Hey New York Times, Is A Supreme Court Justice As Important As A (Black, Woman) Harvard President?
Hey New York Times, Is A Supreme Court Justice As Important As A (Black, Woman) Harvard President?
*Sixty-two stories* they published on the Black Harvard president's 'plagiarism.' Neil Gorsuch's? Bupkis.
This morning we were reading some of the continuing coverage of Claudine Gay’s resignation from the presidency of Harvard, which the New York Times has covered with more alarm than they covered Hitler’s rise in the 1930s, and thinking that it feels like just yesterday we were noting that the plagiarism charges against Gay were not really about plagiarism at all, but were instead a thinly veiled attack on a Black woman by a bunch of white guys who think the only way she could possibly have gotten the job is if she was a diversity hire.
Then we realized it wasn’t yesterday, it was two weeks ago! Time flies when you’re watching CNN and grinding your teeth into a fine powder.
Nothing in the last two weeks has disabused us of our belief about the motives of the people who drove coverage of Gay’s defenestration, but in case we needed reinforcement, there is the case of one of our newer, Trump-bestowed Supreme Court justices, Neil Gorsuch.
Seven years ago during his confirmation hearings, Gorsuch was accused of similar plagiarism charges as Gay. From Politico’s coverage at the time:
The documents show that several passages from the tenth chapter of his 2006 book, “The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia,” read nearly verbatim to a 1984 article in the Indiana Law Journal. In several other instances in that book and an academic article published in 2000, Gorsuch borrowed from the ideas, quotes and structures of scholarly and legal works without citing them.
Similar — really, lesser — questions about lack of citations were what dogged Gay so badly that the New York Times published 62 goddamn articles on her case in the last couple of weeks. Do you know how many articles the Times wrote about the plagiarism allegations against Ol’ Smilin’ Neal in 2017? Zero. Nada. Zilch. Goose egg.
That’s fine, though, because what’s more important to the country at large, a Supreme Court justice whose decisions touch literally every single American, or the president of a college responsible for something like .4 percent of all college alums in the country, even if it does seem like more thanks to the outsized influence Harvard grads have in this great meritocracy of ours?
(Fun fact: You know who graduated from Harvard Law School? Neil Gorsuch, if you can believe it, which you can because you appreciate irony.)
Here’s another fun bit about the Gorsuch story:
The experts offered by the White House asserted that the criteria for citing work in dissertations on legal philosophy is different than for other types of academia or journalism: While Gorsuch may have borrowed language or facts from others without attribution, they said, he did not misappropriate ideas or arguments.
In other words, sloppy citation work does not affect the validity or robustness of the topic Gorsuch was writing about. It is, according to people familiar with her work, the same story for Gay, whose research as a grad student and professor is considered path-breaking.
And yet the New York Times only went after one of these two high achievers as if she was a New York Times reporter questioning the paper’s coverage of transgender people.
PREVIOUSLY!
We were not the only people who noted that the plagiarism charges against Gay were not really about plagiarism, but about a bunch of white men terrified about what a Black woman ascending to Harvard’s presidency said about the diminishing of their societal status when old racial hierarchies get replaced by new ones. So we really appreciate that one of the people who led the charge against Gay, a Harvard alum and hedge-fund bro named Bill Ackman whose principal claims to fame appear to be a) he’s rich, and b) he has David Ferrie’s eyebrows, confessed to it on Twitter:
“She did not possess the leadership skills to serve as Harvard’s president, putting aside any questions about her academic credentials …”
There weren’t any apparent questions about her academic credentials until Chris Rufo and his white supremacist of an assistant put some of it through Turnitin, a plagiarism-detecting software program that was inaccurate enough that Harvard has long refused to use it.
More Ackman:
“The Harvard board should not have run a search process which had a predetermined objective of only hiring a DEI-approved candidate. In any case, there are many incredibly talented black men and women who could have been selected by Harvard to serve as its president so why did the Harvard Corporation board choose Gay?
“One can only speculate without knowing all of the facts, but it appears Gay’s leadership in the creation of Harvard’s Office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging and the penetration of the DEI ideology into the Corporation board room perhaps made Gay the favored candidate.”
So he didn’t actually know anything, he just looked at Gay’s record of jump-starting DEI programs at Harvard and miraculously knew she was unqualified.
Ah, well, as a duller intelligence than even Bill Ackman once said, it would have been irresponsible not to speculate!
As a final irony to this story, we should mention that Business Insider reported on Thursday that Ackman’s wife has a similar plagiarism “issue” in her earlier academic work at MIT (ironically another school whose president Ackman and Rufo are targeting for being insufficiently deferential to them). Ackman defended her on Twitter by saying that any attack on his wife proves he’s on target. Well, what else is he going to say, that he knows he’s been an enormous asshole and comported himself with all the dignity of a rancid turnip in a pile of pig poop?
We’re guessing it’s more that Ackman’s wife isn’t so darn uppity (Black). We don’t have any evidence, but we feel confident enough to speculate.
[Politico / Twitter / Business Insider]
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About 25 years ago, I was in grad school (MA, German), and I was looking through some old notebooks of mine from around 1988. I found a poem that I had written and forgotten about, I thought it had some potential, so I revised it a bit (it was already pretty good) and gave it to my girlfriend to read.
She called me in a few days to tell me she had found "my" poem in..."The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas." I had apparently copied out the poem (an off-and-on habit of mine) and neglected to note where it came from. Ten years later, I thought Dylan Thomas' poem was my own, and even felt that it needed revision. Dylan Thomas.
I do not know whether the case of the president of Harvard is remotely similar, but just to say one can plagiarize inadvertently. So glad my friend caught it!
His wife took money from Epstein, had her students (women) send him thank you notes and gifts.
It is not pretty.
And when he complains about MIT mentioning it his email is like, 'She has a baby and no nurse". How fucking disconnected from reality. Only a PT nurse?
https://twitter.com/BGrueskin/status/1172711645279219712