by Ed Driscoll
Josh Barro: Universities Are Not on the Level.
What seems to be happening here is they are suffering from Chris Rufo Derangement Syndrome. That is, they know conservative activist Chris Rufo is a bad guy, and therefore the only way they can analyze a question on which he has opined is by assuming that the opposite of whatever he said was true. If Rufo says Gay plagiarized, then she must not have plagiarized, regardless of whatever near-duplicate paragraphs we can see with our own eyes. In addition to being a terrible approach to learning the truth, this mental model endows Rufo with tremendous power: If you have Rufo Derangement Syndrome, all Chris Rufo has to do to make you look like a total idiot is be right about something, once.
And so we got a lot of idiotic statements. Gay was merely guilty of “duplicative language,” the Harvard Corporation said, back when it was still defending her appointment. We were told that everybody does it: “Claudine Gay has resigned on the basis of a plagiarism charge that could have been leveled at anyone we know via the power of text mining applied without sound standards of how to assess the results,” wrote Jo Gludi, a history professor at Emory. (Really? Anyone we know?) Charles Blow even wrote in the New York Times that the expectation that the president of Harvard should not plagiarize (or should not be the subject of “questions about missing citations and quotation marks,” as he more verbosely described plagiarism) constitutes a “Wonder Woman problem” in which black women in positions of power “are trapped in prisons of others’ demands for perfection.”7
The demand that we should define academic honesty down in order to address the fact that Harvard’s first black female president is a plagiarist is insulting to academics of all races who don’t copy other people’s works, even the “banal” parts of them. And the insistence that this is how it always was, that actually this kind of copying is a standard industry practice, is just gaslighting. I went to college. I know that’s not true.
Related: Don’t F*** With Bill Ackman’s Wife.
You know that you struck a chord when they go after your wife, in this case my love and partner in life, @NeriOxman.
I am one of the most fortunate people in the universe in large part because of Neri.
Please see her post below about today’s Business Insider piece about her… t.co/SJb9iFsKJY
— Bill Ackman (@BillAckman) January 4, 2024
But that wasn’t enough. In Ackman’s view, the leftists have p***ed off the wrong guy. Following the above tweet, he went on offense. Could it possibly be that reporters at Business Insider, or others at MIT, might be living in glass houses? Well, yes, it could well be:
This experience has inspired me to save all news organizations from the trouble of doing plagiarism reviews.
We will begin with a review of the work of all current @MIT faculty members, President Kornbluth, other officers of the Corporation, and its board members for plagiarism.
We will be using MIT’s own plagiarism standards which can be found here:
integrity.mit.edu/handbook/what-plagiarism
We will share our findings in the public domain as they are completed in the spirit of transparency.
Faster, please.