should it transpire, will be free of Claudine Gay commentary.
I’ll reiterate that per Terms of Service, any posts not in compliance with ToS are subject to deletion without notice or comment. Since users flagged a ton of posts yesterday, we also ask that users refrain from flagging posts simply because they disagree with them or in “retaliation” for one (or more) of their own posts being deleted. Additionally, don’t flag a moderator note as being off-topic.
I am wondering if Gay actually signed an agreement with Harvard prior to resigning, as those often include a “keep quiet” clause to get Harvard out of the news cycle. She is instead going full bore at playing the victim.
From the article:
“There are going to be people, particularly if they have any inkling that the person of color is not the most qualified, who will label them a ‘DEI hire,’ like they tried to label her,” Kimbrough said. “If you want to lead an institution like (Harvard) … there are going to be people who are looking to disqualify you.”
THIS is one of the biggest problems with education today. No Responsibility?! How can we raise people to be caring, honest, and forthright if the foundation of our educational system (at the highest levels) is OK with lying and cheating? Harvard should dismantle their academic counsels that judge student plagiarism… clearly “borrowing” from others is ok.
