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Comment by rahimnathwani | Hacker News Reader

I had never heard of a 'limited hangout' before, and I hadn't realized that HN norms require that a reply must address all points in the parent comment.

Back to the point I was making: BI didn't choose Oxman due to her academic position. They chose her because she is the wife of Bill Ackman.

It's a good tactic! But let's assume Oxman and Gay are equal on both scholarly output and extent of plagiarism.

Removing Gay (who was President of the world's most famous university) seems like it moves things forward. Bringing Oxman into it seems like it's aimed at halting that progress. BI is engaged in whataboutism. If they were trying to show how pervasive plagiarism is, they could have chosen a current academic, ideally one with a senior position at a famous university.

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Great, so we're on the same page that investigating Oxman's academic output was an effective tactic for BI. Now if we're just going to focus on the social impact, I guess it depends on what it is that you'd like to see "moved forward". The people behind the campaign against Gay, including right-wing activist Christopher Rufo, have been very open and explicit that this was about advancing their agenda and that plagiarism was a means to an end [1] so you'd have to be pretty credulous to pretend that this was initially about academic honesty.

Rufo and Ackman managed to shift the Overton window and have achieved their goals, for example, by getting mainstream press outlets like the NYT to publish "just asking questions" articles linking Gay's ousting with DEI. Given that this was the original motivation for this whole thing, from my point of view, BI did a great service in pushing back on this agenda, and looking at Oxman as an exemplar of a white academic (recent academic who became famous for her academic work, whatever) was the perfect way to do this.

[1] https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2024/01/04/msnbcs_al...

I agree BI did a great service, but not because I disagree with Rufo'a agenda and think it needs to be pushed back.

BI 'poked the bear' and provoked Ackman into putting resources into shining a light on some (albeit limited) aspect of the problems with the academic establishment.

Assuming he follows through, we will all get a bunch of interesting analysis, without spending a dime ourselves!

Cool, so we've established that you're somewhere on the spectrum from indifferent to supportive of the agenda of a man who is pretty explicitly trying to bring Orban-style authoritarianism to the US [1]. Personally, I'm far more concerned about a looming existential threat to US democracy than I am about academic plagiarism by the leadership of high-profile universities. So, agree to disagree, I guess.

[1] https://www.vox.com/23811277/christopher-rufo-culture-wars-r...

Why is this about individuals at all? As a former academic I feel academia has a higher principle to uphold its principles about assigning credit where it is due and so on. Right and left are largely meaningless terms, we should be striving for the truth.

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