Pun Salad

Here plagiarism becomes “material that duplicated other scholars’ language, without proper attribution”. It’s been euphemisms all the way down with her and Harvard, with nobody daring to use the p-word. However, she requested corrections of only three items (there were forty or more), and attributed her mistakes to “errors”—as do all plagiarists. It’s hardly possible, I think, to engage in the amount of plagiarism she did without knowing that you’re doing something wrong. She also decries the people who brought her down as being afflicted with “obsessive scrutiny”. Her “scholarship” is still under question, with some saying that what she published from her thesis differs from what the original sources say, but we’ll wait to see how that shakes out.

To no one’s surprise, the AP cobbled together and put out on the wires an utterly craptastic article Tuesday night regarding Claudine Gay’s resignation as the president of Harvard in light of her plagiarism problems. Written by two reporters on the education beat, one affiliated with the AP and the other with the Washington Post, the article was an exercise in blame-shifting, grievance-mongering, and playing to the lazy WaPo reader who desperately needs to believe that it’s only those nasty right-wingers who are stirring up trouble amidst otherwise impeccable behavior from a pioneering minority woman.

And of course the concluding paragraphs rehash the greatest hits of conservatives’ alleged desire to strip the university of any hospitality to anyone who is not a wealthy, heterosexual, white male who probably wants to join a fraternity and go to football tailgating parties:

The campaign against Gay and other Ivy League presidents has become part of a broader right-wing effort to remake higher education, which has often been seen as a bastion of liberalism. Republican detractors have sought to gut funding for public universities, roll back tenure and banish initiatives that make colleges more welcoming to students of color, disabled students and the LGBTQ+ community. They also have aimed to limit how race and gender are discussed in classrooms.

You see, it’s just higher education wanting to make college “more welcoming” to students who rank highly on the intersectionality pyramid of grievance. And if making them feel more welcome means separating them from the pack by providing them their own academic disciplines, resource centers, dormitories, affinity clubs, and activities; if it means protecting them from exposure to views which might come into conflict with their own; if it means a coordinated campus effort to ostracize anyone who doesn’t climb aboard this bandwagon; why then, that’s a small price to pay for social progress, right?

The biggest problem with smart people is that they’re incredibly good at using their prefrontal cortices to rationalize what they want to believe in the first place. This is a well-documented phenomenon, and one you can observe yourself right now. Are you inclined to agree with me here? If so, you’re already forming rationalizations about why I’m correct. If you’re inclined to disagree, you’re reading this with an eye for poking holes in everything I’m saying.

October 7 may prove to be a turning point in mainstream liberal views about DEI. It’s long been true that DEI (or wokeism, or whatever you call it) emphasized group identity and treated people differently based on those identities. The ostensible purpose was to correct for biases against marginalized groups. But the response to October 7 in many elite spaces made it clear that “marginalized groups” does not include Jews, even though any encyclopedia entry for “marginalized groups” should probably include a lithograph of a Jew hiding from a mob. This came shortly after the affirmative action case revealed that Asian-Americans also don’t count as a marginalized group, even though — and this always blows my mind — there are Asian-Americans currently alive who were forced into government camps. These events seem to have caused some liberal and liberal-adjacent folks like Bill Ackman — the sometimes-donor to Democrats who was instrumental to Gay’s ouster — to say “enough”. The extent to which DEI violates bedrock liberal principles has become too large to ignore. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion has turned out to be a lot like the band 10,000 Maniacs: It’s a great name for what is ultimately a big heap of of vile garbage.

Few people will go to Harvard. But just about everyone will apply to college or apply for a job. And nobody wants to be discriminated against — Americans of all races agree that race and ethnicity shouldn’t be factored into hiring and promotion. The conversation we’re having about discrimination is — I believe — high-salience for a lot of people. And I also believe that liberals are on the wrong side of it, which will hamper our other priorities until we get our heads straight.