Chris Rufo on the plagiarism accusations against black female professors
Commenter “AesopFan” helpfully offered this tweet from Christopher Rufo, relevant to this post from yesterday concerning whether black female professors are disproportionately involved in plagiarism:
One of the ironies to this accusation is that I have explicitly asked my sources to review the work of white and Asian scholars and, thus far, the verified plagiarism cases have been predominantly from black women. This is not dispositive, nor is it a systematic study, but it is… https://t.co/327zGFmaP8
— Christopher F. Rufo ?? (@realchrisrufo) April 10, 2024
I was wondering whether there had been an attempt to study this systematically, and that answers the question: sporadically but not in comprehensive research.
As commenter “OBloodyHell” adds, however, that if such research is ever done, then:
1 — if it turns out that it is a racially-founded problem, it will be suppressed.
2 — if it turns out that it is happening across the board, well, then it will be suppressed because… face it, it’ll be mostly liberals doing it.
3 — what won’t be found is and evidence that anyone is being oppressed. But that will not be the merdia spin no matter what happens.
(I assume that “merdia” is a purposeful misspelling, so I didn’t correct it.)
I will add that, if #1 or #2 turn out to be the case, and these results are reported, the plagiarism will be minimized in importance (as happened with Claudine Gay) or even considered an outdated concern of an oppressive culture devised by evil white males. This would be in line with similar attacks on “meritocracy.”
Additionally on the interpretive spelling front: I assume the “and” in *3 — what won’t be found is and evidence* is more properly to be understood as “any“, though I’m open to correction if found to be wrong!
Further: in Rufo’s tweet “. . . and have lower scholarly standards that more rigorous disciplines”, I read “that” as “than.
They systematically remove screens on the admission of certain demographic segments to graduate programs. It’s not surprising you have a comparatively larger number of people who (1) do not complete the program or (2) cut corners in getting the credential. I’ll wager you their dissertation advisors played Mr. Magoo in order to avoid shunting them off the way others would have been.
DEI = Didn’t Earn It
Attacks upon meritocracy are ultimately, suicidal. But not just for a society that succumbs to attacks upon meritocracy for they are busily cutting off the branch upon which they sit. And it’s a long fall from civilization’s great height.
If Rufo says he has asked his investigators to look at a variety of scholars, not only black DEI ones, I am inclined to believe him.
Rufo IMO is a thoroughly decent, honorable man who should be heeded. Plagiarism is a serious, self-induced intellectual sin.
We all know that non-meritocratic blacks are surging student populations at our once-elite universities, funded by Biden loans which will not be repaid. So the universities get the bucks and the deluded 2nd rate blacks drop out, resenting Whitey. The Univs are financially happy and the faculties are not long burdened by less-than-capable students, and can concentrate on leftist indoctrination.
(I assume that “merdia” is a purposeful misspelling, so I didn’t correct it.)
When I saw that spelling several weeks ago, I made the same assumption.
its a composite of a french and spanish cognate for…droppings, also any situation that resembles droppings,
it seems every turn against academic rigor is actively encouraged, which devalues the end product but they don’t seem to care, take liz warren entire fraud ridden career,
Academia is a very competitive world. Plagiarism saves time and energy for competing on other fronts — if you can get away with it.
Given DEI/CRT, black women can get away with it more than other sliced-and-diced groups. So black women do.
Nothing mysterious about it.
huxley-
It is perhaps worthwhile to recall that CRT was developed by a black Harvard law prof way back in 1974.
Maybe I’m cynical, but I’ll bet if they looked at the plagiarism rates across various disciplines, they’ll probably find more in the various race/gender/sexuality oppression/victim “studies” fields than in, say, math, physics, biology, or even things like meat or poultry science. (Yes, I have degrees from Ag schools.)
What about black women in public office? The prominent ones all seem to be bad apples: Kamala Harris, Maxine Waters, Sheila Jackson Lee, Barbara Lee, Marilyn Mosby, Kim Gardner, Kim Foxx, Fani Willis, Letitia James, Cori Bush, Ayanna Pressly, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, Stacey Abrams, …
The exception that proves the rule is Winsome Sears.
But the others are all like Michelle Obama — low on merit coupled with an enormous sense of entitlement.
Critical plagiarism theory argues that only white male oppressors can plagiarize
}}} (I assume that “merdia” is a purposeful misspelling, so I didn’t correct it.)
You are totally correct. I’ve long been making the connection between the modern media and the French word for feces. It feels quite apt.
😛 😉 😀
}}} what won’t be found is and evidence* is more properly to be understood as “any“, though I’m open to correction if found to be wrong!
Yup. Typo. DOH! Been making a lot of “and” typos of late, no idea why (well, “old age” but still…).
I sometimes do “and” when I mean “an”, also. Weird.
Seen myself doing some typos like “theb eginning” for “the beginning”, too.
USUALLY I catch it… I’m a naturally excellent proofer, but I might not re-read something (I suspect that’s the usual cause for it slipping past me) is the only explanation I have.
I will note that the issue with plagiarism is not the solo problem in academia.
There is an acknowledged issue in the “Soft Sciences”** which is quite serious, called The Decline Effect, aka The Reproduceability Problem
Studies done and accepted even as far back as the 80s and 90s are, when an attempt is made these days to reproduce them (as, for example, a class assignment in a field of discipline), they are failing to be reproduced.
It’s happening a LOT in the Soft Sciences, particularly the biological, sociological, and psychological fields.
A couple articles about the issue from ca. 2010:
https://wolfhowling.blogspot.com/2011/01/scientific-method-its-limits-decline.html
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/more-thoughts-on-the-decline-effect
An older, published study (2005) by John Ioannidis:
Why Most Published Research Findings Are False
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1182327/
You might remember that name — he was the epidemiologist who was pilloried early on in the Covid BS for disputing the official party line.
And, more recently…
https://www.sciencealert.com/replication-results-reproducibility-crisis-science-nature-journals
Note that there is also The Reproduceability Project
Psychology: https://osf.io/ezcuj/
Cancer Biology: https://osf.io/e81xl/
General: https://osf.io/search?resourceType=Project%2CProjectComponent
This also ties in, for fun…
XKCD #1
https://xkcd.com/882/
XKCD #2
https://xkcd.com/397/
The REAL problem is “QC” — Quality Control — Unfortunately, all too often stuff depends on peer review which does NOT involve actually reproducing the study, but merely looking over it for obvious errors. If the “error” was not in the actual direct process of the analysis, but in the “cherry picking” of what data is applicable and what were “outliers” and thus to be ignored, well, the peer review won’t do squat about that. Also, if there is a weakness, the reviewer, who may be inclined to believe the study because it confirms what they have already decided they believe to be the case, may rationalize glossing over the problem rather than calling attention to it.
Doing actual reproduction of a study in any bioscience, psych, or sociology field is a pain, for obvious reasons. You need people to produce the data, and time, often, to reproduce the process. So the Soft Sciences are usually just “review type” peer-review, and not full reproduction for verification and validation.
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** The “Soft Sciences” : I use this term in the following manner — there are “Soft Sciences” and “Hard Sciences”. The distinction is in how stringently the universe tests a given study’s validity.
Physics, Chemistry, Engineering are generally — not always, but usually — fairly Hard. The devices work, the bridges connect, the buildings stand. Come up with a conclusion that is wrong, and the universe goes, “Uhhh. Nope. Fuck you, stupid!” — an obvious historical example of this was the Tacoma Narrows Bridge — Engineers, having built a variety of suspension bridges, thought they fully understood them. Except, no, they did not. The result was a bridge that fairly quickly destroyed itself.
The bio sciences, psychology, sociology — these are almost always Soft Sciences — because the universe does not stomp on you immediately when you screw things up. This is why so much of the issues with Reproduceability occur in these fields.
Note that there are some subfields of physics — “Climate Science” is the glaring example — which are a Soft Science, even though they are actually physics. Because it’s clear that, for “Climate Science” there is not a lot of immediate feedback when you do something wrong. A study which decides ‘x is happening’ does not have an immediate destruction of something to say, “no, it’s not happening”. This is even more the case when the models are not openly operated, tested, and publicly accessible so anyone can run studies based on them to verify the accuracy of their predictions…
And in the end, the accuracy of predictions is the truest test of any science.
Extra points: Spot my grammar error in the above. I didn’t spot it until after it had locked down 😀
I changed the structure of a sentence but that needed a change of a word. 😛
Note to self: nvdi