Academia: brilliance, race, and politics
Commenter “Mike K” writes:
The sad and infuriating thing about what was done to Roland Fryer is that he was a genuine academic star. No need for that thumb on the scale or affirmative action. The book “The Bell Curve” shows that there is a right “tail” on the distribution of IQ and these DEI zealots are determined to control black scholars, even if they themselves are a cluster of losers like Gay.
True. For example, although Thomas Sowell – another black academic star – came to prominence prior to DEI zealots, he nevertheless has been deprived of the honors he should have been given. It’s even the case that – at least as far as I can tell – Sowell’s not in the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.. Many and probably most black people today have never heard of him (although I’ve noticed that there’s a tiny cottage industry on YouTube of young black “reactors” to some of Thomas Sowell’s interviews and writings). Nor is Sowell included in the recent AP African American Studies course which nevertheless had room for “academic writers on critical theory, queerness, and reparations.”
It’s about politics. If Sowell had been a leftist, he would have become far more generally famous and not just on the right, where he’s very well-known and highly respected. And of course, white scholars who are on the conservative side also have been finding it hard to get jobs in academia in the last decade or two, and to a lesser extent even in the decade or two prior to that. But the left and the DEI crowd are especially determined to diminish the voices of brilliant black scholars who are insufficiently leftist – and even to cancel them.
However, I don’t think of someone like Gay as a “loser.” Although she has indeed lost her prominent and previously-respected and powerful position as Harvard president, she still has her teaching job and her nearly-million-dollar salary. She is now lauded by many as a victim of right-wing racism, a role she has embraced.
I don’t think Mike K meant “loser” in that sense, however. My guess would be that he meant that, were the criteria objective, she would not have risen to academic prominence at all – unlike Fryer and Sowell, just to take two examples. I wouldn’t call her a “loser,” however, or unintelligent. I would instead call her a devoted apparatchik or maybe even a member of the nomenklatura. She is a party hack rather than an independent thinker, but that’s exactly what is wanted today in university administration and also in academia as a whole.
Gay’s problem was that events occurred which thrust her out of her element and into the glare of Congressional testimony on a subject – anti-Semitism on campus – on which she’s long toed the party line. The awful remarks she made in Congress would have been completely unremarkable and acceptable had she made them only to a Harvard faculty or administrative audience, for example. The American public was shocked, however. And it was only then that the thinness of her academic resume, as well as the fact that she’d plagiarized, came into prominence and together with those remarks precipitated the end of her presidency.
Gay isn’t brilliant, but she never needed to be and I doubt that most professors – even at Harvard, of any race, and especially in the humanities – are brilliant these days. That’s not what’s wanted. What’s wanted is leftist political conformity, and that tends to be antithetical to brilliance – which is always a rare commodity anyway.
Turns out that in 67 I was in a field project with someone who is now a Harvard prof who’s had something to say about the Gay thing. So far it was a message to Gay. Messaged to catch up, asked what the faculty thought about the Sullivan/Fryer thing.
I was the only one in the project whose next gig would involve an Infantry commission and Airborne quals. So I am not sure I’ll get a response from a Harvard prof in a non-STEM field.
Twitter and the Babylon Bee have been having a lot fun with Gay
https://babylonbee.com/news/claudine-gay-claims-white-supremacists-went-back-in-time-and-forced-her-to-plagiarize-at-gunpoint
Someone here needs to summarize the corruption within the “research process” at any university in the US. Funding proposals made to the NSF (National Science Foundation) used to be strictly to fund “research” into a specific area. Now those proposals include many additional people whose only contribution to the research will be their sex or color.
Some universities today are solely dependent on NSF monies to keep their doors open. The overhead funds included in a research proposal used to be approximately 25%.Today most universities keep 55% of the proposal funding for “administrative” overhead. That is money that the research department will never see applied to the specific research project. I have even seen proposals that include additional funding for a higher level school administrator–let’s say an academic dean, or a vice president of the university. This person is supposedly going to review the work and make sure it meets research guidelines. It doesn’t matter if their background is in another discipline. You just gotta pay the school big guys to smooch the big guys at the funding institute.
I have not looked into this for several years now, but up until recently the University of Washington received more funding from the NSF than any other university in the country. More than any university medical school, more than any university business program. Oh, I remember now–U of Washington got more research money than any other school, because that money went into the Aeronautical division to study everything to do with aviation. Tell me again where Boeing was based up until 2001. So all that research money which is by law supposed to be used to advance the human condition went into the pockets of an airplane manufacturer so it could learn how to screw bolts into their airplanes.
Any academic so unethical as to plagiarize other academic’s work 50+ times is utterly unfit to hold any teaching position. But worst of all is what that amount plagiarism implies; a profound intellectual laziness and lack of intellectual curiosity. Which goes hand in hand with being “a devoted apparatchik”. It’s doubtful that she has ever had an original thought in her life, so upon what basis might we imagine that she has anything of worth to share with her students?
well U Washington’s Chris Murray along with Ferguson of Imperial College, was one of the lead proclaimers of the need for lockdowns (I call him feeley ferguson, because like austin powers, he doesn’t quite abide by his own rules,
“I doubt that most professors – even at Harvard, of any race, and especially in the humanities – are brilliant these days”
The writer Andre Maurois said that people who are *intelligent*, but not at all *creative*, tend to latch on to intellectual systems created by others and to hold to those systems more fiercely than even their originators would have. I think this describes a lot of academia…reasonably intelligent (but not brilliant) and without much creativity…indeed, this is probably necessarily the situation given the vast expansion in the scale of academia in recent decades.
The whole ‘intersectionality’, ‘colonialism’, ‘whiteness’, etc thing is an example of such an intellectual system.
how they cover with a pillow,
https://www.libraryhistt.com/2024/01/leaked-media-matters-donor-list-reveal.html#google_vignette
Sowell’s problem is worse than not being a leftist. He’s a former leftist who abandoned the cause.
like eudocio ravines who buckley translated when he was in Mexico City
I saw the entire Fryer video you posted. There is a short excerpt of Gay speaking. It sounded to me like a word salad of various DEI talking points. Similarly, her testimony to Congress merely showed that all 3 college Presidents testifying to Congress had been given the same coaching- “context” etc. Substack blogger Martin Hackworth made the point that Gay didn’t read her audience in Congress. Not at all. She merely recited, as best she could, the coaching points she had been given.
miguel cervantes, thanks for the Media Matters find. This is far from the only example of Democrats/Lefties/Progressives doing political work under the guise of “charities.” Dinseh d’Souza’s 2000 Mules makes the point that Facebook billionaire Zuckerberg funded a “charity” in 2020 to ” get out the vote.” Which went overwhelmingly to Democrat efforts to “get out the vote.” No accident….
And yet we know her classes will be packed with the Harvard Elites. But they will learn nothing, which is about normal at Harvard.
heh
https://twitter.com/BillAckman/status/1743792224020619450
This is the left’s glass jaw. They can’t course correct even when they are headed for disaster.
‘Set the controls for the heart of the sun’
It would appear that the Plagiarism Wars have erupted as a new front in politics.
Bill Ackman, a hedge fund billionaire that has been vocal about the poor leadership in the major universities has made some enemies over the past few weeks. Now Business Insider has gone after his wife.
https://legalinsurrection.com/2024/01/bill-ackman-declares-plagiarism-war-on-mit-after-retaliatory-attacks-on-his-wifes-ph-d-thesis/
Not only mad, but committed and funded and ready to spend: https://twitter.com/BillAckman/status/1743792224020619450
And mad at the other big donors, too, if you follow some of the other links.
This is going to be fun to watch.
Matt Taibbi made an interesting, off-hand comment on his show this week, a connection that I haven’t seen elsewhere: That David Brock’s organizations (Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics) have been behind the efforts to remove Donald Trump as a Republican candidate from the ballot in various states. If true, it would remove the sense of independent action by various state actors, and more properly characterize the efforts as Democratic Party-driven.
That this isn’t pointed out by the Legacy MSM is yet another reason to really despise their lack of integrity.
Thanks for the 10 minutes Neo !
Set the controls for the heart of the sun
Chases Eagles:
Yer killin’ me! 🙂
–Pink Floyd, “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RbXIMZmVv8
This is the left’s glass jaw. They can’t course correct even when they are headed for disaster.
More to the point of Chases Eagles’s comment:
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For a while I thought the Democrats were persecuting Trump, believing that it would keep him in the headlines, arouse sympathy among Republicans, and lead to the GOP nominating its weakest candidate. Now I think they just can’t help themselves.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2024/01/the-race-that-no-one-can-win.php
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I suspect some of the top Dem shot callers hoped that strategy would work, but more likely the hive mind can’t do anything but.
I have my conspiracy moments, but overall I believe we are not witnessing some diabolically clever plan, but emergent properties out of the current configuration of American politics, wokeism and social media.
The term that Sowell has used to describe people like Gray is “anointed,” which was used in the title of a book he wrote, “Vision of the Anointed.”
He’s a former leftist who abandoned the cause.
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He was once a fellow of the Urban Institute, but he was never associated with leftoid politics of any kind.
Some universities today are solely dependent on NSF monies to keep their doors open.
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NSF grants account for about 2.2% of revenues flowing to higher ed. I doubt there are many institutions for which NSF grants are decisive for staying in business.
miguel and Aggie, thanks for that Bill Akerman link.
Great to have a rich and potentially powerful (sane) person on our side.
I thought his essay went on way too long but he was pursuing a bigger agenda than just his beef with higher education personnel quality, etc.
Great idea to use AI to confirm academic integrity or out the outliers. But I can also see where it could be abused (Huxley or a few others might add more here?). Plus, when everyone is found to have a “few errors” in their work product, as almost everyone will, the more venal or egregious cases will claim they are no worse than those more innocent situations. Battle royal. Cribbing from a dead person might be safer if they aren’t able to sue you for infringement or theft of IP, etc.
I also wonder if AI can be brought to bear to improve the success of accusations of libel or slander? Cases of entrapment by law enforcement? Suggestions that evidence was planted as it is too good to be true and too similar to other cases where that occurred?
And since providing citations and attribution for “every little thing” would be a real pain, I could foresee some SW that automatically attaches a suitably approved citation to whatever you cut and paste from wherever. Or maybe supply a certification of authentication that a given passage or paragraph has been checked via XYZ for plagiarism and confirmed to pass acceptance as sufficiently original.
Requiring citations for dictionary searches seems rather extreme to me. And spell checkers and some auto correcting dictionaries occasionally come up short.
[just made an edit at the 7 min point; thx Neo. 🙂 ]
Dr. Carol M. Swain is one of the academics Dr. Gay plagarized. Dr. Swain is Black, a woman, sift-spoken, and a conservative. So, of course, she receives little respect from academic PTB. (Powers That Be)
Gothamite; Art Deco:
Sowell has said he was a Marxist till about the age of 30. That most definitely qualifies as being a leftist. I don’t know whether he was politically active in leftist causes, and if so how active. But he was indeed a leftist.
Re: AI
R2L:
I’m still working out what AI can and can’t do or is likely to do. The new AIs are pretty savvy at handling text. And yes, AIs are already working on plagiarism. They can even detect plagiarism across languages!
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In conclusion, AI has become a valuable asset in the fight against plagiarism, providing a high level of efficiency and accuracy in identifying unoriginal content in scholarly articles and other written works.
–ChatGPT-4
I worry about AWI — Artificial Woke Intelligence.
As I mentioned in Open Thread, “alignment” has become a key word in the AI discussion. Alignment means aligned with human values.
So, in the classic example, an AI programmed to make paper clips doesn’t kill all humans for the iron in their blood to make more paper clips.
But what are human values exactly? Well, however we train AI.
If we can train AI it’s wrong to convert humans into paper clips, we can train AI that Critical Race Theory is the ultimate value system and white people are the ultimate oppressors.
I think Rodgers & Hammerstein said it well:
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You’ve got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a diff’rent shade,
You’ve got to be carefully taught.
–“You’ve Got To Be Carefully Taught from South Pacific-1949”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JjiaRJqKIU
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Interesting how we can hear that song differently today.