Well, I looked at some of former president Gay's supposed plagiarisms, and they were not very impressive. I would hardly call them plagiarism. But then, the essays in which they were to be found were not terribly interesting either. Out of curiosity, I did a little searching for information about the people who have been president of Harvard since I was an undergraduate there. James Conant was an impressive scientist. Nathan Marsh Pusey was not an impressive intellect at all, but he resisted McCarthy in his former position and that was a good thing. Derek Bok was a reasonably impressive legal scholar. Most of the presidents of Harvard in the past 70 years have been people one would not really be interested in talking to if one had a chance.
I actually met Conant when he was the head of the American portion of a divided Berlin. Since I was a traveling Sheldon fellow he agreed to see me. Not very exciting. I also had lunch once with a committee that was meeting with Pusey. He seemed to me very much like a retouched photograph of himself. Academic administrators by and large are people who do just enough to get tenure and then go into administration.
I should not imagine any of this will have an effect on my Marx study group, which starts February 2. Eight faculty and 25 students signed up for it and I am really excited to have a chance to teach again.
I do not know yet whether I will be permitted to record the sessions or whether that is a good thing. I will let you know. Meanwhile, I am safe and protected in my retirement community while all the rest of the world is going to hell. I gave another thousand to the DLCC. It is pretty much all I can do.
I am not an academic, but the whole thing sure had a whiff of "Find a reason to push her out".
ReplyDeleteOh well. Hope your seminar goes swimmingly.
Politically, Gay's resignation empowers/emboldens horrible forces on the Right. An academic named Don Moynihan had a good Substack post about the whole thing. I'll link to it later on.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was an undergrad, Derek Bok was president. Never interacted w/ him. I did have a chance to meet briefly, in a social setting, his successor Neil Rudenstine, who I think is probably someone one would want to spend time with. (Not that I did.) That judgment is based on what I know about him and some other things that I won't go into.
P.s. Drew Faust, whom I've never met, is also probably a fairly interesting person. She recently published a memoir mostly, I think, about her youth in the '60s, as a Southerner going to school in the North and involved in the civil rights movement.
ReplyDeleteHere is the Moynihan piece:
ReplyDeletehttps://donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-campaign-to-remove-the-president
I cannot resist exclaiming, or at least noting, that the short second paragraph of the post is a brilliant piece of description and commentary, the best lines I've read recently that weren't by Chaucer or William Langland. Perhaps the professor's 10th decade will be his Dorothy Parker one.
ReplyDeleteHow can you be sure that someone would not be interesting to talk to, unless you've talked to them?
ReplyDeleteA person can be not very intellectually impressive and yet be a fascinating conversation partner, especially, women, in this case, Claudine Gay, who are generally more insightful than men about others and their motives.
It's much more interesting, for me at least, to gossip with an intelligent woman than to
talk great ideas with almost all intelligent males.
Life without intelligent gossip isn't worth living.
That piece LFC linked to is interesting.
ReplyDeleteWhile there was clearly an anti-DEI push from conservatives in the campaign against Gay, as Moynihan argues, I think it would be a mistake to try to explain the whole story on that basis. Different actors appear to have had different motivations (there's Rufo on the one hand, but Stefanik and Bill Ackman on the other).
And let's not overlook the fact that this is the second high-profile resignation under duress of a member of the African and African American Studies faculty in as many years, with both cases involving allegations that the faculty members had not taken the correct positions on issues related to Israel.
Eric,
ReplyDeleteI followed the situation reasonably closely, and I'd point out that more than 700 members of the faculty signed a letter that, in effect, supported Gay after her congressional testimony in early December. And the Corporation (the main governing board) issued a statement around Dec. 12 saying she was staying. It was the continuing drip-drip of the plagiarism charges that was decisive, imo, in leading to her resignation. If she had stayed, the university would have been embroiled in endless discussions of plagiarism, what constitutes it, how serious hers was, whether one standard for students and another for the university's president is tolerable, etc. Obviously I was not privy to what happened behind the scenes, but it seems plausible or likely that the board realized that this was not a tenable situation.
Rufo seems to have intuited this turn of events, which is why he pushed the (anonymous) plagiarism accusations. Of course Rufo doesn't care one whit about academic integrity, but he knew a good tactic when it presented itself.
I only read part of the Moynihan piece, but I think it supports the above analysis. Plus, as Moynihan notes (and others have as well), the New York Times devoted an absurd amount of coverage to the story, which kept it on the front burner.
P.s. Offhand I'm not aware of the other resignation you referred to (and I'm not going to search for it right now). Perhaps you could link to something on that.
P.p.s. If you're talking about Cornel West's departure, that was mainly a personal thing about how the univ. was treating him re tenure after he'd come back as a "professor of the practice." But I don't know if you're referring to that or something else.
ReplyDeleteAlso, Gay is not leaving Harvard, at least afaik; she's returning to the faculty. (Whether she'll decide to leave in the future, who knows. Academics, esp at that level, do move around, and she may decide to go elsewhere at some point. Obvs this is pure speculation.) I also don't know whether the anonymous accuser will continue to press the 'research misconduct' charges now that she's resigned the presidency.
ReplyDeleteGay published an op-ed in NYT yesterday. (I can leave the link later.)
ReplyDeleteFree link:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/03/opinion/claudine-gay-harvard-president.html?unlocked_article_code=1.LE0.3S9v.iJfrbmApK3EJ&smid=url-share
I am on Lecture-3 of your Marx 7-Lecture Series. I keep rewinding and listening. Fascinating lectures. They show how well you understand and able to explain the power of Marx thoughts. What did Marx get wrong? Did you point that out in the lectures? I will get the book to get the last drop.
ReplyDeleteI am also touched very deeply by your comments on the Genocide war in Gaza. You can't imagine how comfortable you've made me feel....Human again, not the subhuman I feel in my hometown under occupation.Thank you.
Jamal Barghouti,
ReplyDeleteAll my solidarity with what your people are suffering in Gaza.
I write as a Jew, sick of what the IDF is doing to Palestinians.
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