Harvard President Claudine Gay Resigns | Hacker News Reader

Harvard President Claudine Gay Resigns

thecrimson.com

44 pointsmfiguiere24 comments

It's worth calling out two sad trends in the west as well. One is bad-faith defense of the plagiarism. It's really just the logic fallacy of attacking one's motives, and I can't believe so many western people bought into such fallacy. Chinese used to say “杀人诛心”，which means it's better to attack one's motives than killing this person, and it is exactly how people persecuted their political components for thousands of years. I can't believe that the west, who brought forth the modern political systems, are going backwards, big time.

Another trend is dividing people into oppressed and oppressors, while automatically giving the oppressed the moral high ground and all the legitimacies. I mean, how is it different from what Chinese and the Soviet Union did back in 1960s? For starters, check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guangxi_Massacre. Or this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pol_Pot. Do western people really think they can do better if this kind of false dichotomy prevails?

There is nothing more dangerous than certainty of belief.

Are you sure?

Well I would imagine many of those who acting this way have always had sympathies for the underlying ideologies of China and the USSR. Liberals are a small minority after all.

I wish so but I'm not so sure about that. Harvard CAPS had a poll that showed more than half of the young people support Hamas. The Squad have been steadily gaining popularity, so much so that a recent article in Spectator asked who would be able to stop the Squad after the Biden administration is gone while Pelosi already stepped down. And in multiple cities in the US, the mob destroyed statues, yet left Lenin's intact.

Why would people who were protesting racism in the US care about tearing down a statue of Lenin?

Yknow, rather than the ones of people who advanced or tried to protect slavery here.

This is just a guess, but the article from the Crimson that was from the plagiarism voting board that said Gay's work would have clearly been "voted" for suspension, probably did her in.

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/12/31/honor-council-...

I think it's more likely this letter https://freebeacon.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Complaint2... reported here https://freebeacon.com/campus/harvard-president-claudine-gay...

The board was already pretty close but chose to retain her before this, but their position became less tenable when this letter was published. The letter itself bears close reading, as it's a wonder of rhetorical skill. Really, anybody who wants to effect change should read this letter and learn from it.

I wonder how this affects the signaling power of college. The usual narrative is that college is supposed to signal competence, or that college today has become dumbed-down compared to in the past. But widespread or undiagnosed plagiarism 30 years ago or longer, before the advent of machine learning, means that the signal may have been weaker back then, or that college was more dumbed-down when one takes into account rampant, unnoticed cheating. I think this is it. Due to better plagiarism /cheating detection and stricter standards, the completion of college today is a better signal of competence compared to in the past.

If you think 'ai' wont just create even better plagerism, I have some swamp land to sell you.

This fuels my growing distrust of academia. The person who is the president of one of the most prestigious academic institutions in the world it turns out has been consistently violating some of the most basic principles of academic integrity. Beyond that there is questions if this individual was qualified for the position in the first place or if they were selected on account of other factors.

So maybe sometimes it pays to be skeptical of "the experts".

Plagiarism has always existed in academia. What you’re witnessing is selective enforcement, where a group wanted her out because she was weak on antisemitism, and went digging for the dirt they needed. In this case, they struck plagiarism and stopped early. But it could have easily been some other gotcha sufficient to cancel someone. When you have a thousand eyes scrutinizing someone, all kinds of skeletons reveal themselves.

This is the only logical stance to have until we see some signs of life for merit and achievement as their guiding principles again.

There are two reasons why initially Harvard dug in, putting it's "full support" behind her:

1. They dismissed the plagiarism allegations as partisan (which was sort of true but the copy pasting was pretty egregious)

2. Harvard ontologically can't understand how its reputation could be hurt by this or anything else. Everyone there thinks of themselves as the "best" and in their mind these political squabbles, or even who the president is shouldn't matter.

Zero Hedge's article [1] on the same references the Washington Free Beacon exposure [2] of 6 new allegations of plagiarism, "Half of Gay’s published works now implicated in growing scandal" from [2]

When it rains, it pours.

[1] https://www.zerohedge.com/political/harvards-gay-hit-new-pla...

[2] https://freebeacon.com/campus/harvard-president-claudine-gay...

Predictably, the Zero Hedge thing is just blogspam of the Crimson and Free Beacon --- it is itself a seeming instance of plagiarism.

everyone just copies from each other now. one original source for every hundred copycats

I'm conflicted with zerohedge because it seems like a decent source for useful market info but also posts so much garbage that I don't really want it in my Twitter feed that much

I read this, long ago and found inner peace with respect to this topic:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3895149

Yeah I only found it recently and that seems about right. They're fast which is nice but that doesn't that outweigh the constant info-wars talking points

Here's a piece to read on ZH's background:

https://newrepublic.com/article/156788/zero-hedge-russian-tr...

This appears to have been in the wake of a whole new raft of plagiarism charges.

Haven't seen the new raft.

Apparently the old set of charges were already severe enough to e.g. get a Harvard student suspended for a year[1] or so.

[1] https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/12/31/honor-council-...

new stuff on https://freebeacon.com/campus/harvard-president-claudine-gay...

The can of worms opened.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com