Harvard, Gay, Ackman And The Bottom Line

FIRST ON FOX — Harvard University President Claudine Gay resigned on Tuesday — marking a cataclysmic failure of the leftist orthodoxy that has consumed higher education in recent decades, said two leading academics. 

"What we see here is an example of the final corruption of our most elite institutions," former U.S. Department of Education Secretary William Bennett told Fox News Digital.

Except... she didn't resign.

She's still a faculty member and will likely still keep her near-million dollar a year salary, and of course benefits.

This, despite there being evidence that her alleged "academic work" was riven through with plagiarism, an offense that often leads scholars in all areas of study to either fail a class, be suspended or even expelled -- and always to have such as a permanent brand on their academic record.  Such "honor violations" are of the most-serious sort in academic pursuits -- except, of course, if the point of your presence wasn't your scholarship.

That's the real damage here.

There's no easy way to fix this when you get down to it, and what drew attention to the problem is orthogonal to the issue itself.  Yes, she and the other two made statements in testimony on Capitol Hill that rankled a lot of people -- including some very prominent Jewish people.  But the reality of the situation is that she, like everyone else, has a right to free speech and to their own opinions -- even if someone who has a lot of money and is Jewish is offended by it.  We can have that debate all day long and frankly that Bill Ackman and others went after her on that basis is both unsurprising and actually rather damaging overall because the question here is quite-clearly one of her character and intellectual capacity, not her opinions.

Thus the basic problem: Gay was hired despite the character issue with her own work and it was either undiscovered because people were uncurious or worse, they at least suspected she had done so and let it go anyway.  That's not one person, nor is it a mark of being "Anti-Semitic"; it is much larger in that it is an indictment of an entire industry, specifically higher education that has demonstrated it is handling out unearned credentials and promoting persons who lack merit to hold the positions they have.

Worse, by Harvard's actions they've gone much further -- they've underwritten the plagiarism that Gay apparently engaged in throughout her academic writing, not just once or twice but all over the place.  It belies belief that nobody at Harvard -- or elsewhere -- knew about it over such a period of time and study.  If in fact it was truly undiscovered then its even worse because now we have entire thesis review boards who aren't competent to sit in judgment during said thesis defense, or worse, passed on her work knowing what she had done and thus gave license to it.

That upon this discovery Gay was not immediately subject to the very same scrutiny and sanction that any other student would be expected to suffer -- and still isn't being held to account, as it appears she will remain on the faculty and continue to be paid even as it is now alleged that it was not one instance of plagiarism but rather many instances riven through her entire body of academic work -- is unconscionable. 

That it took a public comment that some rich people found rude before this was brought forward into the public is even worse in that it draws a reasonable implication that putting unqualified people in positions is just fine provided they continue to parrot whatever opinions and public policy positions certain rich people want to have put forward and, in many cases as we saw over the last three years, enforced.

Gay's body of academic work was notably thin to begin with and thus that record begs the question: Did she ever really do anything to merit being a professor at all, never mind Harvard's President, or even to hold an advanced degree of any kind?  On exactly what basis, may I ask, was she first admitted to Harvard's graduate program?  Can her original admission be objectively justified or does the issue go back even further than we now have in evidence?

I don't know that answer either -- but what I do know is that every degree Harvard has issued at least from 1998 forward when she got her PhD cannot be reasonably believed to have been honestly earned, and thus until Harvard can prove at what point this practice became tolerated and give us a hard cut-off date we must presume it goes back even further than that.

It would appear the Trustees and other members of the faculty do not appreciate that essentially two decades of Harvard degrees are now reasonably considered worthless by anyone in industry or anywhere else -- and that on a forward basis nobody can trust the process of education there.  Does that not rise to an existential threat in that it impugns the value of every credential issued by Harvard and thus the very existence of the institution?

The saddest element of all is that I don't expect any of these institutions to answer for any of this fiasco because they don't think they have to.  They believe they can issue pieces of paper and pay people nearly a million dollars a year when in fact by the evidence rank violations of academic standards took place and thus said credentials -- and following from that said salaries -- were in fact unearned as the intellectual chops and character represented by same are absent.

And that, perhaps, is the worst of it, especially considering the con jobs run on the public through the last two decades in our economy, markets and other professions, including, of course, the last three years in matters of public policy -- and the number of people involved in all of it who have wrapped themselves in Harvard credentials. (read more)