RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thespectator.com/topic/harvard-claudine-gay-boot-plagiarism/

You are probably almost as sick of hearing about Claudine Gay — as of this writing, still the president of Harvard University — as I am of writing about her. As I pointed out a year ago in this space, Harvard’s appointment of Gay, a black woman, was simply the next chapter in the university’s long-running pursuit of its racial spoils system. Gay’s entire academic career has been a testimony to the power of that enterprise. What a prize Harvard had in Claudine Gay: a black female who was an avid proponent of the whole “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” racket. Could there be any doubt that she was being groomed for the top slot?  

When Gay joined the presidents of MIT and UPenn (also female, but unfashionably pale-faced) before the House Committee on Education, she, like her peers, beclowned herself. “Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate you university’s code of conduct?” That was the super-easy-to-answer question that Representative Elise Stefanik posed to the ladies. They tied themselves in knots over that one — it all depends on “context,” don’t you see — and Liz Magill, the (now former) president of Penn sealed her fate by producing a truly cringe-making video a day or two later in which she groveled, apologized  and underscored her moral pygmyhood. 

In short order, Magill was shown the door by Penn’s board. “One down, two to go!” was the chant among many critics. MIT seems to have successfully circled the wagons around its president Sally Kornbluth. But Claudine Gay was more or less in the position of someone who gets stopped for speeding and then is discovered to have been driving on an expired license. 

https://www.city-journal.org/article/los-angeles-schools-are-funding-for-failure

For decades, progressives have attributed black students’ low academic skills to school underfunding. Attend any graduate education program or sit in on any legislative hearing, and you will hear that stingy white taxpayers deny majority-black schools the financial resources necessary to close the academic achievement gap. Americans are to imagine cash-starved inner-city classrooms that would make a prairie schoolhouse look luxurious—teachers forced to ration textbooks, students lacking pencils and paper, harried principals drowning in administrative duties due to the lack of staff.

A recently announced initiative from the Los Angeles Unified School District, the public school system in Los Angeles County, is a good place to test the underfunding theory. February 5, 2024, will mark the start of a district-wide “Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action.” (Previous LAUSD “weeks of action” have included a week in October 2023 organized around “National Coming Out Day.”) The district has distributed a teacher “toolkit” of suggestions for conducting the Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action, compiled, as the toolkit notes, by the district’s “SMH,” “BSAP,” and “HRDE.”

Here is our first clue for assessing the underfunding theory: any bureaucracy that slaps acronyms on its component parts is not a bare-bones organization. The names of its innumerable departmental byways must be abbreviated, lest they take up too much space in print or in speech.

“SMH,” “BSAP,” and “HRDE” stand for the district’s School Mental Health bureaucracy, its Black Student Achievement Plan bureaucracy, and its Human Rights, Diversity and Equity bureaucracy. The HRDE bureaucracy is itself part of the Student Health and Human Services bureaucracy. Possessors of these sinecures are hidden from sight, far from the classroom. Funding such offices requires princely sums; the BSAP just received an additional $26 million in 2023, on top of its existing budget. The BSAP bankrolls counselors, climate advocates, and psychiatric social workers to work with black students in “high priority” schools. It doles out “Innovation Capacity-Building” grants of up to $100,000 to entities that promise to improve black achievement.

Any school system that can afford climate advocates (as part of a black uplift plan, no less) is not hurting for taxpayer dollars. Any school system that runs a massive system of subcontracting for “psychiatric social workers” and “counselors” is not hurting for taxpayer dollars. Such a system has more money than it knows what to do with. Indeed, the LAUSD budget for the 2022–23 school year was $20 billion—more than that of some nations. Divide that pot among the district’s 397,623 K-12 students, and taxpayers are paying the equivalent of an Ivy League tuition—over $50,000—for every student, every year. Add “clients” in other functions that the LAUSD has embraced— early education centers, infant centers, and adult education—and the district spends a still-lavish $35,341 per student.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/12/academic-bias-and-censorship-are-huge-problems-and-we-can-prove-it/

A team of researchers measured contemporary levels of censorship in the American academy. Simply put, cancel culture is no myth.

Academic censorship just got accurately measured.

For the prestigious professional journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a team of top academics — which, in the interest of full disclosure, included Yours Truly as a bit player — recently attempted both to examine contemporary levels of censorship in the American academy and understand the motivations behind it. The results obtained by our team, led by UPenn’s Cory Clark, were interesting and to some extent not very surprising — but deeply unsettling.

Censorship is extraordinarily prevalent across modern academia. Per one large data set reviewed for the project, 34 percent of all tenured and tenure-track faculty members report open “peer pressure” to “avoid controversial research.” Interestingly, the motives of today’s bluenoses seem to be, at some level, positive ones (Clark uses the term “pro-social”). Censors genuinely want to interfere with the spread of ideas that they see as racist or sexist, rather than to simply exercise power. However, the in-practice effects are the same: Since contemporary leftists see almost everything as racist and sexist, the effects of the theoretically moral motivations that dominate on today’s campuses are frequently absurd — i.e., the resignation of Harvard president Larry Summers after he noted that men and women are different.

First, let’s look at the data. Drawing on both high-quality, preexisting databases and our own analyses, the Clark Team documented an extraordinarily high level of hard censorship (i.e., journal blacklisting of certain research categories), soft censorship (“cancellation”), and self-censorship (self-explanatory, one hopes) in the modern academy. Simply put, cancel culture is no myth. Overall, “hundreds of scholars have been sanctioned for expressing controversial ideas,” and the rate of sanctioning has increased substantially over the past decade.

This trend can be outlined empirically, using hard numbers. In sum, 4 to 11 percent of current university or collegiate faculty have been threatened with dismissal or other discipline related to some aspect of their teaching or research work, 34 percent have been “peer pressure[d] to avoid controversial research,” and fully 25 percent describe themselves as being very or “extremely” likely to self-censor during the professional research process. Hell, it may be no coincidence that we named the paper “Prosocial Motives Underlie Scientific Censorship by Scientists,” rather than simply “Censorship Is Everywhere in Academia!”

Disturbingly, the Inquisitional atmosphere of the contemporary campus seems to be supported by a sizable minority of its denizens. Per the data, “9-25% of academics and 43% of PhD students . . . support dismissal campaigns for controversial academics.” Many of these individuals report willingness to behave in a biased fashion against right-wingers and other controversial scholars in the context of “hiring, promotions, grants, and publications.”

https://americanmind.org/salvo/wretched-of-the-university/

Postcolonialism rivals Jacobinism and Bolshevism in its systematic destruction of civil society.

In the summer of 2020, decent Americans found themselves overcome by a torrent of propaganda besmirching the United States as a nation racist to its core, with “white privilege” making life intolerable for anyone but its immediate beneficiaries. A fanatical moralism demanded that all right-thinking people sign on to an anti-racist catechism that was as simplistic as it was absurd. And plead “guilty” untold numbers of people did, with a whiff of the Chinese Cultural Revolution in the air.

Civic courage was hardly to be found, and accommodation to ready-made lies provided a momentary reprieve for those, especially on the Left, afraid of being “cancelled” by their censorious peers utilizing social media as the weapon most ready-at-hand. The ritualistic self-loathing that had long been present, even institutionalized, on college campuses became the norm in journalism, the entertainment business, corporate culture, professional sports, and in many churches and synagogues, too. As Andrew Sullivan has strikingly observed on more than one occasion, we are all living on college campuses now.

Naïve liberals and suburban housewives joined the hardened Marxists and Maoists (and grifters, too) of Black Lives Matter in demanding the radical revolutionary transformation of a country still largely free, decent, and self-critical. The police became targets of angry mobs (and Antifa terrorists), and pressure grew to withdraw police protection from the weak, aged, and vulnerable, especially in minority communities.

The revolution was driven in large part by white progressives, trust fund babies, and the like who marched as they bandied about tired and stale revolutionary slogans. In the name of “anti-racism,” whole groups of people were stigmatized for belonging to the wrong race or “gender,” an ugly word that has become meaningless as it has been weaponized. Everything was racialized, and it became verboten to judge people by “the content of their character.” Those blacks, not a few in number, who wanted to think for themselves, who refused to define themselves as helpless victims and nothing else, were subject to endless vituperation. The loud, the angry, the uncivil, and the massively uninformed were lauded for their so-called courage and social consciousness. For months, the most “privileged” Americans playacted at revolution, as if any ideological revolution can ever end well.

For all intents and purposes, America had gone mad. Grown-ups took their bearings from 18-year-olds repeating mindless and extremist slogans (and finding “systematic” violence and mass killings against black Americans where they didn’t exist). In their “socially constructed” world, an ideological Second Reality took the place of the common world where citizens debate and deliberate, sometimes contentiously but never violently, about matters of public import.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/artificial-intelligence-learning-panacea-or-progressive-trojan-horse/

Barak Obama’s Administration first reported on the future of Artificial Intelligence in an October 12, 2016 summary. A new battle is being enacted against our conservative way of being. At the center of this battle is the widespread support for and increased use of artificial Intelligence (AI). Its intrinsic values are myriad but nonetheless secreted. James Giodano, Chief of the Neuroethics Studies Program and Scholar-in-Residence in the Pellegrino Center for Clinical Bioethics at Georgetown University cautions that “The brain is the battlefield of the future.” He believes that neuros are weapons that can be used “against humans in directional ways that can be harnessed for what’s called dual use medical purposes, the ethics of those individuals who may be competitive if not combative to us, so in other words, this can also be weaponized against others and this is where we get into the idea of novel neural weapons.”

For example, after the Arab massacre of Israelis on October 7th, there has been a concerted effort to polarize through AI’s visual propaganda functions targeting especially the younger generation using photorealistic, generative artificial intelligence. Such visual propaganda, on its surface, appears authentic but was created by a machine to use against Israel and its supporters. This effort is based on the belief that AI learning is the suasory equivalent of a second educational coming. In fact, Gruetzemacher and Whittlestone argue that AI is presently having a genuinely “transformative” effect on society at large, but in clandestine and unobvious ways.

The Foundation of AI

Stanford University’s Hoover Institution provides a succinct and useful definition of AI: “Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a computer’s ability to perform some of the functions associated with the human brain, including perceiving, reasoning, learning, interacting, problem solving, and even exercising creativity. In the last year, the main AI-related headline was the rise of large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 (Generative Pretrained Transformers), on which the chatbot ChatGPT developed by OpenAI, and its most recent derivatives [the soon to be released GPT-5] are based.” The same article cautions that even the most advanced AI today has many failure modes that can prove to be unpredictable, not widely acknowledged nor easily fixed; inexplainable, but capable of leading to harmful unintended consequences.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2023-12-24-claudine-gay-update-now-its-data-falsification

It was less than three weeks ago, December 5, when the name of Claudine Gay, President of Harvard University, suddenly burst into the news. That was the day that she, along with the Presidents of Penn and MIT, testified before Congress — and could not give a clear answer as to whether it was against the policy at their schools to call for the genocide of Jews. All three women attempted to use the occasion to paint themselves as defenders of free speech, particularly important in such extreme cases.

Manhattan Contrarian readers already knew that Ms. Gay was the opposite of a defender of free speech. In a post on December 16, 2022 with the title “Goodnight, Poor Harvard!” — written on the occasion of the announcement that Ms. Gay would become the next President of Harvard — I reviewed her record on the subject. My conclusion, based on multiple examples mostly from the work of independent journalist Christopher Brunet, was that Ms. Gay was “the enforcer-in-chief of wokist orthodoxy at Harvard.”

In the few short weeks since December 5, the news as to Ms. Gay has gotten worse and worse, seemingly by the day. First, some big donors ramped up threats to pull their funding. Then came a handful of allegations of plagiarism found in a few among Ms. Gay’s small number of academic papers. On December 12 the New York Times reported that the Harvard Corporation had appointed a special committee to investigate the allegations of plagiarism, and that the committee had cleared Ms. Gay. Then it emerged that a source had given the allegations of plagiarism to the New York Post back in October, and the Post had sent them to Harvard for confirmation — only to get in return a threatening letter from the Clare Locke law firm (the same firm that had recovered over $700 million from Fox in the Dominion Voting case) asserting that the accusations of plagiarism were “demonstrably false.” Then (December 19 in the Washington Free Beacon) there emerged a new dossier now with some 40 instances of alleged plagiarism — almost four for each of Ms. Gay’s eleven academic articles — many of the new allegations much more serious than the ones that the special committee had just deemed minor.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/opinion/whats-really-at-stake-with-harvard-5548875?utm_source=epochHG&utm_campaign=rcp

The appalling testimony by the presidents of MIT, Harvard, and the University of Pennsylvania before the House Education Committee earlier this month has been the subject of widespread criticism, ridicule, and head-shaking surprise.

Asked by Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) whether calling for the genocide of Jews would contravene their institutions’ rules of conduct, all three temporized that it would depend on the “context.

Clearly, they had all been prepped by the same lawyers, or at least lawyers who themselves had been prepped by the same head office.

The public response was quick and brutal.

The president of UPenn, Liz Magill, was forced out within days, as was the chairman of Penn’s board.

When Harvard’s board of overseers met in an emergency session, many predicted that Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard, would suffer the same fate.

I could have reassured them that that wasn’t going to happen.

Why?

For the same reason I believe Ms. Gay was appointed president: because she’s black and ideologically on page with the progressive—i.e., anti-white, anti-American—mindset that has taken over elite education like a parasite inhabiting its host.