Harvard President Claudine Gay said she would resign from her position on Tuesday, ending a six-month tenure marred by allegations of plagiarism and backlash over her congressional testimony about antisemitism on campus.

Gay had come under pressure to resign from Harvard’s Jewish community and some members of Congress over her comments at the Dec. 5 congressional hearing, while also facing several allegations of plagiarism for her academic work in recent months.

  • flan [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    40·
    10 months ago

    Is this antisemitism thing just universities tolerating pro palestine views or is it actual antisemitism? it looks like shes not the only university president to have recently resigned

      • Maturin [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
        14·
        10 months ago

        Any good links? I assumed it was pretext but now what you said has me super curious of the actual merits even without the whole Zionism angle.

        Also, since I’m commenting anyway, anyone else read the caption as her “resigning from Harvard’s Jewish community”?

        • joaomarrom [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
          13·
          10 months ago

          Gay had come under pressure to resign from Harvard’s Jewish community and some members of Congress over her comments at the Dec. 5 congressional hearing

          it also sounds like she resigned from some members of congress lol just very strange phrasing in this sentence

          just move “from Harvard’s Jewish community and some members of Congress” to before “to resign” and it becomes still a bit awkward but way easier to understand

      • HexBroke [any, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        25·
        10 months ago

        I think you’ve well and truly passed normal workplace standards (frankly their skill too) in management at that salary

        These are the skills she being paid for:

        In 2021, Gay announced that the cost of the Faculty core academic commitments were greater than its revenues and began processes to reduce expenses including a freeze on faculty bonuses and salary increases, and a freeze on faculty searches.

        In 2021, the [faculty] reported a surplus of $51 million, an increase from the projected deficit of $112 million.

        Cut wages for staff and bring $160m net to Harvard’s enormous coffers

  • smokeppb [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    32·
    10 months ago

    Whether the plagiarism was real or not seems kinda moot due to the proximity of the other “antisemitism” allegations to what’s going on in Gaza. Zionists are looking for an easy PR win after a streak of losses, and university presidents are basically the designated fall guys for this kind of thing.

  • RNAi [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    27·
    10 months ago

    If I had a penny for every gay plagiarist exposed in the last months I’d have two pennies, which is a lot of money in Argentina

  • ZoomeristLeninist [comrade/them, she/her]@hexbear.netMEnglish
    25·
    10 months ago

    “Harvard’s Jewish Community” i smell bs here. PMC and petit bourgeois Jews are much more likely to be Zionist than working class Jews (anecdotal: the Jewish side of my family has a petit bourgeois background and i knew a ton of PMC Jews who all supported isntreal; when i expanded my worldview and met more working class Jews i learned more abt the true nature of isntreal). that being said, non-tenure-track profs and are some of the lowest paid PMCs and are usually the most class conscious. its much more likely “Harvard’s Jewish Community” is probably limited to some angry Jewish full tenure profs and administrators, backed up by the Jewish students with upper class backgrounds.

    that, or the plagiarism was legit. universities take that shit seriously

  • SpiderFarmer [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    10·
    10 months ago

    The articles and news pieces I’ve seen are struggling to take this President’s lines out of context. Her statements on Israel are lukewarm and the attempts to frame it as antisemitism are weak. I’ll give her kudos on her political verbage, as even out of context nothing seems scary amd racist. Needless to say, videos are posted with comments immediately blocked.

  • Philosoraptor [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    9·
    10 months ago

    Her work isn’t in my area, but from what I’ve seen of the accusations, it’s a stretch to call it “plagiarism.” There are a number of places where her citations were a little shoddy (especially in her early work and PhD dissertation), but those all seem like what are basically instances of her not being as careful as she could have been rather than actual plagiarism in the strong sense. Most of the accusations revolve around some cases where she ambiguously paraphrased material without making it super clear what was and wasn’t a paraphrase. It was all cited, but not as meticulously as it probably should have been. There’s not even an accusation that she stole ideas or concepts, or tried to pass the work of others off as her own–again, from what I’ve seen.

    The consensus among academics I know is that she should have been more careful, but that nothing she did rose to the level of real academic dishonesty, nor was it even necessarily really outside the norm for a grad student or new faculty (especially at the time). Before the ubiquity of digital tools, it was much more common to do stuff like this, as it wasn’t always easy to keep track of where ideas or phrasing came from. Technical language in particular was pretty easy to inadvertently “paraphrase,” as there are only so many clear ways to explain technical phenomena. Standards about this stuff were more lax 25+ years ago.

    This is all to say that she’s almost certainly been pressured to resign entirely as a result of Zionist cry bullying, and not because of actual academic misconduct. The “plagiarism” stuff was just a kind of pretext to give the push a veneer of being apolitical. If you dug into most people’s work from the same time period, you’d almost certainly find a few similar instances for pretty much anyone. This is really similar to the phenomenon from a few years back when right wing shitheads would dig back through the twitter accounts of journalists they didn’t like until they found some off-color bad taste jokes from when the person was 20 years old, and then make a big fuss about the journalist being a secret pedophile to get them fired. It’s disingenuous by design.