Author Archive: Glenn Reynolds
January 3, 2024
WHEN THE NYT IS DOWN ON DEI, I THINK IT’S PEAKED: The Word That Undid Claudine Gay: The fate of Harvard’s president is the latest evidence of a deep crisis in American academia.
In retrospect, Claudine Gay’s fate was sealed by a single word. (She resigned the presidency of Harvard on Tuesday, just six months into her tenure.) It wasn’t “plagiarism” or “genocide” — the fearsome fighting words most publicly associated with her case — but rather a careful, neutral piece of language that struck some listeners as outrageous for precisely that reason: an attempt at anti-inflammatory rhetoric that had the opposite effect. The word was “context.” . . .
The Israel-Palestine conflict and American election-year politics are not the only salient context here. Academia seems to be in the grip of a multidimensional crisis that goes beyond ideology, and also beyond Harvard. Higher learning is plagued by opaque admissions policies; runaway tuition costs; administrative bloat; grade inflation; helicopter parents; cancel culture. The list goes on. An assiduous scholar might connect these phenomena with recent events in Harvard Yard. An enterprising writer could weave the whole thing into a bristling campus novel, something worthy of Paul Beatty or Mary McCarthy.
Instead, for now, we will have to make do with Dr. Gay’s letter of resignation — emailed to students, faculty, alumni and others with the subject line “Personal News” — and the message from the Harvard Corporation (the university’s secretive governing body) about her departure.
What is most striking about these texts — each amounting to little more than 600 words, all of them carefully measured, few of them memorable — is their rigorous avoidance of context. . . . What’s curious, though, is that Harvard, which compels its undergraduates to master expository writing in their freshman year, cannot find the language to defend itself.
Well, it’s hard to defend the indefensible.
THAT HE’S PRESIDENT IS A STUNNING INDICTMENT OF OUR SYSTEM FOR SELECTING PRESIDENTS: “Whatever Biden pushes should be viewed with skepticism and concern, given that he’s a public official who has been wrong about foreign policy for 40 years.”
NEW TALKING POINT: Plagiarism charges now a right-wing weapon against DEI.
Sounds like they know they have a more widespread problem. And that’s probably right. A lot of unqualified people have been promoted in higher education administration, but it’s still been required that they, at least formally, check the boxes with dissertations and some publications. But since nobody really cared about the quality, there was probably a lot of this sort of thing going on. Now it’s much easier to check such things. The obvious solution, thus, is to devalue plagiarism as an offense. Up to now it was always a firing offense; it will soon be transmogrified into a mere peccadillo, or even a blow against a “privileged” system.
If they can get away with that, anyway.
Related:
How many conservatives did it take to force Claudine Gay to plagiarize 50 times? Was it more than 100,000? What specific weapons were used? Writing my thesis on this.
— Savannah (@BasedSavannah) January 3, 2024
UPDATE: Heh:
Claudine Gay Claims White Supremacists Went Back In Time And Forced Her To Plagiarize At Gunpoint https://t.co/dJlF7lmkGx pic.twitter.com/3qwcj04P81
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) January 3, 2024
WHEN WE START HAVING IBM AND ROCK-OLA MAKE THEM, WE’LL BE SERIOUS: The West Badly Needs More Missiles—but the Wait to Buy Them Is Years Long.
A factory here west of Oslo produces a missile-defense system that can shoot down drones, helicopters and other airborne threats from almost 25 miles away.
Capable of launching 72 missiles into the sky at once, the National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile System, or Nasams, is what protects the airspace over the White House. When first deployed in Ukraine in 2022, it recorded a 100% success rate shooting down cruise missiles and drones in its first few months.
With the West confronting a rising number of potential threats, including Russia and China, orders are piling up for the Nasams from Kongsberg Defence & Aerospace.
“I’ve never seen anywhere near so much demand,” said Eirik Lie, a 30-year Kongsberg veteran who is president of the company’s defense unit, on a November tour of the factory.
New customers, though, will have to wait: It takes two years to make one Nasams, and there is already a multiyear backlog.
The Ukraine war has highlighted the West’s deficiencies in quickly producing more weapons at a time of need. The Gaza conflict may tighten supplies for certain armaments.
The constraint is particularly acute for missiles and the systems that defend against them, and also guard against the swarms of drones that have become a central element of modern warfare. . . .
Faced with increased tensions with China, Asian nations are developing their own missile capabilities “because of limited U.S. production,” said Bang Jong-kwan, a former South Korean Army Major General.
In 2022, Taiwanese officials publicly complained of U.S. delays on deliveries of Stinger antiaircraft missiles, alluding to supplies for Ukraine as being behind the holdup. In October, the chairmen of two separate U.S. congressional committees sent a letter to Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro, questioning him over “alarming delays” to weapons deliveries to Taiwan, including antiship missiles. They were ordered in 2019, with the first batch finally arriving in spring 2023.
The Navy declined to comment.
Taiwan began mass producing a new domestic long-range land-based missile in 2021, and the country has three other types of long-range missiles in development, Taiwanese officials say.
We haven’t been serious about this stuff for decades and it shows.
MARTIN HACKWORTH: Some bells you can’t un-ring: The tragedy of the Claudine Gay saga isn’t plagiarism; it’s that she was the president of an Ivy League school in the first place. “The academy is on life support if Gay is, indeed, supposed to be among the cream of the crop.”
The academy survives on prestige, and she’s dealt it the single worst blow it’s ever received. Even the celebrity admissions scandals carried the subtext that maybe these institutions were corrupt, but look how badly people wanted to get in. Now it’s like why would you want so badly to get in?
IT’S TIME FOR CHANGE: Harvard Corporation members should resign in wake of Gay fiasco, watchdogs say.
More from Bill Ackman, who isn’t going home:
In light of today’s news, I thought I would try to take a step back and provide perspective on what this is really all about.
I first became concerned about @Harvard when 34 Harvard student organizations, early on the morning of October 8th before Israel had taken any military…
— Bill Ackman (@BillAckman) January 3, 2024
YEP: Has Anyone Noticed How Cheap it Was to Bribe the Biden Crime Family and Our Universities? “And this is, to me, perhaps the most troubling part of the story. The Biden crime family so undervalued my country that they sold it for chump change—not merely disloyal, but deeply dismissive and disrespectful.”
WHAT DOES MIT PRESIDENT SALLY KORNBLUTH SAY? MIT student group continues the fight for free speech in 2024.
WELL, THE NEW YORK TIMES: “What a delicious parenthetical!
That link on “poorly” goes to the FIRE website, where you have to do a search to see where Harvard ranks. I did the search (and you can too). We’re told the “speech climate” is “abysmal.”
But of course, this article, outside of its parentheses, portrays conservative critics of academia as the threat to freedom.
LOL. Of course.
REGIME CHANGE COMES TO HARVARD.
STEPHEN KRUISER: The Morning Briefing: Academia Needs a Purge, Not a Reshuffling. Slashing federal funding, perhaps by capping eligible tuition and expenses, would get the ball rolling. And tuition caps would be an easy sell.
SEXUAL VIOLENCE BY THEIR FRIENDS IS FREEDOM, A LUSTFUL LOOK BY THEIR ENEMIES IS RAPE: From crucifying Kavanaugh to defending Hamas: The Left’s hypocrisy about sexual violence.
DECLINE IS A CHOICE: UK Methodists Dropping Terms ‘Husband’ and ‘Wife.’
SOME PARTS OF AMERICA STILL WORK:
Liftoff! pic.twitter.com/djbETJCPTk
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) January 3, 2024
REALCLEARINVESTIGATIONS: The FBI-Tainted Whitmer ‘Kidnap Plot’ You’ve Heard Next to Nothing About. “In the years since the election, the national press has given little attention to the case since the initial arrests, even though court documents have recast the episode as something more sinister. Instead of a heroic effort by the FBI to safeguard the country from domestic terrorists, it now appears to have been a broad conspiracy by law enforcement to entrap American citizens who held unpopular political views.”
YOU DON’T GET RICH BY GOING COMMIE: The China (Degrowth) Syndrome: The Beijing communists can’t command growth from either their economy or population.
Communism can enrich the top leaders, and a few collaborators in other countries, but it impoverishes everyone else.
TED BALAKER: Our Problematic Nation: America Isn’t Down with DEI.
January 2, 2024
TAR. FEATHERS. Ex-CIA analyst says intel agencies to be politically active again in 2024 election: ‘Significant problem.’
I think we’re well past the point at which the Intelligence Community has become a net negative.
OPEN THEAD: Well, here we are.
AT MY SUBSTACK: Claudine Gay Has Gone Away: Is this the dawn of a new day?
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WARM UP THE LEARJET, WE’RE GOING TO NOVA SCOTIA! Total solar eclipse April 2024: 10 of the biggest cities within in the path of totality.
Now where’s my apricot scarf?