The Whole Two Yards

The resignation of Claudine Gay as President of Harvard has been hailed as a victory by supporters of Trump for whom Prof. Gay embodied all they loathe about what they call ‘woke’ culture in academic institutions.

Elise Stefanik, a Harvard graduate, is taking the credit for demoting a woman she calls an “anti-Semitic plagiarist” but the real issue here is the full frontal attack on academia of the kind JD Vance has promoted because it just ain’t American.

This punt only goes two yards. If that. I doubt Prof Gay is anti-Semitic, and I doubt she will sue anyone who says she is. As for the plagiarism, well, in the US a doctoral thesis is not the major component of the qualification whereas in the UK it is the only means of obtaining the degree. I once read a US PhD thesis which consisted almost entirely of paragraphs followed by extensive quotations from published sources. It had no merit at all. Another that I read claimed to be a work of medical history but the author announced in the introduction there would be no medical evidence. It was in reality a thesis on historical geography.

So Prof Gay should have questioned the assumptions made by Stefanik before answering the question, because they were bogus (see the contribution by Joanna Walter’s in the link), and as for the thesis, well big deal.

The real deal here is that Trump intends to shred US academia as DeSantis has been doing in Florida, turning independent institutions that promote critical thinking into the whole nine yards of loyalty to Trump and the ‘anti-woke’ agenda that will reverse every socially liberal law passed since 1965, taking 1865 as the year their dream died, to be revived by the standard bearer of lies and crime.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...polling-latest