Happy New Year!
I really felt like skipping news this weekend, but the story about charges of plagiarism against Bill Ackman's wife, Neri Oxman, is developing. Its details are tedious, but demonstrate some interesting things about the fury of the fight over the resignation of the President of Harvard -- part of a small, oppressed class of black women who grew up in a privileged family in a third world country, who went to a prestigious prep school before attending prestigious universities, and who still make about $900,000 a year.
There are other things to think about this weekend, too.
Setting the stage - The Week in Pictures, Gay Times Edition
Well, this new year is starting off much better than expected. It's not often that a schadenfreudey moment like the self-immolation of Harvard's Claudine Gay lasts an entire month, so by all means let's revel in it for another week. Let it roll over us like hot chocolate syrup on a vanilla ice-cream sundae. (I'm sure some ninny somewhere will think this imagery racist, unless they stop and think about it for a moment, which they won't.) It's been so much fun we almost ignored the new Jeffrey Epstein documents, which didn't hang themselves. Now on to MIT!
The DEI Juggernaut targets Bill Ackman's Wife
It started like this:
Bill Ackman had earlier called on other CEOs not to hire Harvard students who blamed Israel for the Hamas attack. He then criticized Dr. Gay and two other college president over their congressional testimony regarding the acceptability of advocating the genocide of Jews. He helped start the ball rolling toward the resignation of Dr. Gay. Then the instances of plagiarism were found . . .
DEI fights back
Well, Bill Ackman and his wife are part of the elite. And now they are heretics.
Business Insider seems to have been chosen to charge Neri Oxman with plagiarism, so more "reputable" news sources could quote them. Ms. Oxman received an email from Business Insider on Jan. 4. I think the examples included (such as leaving out quotation marks but citing the source) come anywhere close to the examples found in Dr. Gay's work. And Ms. Oxman's response is not anything like that of Dr. Gay and Harvard. They first denied the allegations and threatened to sue the NY Post. She affirmed the importance of her colleagues' work and apologized for any omissions of credit.
You may want to read her post if you are interested in the academic details.
Then, last night, Bill Ackman received, second-hand, another email from Business Insider, asking him to review claims that his wife plagiarized from Wikipedia. He says he received nothing directly:
Ms. Long of Business Insider did not send anything to me.
Fran McGill, who heads communications for us, received an email from Ms. Long at 5:19pm which he brought to my attention when he tracked me down around 20 minutes later. The email was about 12 pages long.
Ms. Long said in the email that BI would be publishing its story this evening. They did so at 7:15pm.
Note that they chose to send the email after sundown on Friday night to a family that celebrates Shabbat dinner together.
And also note that they are attacking the Israeli wife of the protagonist in this situation.
Think about that and think about why they chose to wait until 5:19pm.
Now also consider why is it that Business Insider published this story. Probably because other news sources turned it down. . .
But the NYT has reported that Business Insider reported it. That's what's important.
What if Bill Ackman joins Chris Rufo's campaign to uncover plagiarism among all university faculty? There are a lot more leftists among them than conservatives. Ackman reposted this:
There's an element of @realchrisrufo's strategy no one has picked up on yet. It's this:
Almost nobody outside universities reads academic papers, so the papers radical activist professors write in which they defend absurd ideas don't get read by the general public.
So...
Leftist academics are free to use academic journals to advance their social and political goals in the academy and no one notices because no one outside the academy reads it.
This dynamic allows leftist profs to make absurd claims on behalf of leftist dogma and pay no price.
Since no one outside academia reads these journals, activist profs could claim truth does not exist, everything is about power, men can become women, and other such wild claims, and the general public was unaware that academia had been hijacked by a political agenda.
But....
Now @realchrisrufo has started a plagiarism war in academia. And you what that means?
It means people are now looking for plagiarism in academia, and in order to find plagiarism guess what they are going to have to do?
That's right . . . they have to read academic journals.
And when they read those journals they are going to find paper after paper denying objective truth, papers claiming racial identity matters more than facts, papers that claim lived experience is more important than evidence, and papers claiming children can pick their gender.
What @realchrisrufo has done by starting the plagiarism wars is to get people outside academia to actually READ all of the insane nonsense that's being produced by activist professors.
Now regular people, even those who hate Rufo, will be forced to confront the fact...
that the universities have been hijacked by activists who are using the universities as a vehicle to advance the political and social goal of the left.
It's brilliant. . . .
I cleaned up a couple of typos and added some emphases.
There are reasons people hate Rufo.
RELATED
Peter Boghossian is not a conservative, but he was fighting DEI before it was cool.
Weekend
Putting down your phone anytime this weekend?
Poetry
You or your kids plan to memorize any poetry this year? What do you like?
Music
The Smothers Brothers just singing.
Hope you have something nice planned for this weekend.
This is the Thread before the Gardening Thread.
Last week's thread, December 30, 2023, Can women decolonize the University of Minnesota?
Comments are closed so you won't ban yourself by trying to comment on a week-old thread. But don't try it anyway.