The Social Danger in Allowing Academic Dishonesty to Fester

Bradford Smith

Bradford Smith is a former history professor and current home-school dad and personal chef. He's published a couple of books and a bunch of articles and has been described publically as "a noted historian of gender" and "a conservative Marxist." He has just finished a book manuscript on witch trials and is currently working on a video series on the early Middle Ages. He can be found on Twitter @historybythepint .

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22 Responses

  1. Jaybird
    Ignored
    says:

    conscientious scholars hit the “insert footnote” tab automatically by instinct

    When *I* was a kid, we had to walk to school through the snow!

    The fundamental problem is that there’s a class war going on. Like, the people who are taking the most joy in attacking the plagiarizers are from Team Evil and that means that Team Good has to defend Claudine Gay. It’s not that bad. Everybody does it. The Harvard Extension School doesn’t have *REAL* Harvard people in it.

    If we discussed plagiarism 20 minutes prior to the Gay revelations? Everybody would have been on the same page. But the fact that the Gay stuff came to light at the agency of Rufo means that we now have to hem and haw and prevaricate about it.

    It’s a war, man. Do you really want to give Team Evil a win?Report

    • Philip H in reply to Jaybird
      Ignored
      says:

      You know what? Gay didn’t do anything that probably 90% of academics across subjects haven’t done before. Is it 100% straight up? No. Nothing g ever is. There is no profession where the people doing the thing get it right 100% of the time. So why anyone prior to this would have expected perfection is beyond me.

      And it’s a distraction. From an all out assault on education from the right. Which is the real issue we should be grappling with.

      But this needs exactly no more air then it has been given.Report

  2. Chip Daniels
    Ignored
    says:

    Two things can be true at once.
    Gay committed plagiarism, and the right needed to attack a symbol of their cultural impotence..

    The last line in the essay:
    I can think of nothing worse for society than a leadership class full of sociopathic serial cheaters. Along with other events of the past decade, the recent scandal at Harvard suggests we are already there.
    Is lifted straight from a screed by a left wing radical circa 1972.

    Its a standard cliche in modern liberal circles to lob charges of vast malfeasance and bad behavior by corporations and police. But its only been in the past decade or so that I’ve seen this sort of sweeping indictment of our entire society from the right.

    It tracks with what I’ve been saying how the right has found itself on the wrong end of the “Long March through the institutions”, where the pillars of America society- the government, corporations, military, media and entertainment- are now seen as enemies.

    Conservatives now find themselves on the outside of what hippies called “The Establishment” and like the hippies, reject the entire edifice as beyond saving and in need of being burned to the foundations.Report

    • Philip H in reply to Chip Daniels
      Ignored
      says:

      Not true at all. Some of the right’s most virulent critics of this sort of thing come from the Ivies. They went willingly to burnish their entry into the elite part of society. They are doing this to both cover their tracks and to make sure no one else can duplicate their feat.Report

      • Chip Daniels in reply to Philip H
        Ignored
        says:

        Of course conservatives send their kids to the Ivies. What, like they’re going to send their precious offspring to Hillsdale, or some creationist college?

        Its the experience of being socially shunned at the Ivies which infuriates them and reminds them of their outsider status. Hawley, Cruz, Rufo…these guys are those pledges you see in the first scene of Animal House, politely steered to the reject corner.

        And its the same all through American society.

        Decades ago a Roger Sterling might have asked, “Have we hired any Jews/Gays/Blacks?” to which a Don Draper would retort “Not on my watch!”
        But today a conservative graduate with an MBA from Harvard has to sit through a Powerpoint given by a black woman showing their new media campaign featuring a rainbow flag.Report

        • Jaybird in reply to Chip Daniels
          Ignored
          says:

          But today a conservative graduate with an MBA from Harvard has to sit through a Powerpoint given by a black woman showing their new media campaign featuring a rainbow flag.

          Not anymore! Now it’s a Jewish guy giving the presentation. And slides 12 and 13 have been removed.Report

  3. Marchmaine
    Ignored
    says:

    Gay wasn’t fired for Plagiarism; she was fired because she fumbled a simple question on genocide and then her administration fumbled a simple question on Plagiarism… the first fumble alienated many of her donor stakeholders, the second many of her faculty stakeholders.

    Answering simple questions in Public is the sine qua non skill required of chief executives.

    Along the way the fumbles exposed interesting side stories that came to light about how she climbed the greasy pole… but mostly that was because she fumbled the easy questions and lost her stakeholder support.

    But again, ultimately she was fired because she couldn’t effectively say that you can’t call for genocide at Harvard.

    Remember, no-one is stripping her PhD and she’s still going to teach at Harvard (temporarily, I’d expect).

    On the main point of the original post [professional] plagiarism is a ‘bigger’ deal in the word-smithing disciplines whereas replication is a bigger issue in the [soft] sciences. I think the taxonomy of Students who plagiarize is solid; the erosion of trust in both cases, though is similar… credentialling through college and credentialling through publications are driving a lot of sub-optimal behaviors throughout.Report

    • Chip Daniels in reply to Marchmaine
      Ignored
      says:

      So, embarrassing the organization is cause for firing, you say?
      Scientist cited in push to oust Harvard’s Claudine Gay has links to eugenicists
      Christopher Rufo, credited with helping oust school’s first Black president, touted critic associated with ‘scientific racists’

      A data scientist promoted by the rightwing activist Christopher Rufo, the Manhattan Institute thinktank, and other conservatives as an expert critic of the former Harvard president Claudine Gay has co-authored several papers in collaboration with a network of scholars who have been broadly criticized as eugenicists, or scientific racists.

      Rufo described Jonatan Pallesen as “a Danish data scientist who has raised new questions about Claudine Gay’s use – and potential misuse – of data in her PhD thesis” in an interview published in his newsletter and on the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal website last Friday.

      He did not tell readers that a paper featuring Pallesen’s own statistical work in collaboration with the eugenicist researchers has been subject to scathing expert criticism for its faulty methods, and characterized as white nationalism by another academic critic.

      The paper Pallesen co-authored repeatedly cites Kevin MacDonald, a retired psychology academic whose antisemitic publications argue that Jews engage in a “group evolutionary strategy” that explains their financial and cultural successes, and that antisemitism is an understandable reaction to this phenomenon.

      https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/14/christopher-rufo-jonatan-pallesen-eugenics-racism-claudine-gay-harvard

      Huh. I wonder if “Not proudly touting the work of Neo-Notsees” is a sine qua non skill required of chief executives.Report

      • Jaybird in reply to Chip Daniels
        Ignored
        says:

        So Rufo.
        Is a fan of a data scientist.
        This data scientist wrote a paper that cited another scientist.
        This other scientist also wrote a paper that cites a different scientist that is, reportedly, anti-Semitic.

        What they aren’t telling you is that this third scientist was in Sleepers with Kevin Bacon.Report

        • Chip Daniels in reply to Jaybird
          Ignored
          says:

          Rufo’s data “scientist” wrote this:

          The 2019 paper is entitled Polygenic Scores Mediate the Jewish Phenotypic Advantage in Educational Attainment and Cognitive Ability Compared With Catholics and Lutherans. It argues that the high cognitive abilities of Ashkenazi Jews are “significantly mediated by group differences in the polygenic score” – that is, genetically caused. They speculate that “culture-gene coevolution” may influence “Jewish group-level characteristics” like high cognitive abilities.

          We can see why Rufo thinks so highly of the guy!

          There is a significant social danger in allowing academic dishonesty to fester. I can think of nothing worse for society than a leadership class full of sociopathic racists.
          Where does Rufo work, and why is his employer tolerating this? Are they unaware, or supportive of this sort of thing?Report

          • Jaybird in reply to Chip Daniels
            Ignored
            says:

            Was the data in the paper accurate? Like, did it replicate? Hey, I could google that.

            Huh. Reddit talked about the original paper back in 2019. Apparently, the findings were replicated in the UK.

            I have no idea why people are trying to publicize these papers instead of just trying to cover them up.Report

            • Chip Daniels in reply to Jaybird
              Ignored
              says:

              Believe you me, I want this on the front page of the NYT every day for six weeks.

              “Conservatives Believe That Some People Are Just Better Than Others”Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Chip Daniels
                Ignored
                says:

                This conflates a couple of things in an interesting way.

                If you see “intelligence” as, necessarily, virtuous in and of itself, any finding that someone is more intelligent than someone else is, necessarily, discovering that s/he is more virtuous than another.

                So there has to be a concerted effort to say that intelligence can’t be measured and, besides, there are multiple intelligences and, besides, I knew a smart guy but he got addicted to heroin so I guess he wasn’t *THAT* smart was he? and so on.

                Deny that it can be measured.

                Because, if it can be measured, then we’re saying that this group might be “better” than that group.

                If, however, you see “intelligence” as something similar to “height”, it can be measured but it’s not evidence of any particular virtue.

                Short guys get irritated at the whole “when his height begins with 5” meme template that chicks pass around every few months but, other than that (admittedly low status act), we all know that height doesn’t mean much.

                But people who would see height as virtue in and of itself? Man. They’d have to find all sorts of ways to deny that height is virtuous when discussing differences between groups. “No, it is not the case that Danes are better than Chinese people. That hasn’t been true since the 70’s anyway and it was entirely due to malnutrition.”

                But if you don’t see “intelligence” as something that makes someone “better” than someone else, you don’t have that problem.

                If you do… and if you do to the point where you cannot even imagine someone else thinking otherwise… man. That’d be crazy.Report

              • Chip Daniels in reply to Jaybird
                Ignored
                says:

                Someone could also point out that the idea of some races or ethnicities being more intelligent than others is a fringe idea not supported by the scientific community.

                And we can then ask why there is so much of a concerted effort by laypeople who flat out don’t understand what they are reading, to cling tenaciously to a conclusion not supported by science.

                Its not like these people discard the consensus of opinion on geologists and support fringe ideas of a hollow earth.
                They only discard the consensus of scientists when there is an idea which confirms their biases.

                Its almost like they think intelligence is a virtue or something.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Chip Daniels
                Ignored
                says:

                Oh, Chip.

                It can’t be measured. Do we even have a definition of what “intelligence” is? Since we don’t, it doesn’t exist.

                Q.E.D.Report

      • Marchmaine in reply to Chip Daniels
        Ignored
        says:

        Will Gay be a more competent President if Rufo or Oxman pay a price?

        If I didn’t know better, I’d say you’re trying to make room for folks at Harvard to make calls for Genocide of the Jews. Is that what you’re working to protect? Seems sketchy to me. Or maybe I’m not reading your conspiracy board correctly?Report

        • Jaybird in reply to Marchmaine
          Ignored
          says:

          You wanna know how to get Capone? They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. *That’s* the *Chicago* way! And that’s how you get Capone. Now do you want to do that? Are you ready to do that? I’m offering you a deal. Do you want this deal?Report

        • Chip Daniels in reply to Marchmaine
          Ignored
          says:

          No conspiracy needed.

          As I have said repeatedly, two things can be true:
          1. Gay committed plagiarism;
          2. The right needed to take down a powerful black woman.

          And by the way, the whole “Jews have higher cognitive ability” is no different than “Black have natural rhythm”.
          Its meant to sound like a compliment, but its outright racism.Report

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