They would be if the info was available and they thought they could spin it to smear her enough to get rid of her.
Help me understand. If someone lies on their resume, job application or anything related to their work, what exactly is the statue of limitations that they could no longer be fired?
Is it 2 years, 10, years 20 years or they could be fired at anytime?
4 Likes
Did she lie on her resume? Did she lie at all? I’m confused?
As for someone else, if they are fired for lying on their resume long after the fact, it is a very safe bet that the real reason they were fired had nothing to do with whether or not they lied or their resume. It would be pretext. Subterfuge. Just like with those going after Gay.
Is the statue of limitations relevant at all in this discussion?
2 Likes
Yes.
1 Like
Finally an honest assessment admitting what is driving the hatred toward Gay. It is about people mad she was hired. People who don’t like her views. People who are afraid of supposed CRT. It isn’t about honestly or integrity or even the quality of her academic record.
1 Like
If Gay isn’t going to resign on her own, isn’t there anyone on the Harvard Board who can foresee the damage that is coming?
Imagine a congressional hearing (with appearance forced by subpoenas if necessary) with Representatives showing copied sections side by side, and asking Gay to explain why it wasn’t plagiarism, followed by Carol Swain testifying that Claudine Gay plagiarized her work, and perhaps even a sympathetic looking student who was suspended for similar infractions.
Yes, it’s all theater, but it’s a continued PR disaster for Claudine Gay and Harvard.
6 Likes
Bottom line:
Harvard will probably not fire her or force her to resign. If they do, it’s going to get really ugly.
She will either resign on her “own” or she’ll stay on. If she stays on, it’s going to get real ugly but for completely different reasons. #HarvardScrewed
2 Likes
Okay so I read the NY Times “Excerpts from Dr. Claudine Gay’s Work” - and if I didn’t know who that was, and what the time-context is, I would have not even taken notice.
The closest to a literal quote was the maxim “drove me harder than I wanted to be driven.”
Frankly, if I had come across that particular notion a year ago, and it somehow resonated with me, I might have “adopted it” subconsciously, and later even use it to reflect on my own situation without ever realizing where it came from, and that it was not some Shakespearean proverb.
Papers can be quite voluminous - and if those partial phrases appearing in papers over the course of a career of publishing supposedly are the “smoking gun”, then this really does seem like a proverbial witch hunt motivated by anything but concerns over academic integrity.
3 Likes
Congressional investigations, donor revolt, unwanted distractions, continued media scrutiny.
It could go away but she’d be under an even more intense microscope. Everything Harvard does, people will be watching for every little potential slip up.
Let’s see the student demographics in 2025, 2026, 2027. Are they abiding by the Supreme Court decision? Hmmm.
And of course the continued conflict on campus between opposing political factions which is another potential powder keg if not handled with great care.
It’s never a good thing to add more and more enemies who feel someone has “gotten away with something”, especially ones with money and power.
2 Likes
You missed the point. This wasn’t just a one-time mistake ( for which teen undergrads have been suspended and had their grad school chances ruined). This is a repeated pattern of inappropriate academic behavior over decades by what is supposed to be an academic professional and leader.
The undergrads are rightly furious at being held to a higher standard than the faculty, and the Congressional hearings will show Harvard’s history of students severely punished for far less egregious conduct.
Whether Gay can continue as a scholar is up to her faculty colleagues, but clearly her time as a leader is up.
7 Likes
NYT is piling on.
"Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, should resign.
I don’t love thinking so and hoped we would not reach this tipping point in the controversy over whether she should be retained in her position. But a tipping point it is.
Harvard has a clear policy on plagiarism that threatens undergraduates with punishment up to the university’s equivalent of expulsion for just a single instance of it. That policy may not apply to the university’s president, but the recent, growing revelations about past instances of plagiarism by Dr. Gay make it untenable for her to remain in office."
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/21/opinion/harvard-claudine-gay.html
4 Likes
I didn’t. Please don’t tell me I missed something just because I disagree with you. I do not see evidence of a pattern justifying here termination. I definitely do not see evidence of dishonesty that would justify such a draconian punishment.
I don’t believe this is true, but if it is true, then this should be corrected, not emulated.
1 Like
The author, John McWhorter, an African-American Columbia professor with a Stanford PhD, goes on:
"…After the congressional hearing this month where Dr. Gay made comments about genocide and antisemitism that she later apologized for, and now in the aftermath of the plagiarism allegations, some of her supporters and others have argued that the university should not dismiss Dr. Gay, because doing so would be to give in to a “mob.” However, one person’s mob is another person’s gradually emerging consensus among reasonable people.
I, for one, wield no pitchfork on this. I did not call for Dr. Gay’s dismissal in the wake of her performance at the antisemitism hearings in Washington, and on social media I advised at first to ease up our judgment about the initial plagiarism accusations. But in the wake of reports of additional acts of plagiarism and Harvard’s saying that she will make further corrections to past writing, the weight of the charges has taken me from “wait and see” to “that’s it.”
If it is mobbish to call on Black figures of influence to be held to the standards that others are held to, then we have arrived at a rather mysterious version of antiracism, and just in time for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday in less than a month."
4 Likes
Of course the NYT is notoriously full of people who are “mad she was hired” and “who don’t like her views” because they “are afraid of supposed CRT”.
1 Like
Seriously? You just assume he must be a progressive? Because . . . ?
You may want to take a closer look at who John McWhorter is. Despite your sarcasm, no one fits the bill better. He literally wrote the anti-CRT book.
4 Likes
At the speed things are snowballing, the question more and more seems to be: “before or after Christmas?”
2 Likes
Was just going to say that…In fact, McWhorter does oppose CRT.
4 Likes