Harvard University president Claudine Gay was hit with six additional allegations of plagiarism on Monday in a complaint filed with the university, breathing fresh life into a scandal that has embroiled her nascent presidency and pushing the total number of allegations near 50.
This is from Aaron Sibarium, “Harvard President Claudine Gay Hit With Six New Charges of Plagiarism,” Free Beacon, January 1, 2024.
The strangest part of the defensive responses of various Harvard faculty was this:
Another Harvard lawyer, Charles Fried, was more explicit, describing the allegations as an “extreme right-wing attack on elite institutions.”
“If it came from some other quarter, I might be granting it some credence,” he told the Times. “But not from these people.”
To be clear, Fried said this in December, before these latest charges, something that the Free Beacon news story did not make clear. Fried should know better, and he probably used to, given that he was Solicitor General from 1985 to 1989 under President Ronald Reagan. When someone makes a factual charge, it’s relatively easy to examine the factual charge regardless of the motives of the person making it. Indeed the motives are completely irrelevant to whether the charge is true. Lawyers are typically very good at understanding that.
Fried has flunked basic reasoning 101.
READER COMMENTS
steve
Jan 2 2024 at 2:33pm
You missed part of the quote.
“former solicitor general in the Reagan administration. “The obvious point is to make it look as if there is this ‘woke’ double standard at elite institutions.”
I dont think the double standard claim being espoused is one of facts, or at least the people making the claim have not really offered evidence of that. Other prominent professors of liberal bent have been investigated for plagiarism. Since the official Harvard policy is that it only counts as misconduct if deliberate and, IIRC correctly, consequential, those professors were not booted. There may be some merit in clams that they treat students more harshly, though I haven’t seen that actually substantiated, but there is no evidence being offered that students were treated more harshly because of wokeness. More likely just good old fashioned power differential.
Steve
Jon Murphy
Jan 2 2024 at 2:41pm
Actually the official Harvard policy explicitly states that it is inconsequential whether the plagiarism is deliberate or not.
Regardless, your point is irrelevant. Even if it is an attempt to make it look like a “woke” double standard, Fried is still making a mistake.
David Henderson
Jan 2 2024 at 2:51pm
None of what you said addresses Fried’s basic failure of reasoning. But I’ll state the point again: You don’t need to know the motive of the accuser to judge the accusation. In a case of alleged plagiarism, you can simply compare passages.
Matthias
Jan 3 2024 at 1:23am
Perhaps you can, but what makes you think Fried was trying to use reason here?
Sounds all like political performance, one way or another.
MarkW
Jan 3 2024 at 10:18am
Sounds all like political performance
Yes, that is obvious. But it is still worth calling out people who engage in ad hominem arguments and throw reason out the window in favor of politics.
steve
Jan 3 2024 at 4:55pm
Seems pretty clear to me that he was not commenting upon the claims of plagiarism per se, but rather the claim about a double standard. There arent many facts to examine if you are evaluating that claim, but there are cases of professors with a liberal leaning being punished for plagiarism so there is no evidence of being a woke professor means you automatically get a free pass.
Jon- https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/regulatory-affairs-and-research-compliance/wp-content/uploads/sites/2352/2019/12/Dont-Let-Research-Misconduct-Ruin-Your-Career-2.pdf
It does matter whether or not it is thought to be deliberate when it comes to assigning punishment. If it is determined to be deliberate it is considered research misconduct and the penalties are harsher.
” Research Misconduct means fabrication, falsification, or
plagiarism, in proposing, performing, or reviewing research, or in
reporting research results. It does not include honest error or
differences of opinion”
If you work in a data heavy or technical field you will often say the same thing as other people. For example I have said many times something like “the failure rate of the ACME brand ventilator is about 1% per year.” Others have said the exact same thing or maybe with one or two words different. Depending upon whose definition you want to use and who is making the judgment that could be plagiarism or just common usage. At least in my field no one gets upset about this stuff. When it is deliberate or people steal main ideas or cite data without attribution then we take action.
Steve
Jon Murphy
Jan 3 2024 at 5:25pm
He explicitly says he’s commenting on the claims of plagiarism.
JFA
Jan 4 2024 at 9:18am
Steve, here is the whole quote from the Times,
““It’s part of this extreme right-wing attack on elite institutions,” said Charles Fried, a professor at Harvard Law School and a former solicitor general in the Reagan administration. “The obvious point is to make it look as if there is this ‘woke’ double standard at elite institutions.”
“If it came from some other quarter, I might be granting it some credence,” he said of the accusations. “But not from these people.””
There are a lot of “it’s” in those sentences and considering that those might not have been contiguous sentences when Fried made them (they are only what the reporter chose to include), I think it is hard to say for certain what Fried is referring. At the same time, we can still say that his reasoning, such as it is, is very bad because he is only focusing on the identity of the people making the case rather than the case that is being made. Either way, David’s points largely stand.
But for discussion purposes, let’s grant that he is talking about the “woke” double standard criticism. What happens if there were no consequences for Claudine Gay when at least one Ivy League president had already been removed without any of the plagiarism charges? How would one interpret keeping a black woman in that position (when students are sent off for much less egregious forms of plagiarism)? So Fried wants to deny the existence of a woke double standard, but without any consequences for Gay, there would in fact have been a woke double standard. If the Twitter response from Ibram X Kendi and Nicole Hannah Jones is representative of how “the Left” feel, then there really is a woke double standard.
Here’s Kendi: “When a racist mob attacks a Black person, it finds a seemingly legitimate reason for the attack that allows for it to accrue popular support and credibility, and which allows the growing mob to deny they are attacking the person in this way because the person is Black.” Also Kendi referencing an article from the AP, “This is journalism. Getting closer to what truly happened and why. “The plagiarism allegations came not from her academic peers but her political foes, led by conservatives who sought to oust Gay and put her career under intense scrutiny in hopes of finding a fatal flaw.””
Here’s NHJ: “Let’s be real. This is an extension of what happened to me at UNC, and it is a glimpse into the future to come. Academic freedom is under attack.”
All those responses basically support a system in which it doesn’t matter if the allegations are true, so long as the allegations are leveled at a black woman, the allegations shouldn’t matter. Note that when Kendi references the AP reporting that the criticism wasn’t coming from within Harvard, he mistakes that as a good thing, when in fact it shows the deep corruption of the institution of not wanting to hold its leaders to a high standard (as long as the leader is a black woman… Larry Summers was run out when he referenced the intelligence variability hypothesis as a potential reason why women weren’t represented as much as men in STEM, a comment which caused some Harvard board members to resign in protest… did any Harvard board members resign after Gay’s testimony or the subsequent plagiarism examples were discovered… no… they gave her a vote of unanimous support).
Overall, Fried doesn’t come out looking very well.
Richard W Fulmer
Jan 4 2024 at 9:50am
Let’s assume for the sake of argument that Fried, Kendi, et al are correct and Gay did nothing wrong as demonstrated by the fact that her accusers were conservatives with an agenda. Well, then. What does that say about Harvard and Gay who have knuckled under to false charges leveled by very bad people?
Charley Hooper
Jan 2 2024 at 11:46pm
Fried’s comments remind me a bit of the division in physics in Nazi Germany. Back then, there was Jewish physics and regular physics. The thinking was that Jewish physics could be ignored. Fried seems to be saying that there are “right-wing” facts and regular facts. He admits that he needs to recognize regular facts, but feels that he can safely ignore right-wing facts.
If that’s the case, then he has failed Reasoning 101.
Richard W Fulmer
Jan 3 2024 at 11:48am
From The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer:
According to this Newsweek report, a group calling itself “Equitable Math” declared:
George Leef
Jan 3 2024 at 7:56am
Yes, it is clearly a failure of reasoning. I’d say that Fried is guilty of the ad hominem circumstantial fallacy, which is the fallacy of thinking you’ve refuted someone’s argument merely by pointing to some circumstance about the person. Arguments stand or fall on their merits, not on any fact about the arguer. This failure of reasoning seems to be getting more and more prevalent.
Knut P. Heen
Jan 3 2024 at 9:11am
Sounds strange, but I think it says more about academic freedom than Fried’s reasoning. He probably felt he had to distance himself from the “extreme right-wing” by supporting Gay publicly.
Richard W Fulmer
Jan 3 2024 at 9:21am
Welcome to the wonderful new world of intersectionality in which skin color, victimhood, and bien pensant thought determine relevance. Truth is not a consideration because there are no truths.
Note: The statement, “there are no truths,” would, if true, be a truth, which would make it false. However, this is an example of “white man’s logic,” and is therefore inadmissible.
Monte
Jan 4 2024 at 11:46am
Yes. It is only through the lens of oppression and racism that we enable ourselves to see beyond the world of reality into the universe of possibilities, where “logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead” (ref: Jefferson Airplane song, “Go Ask Alice”). There is no final analysis. All is nuance. Even math, which used to be the last refuge of the apolitical, has been co-opted by the left. According to Micheal Rubin, AEI Senior Fellow, The Seattle Public Schools’ “Ethnic Studies Framework” for K-12 math are teaching that:
Nothing is as it seems, nor is it otherwise. -Zen proverb
Richard W Fulmer
Jan 4 2024 at 12:48pm
There are oppressors in the world and there are oppressed. But the far left takes this truth and runs over a cliff with it. First, they tend to see the world only in terms of oppressor/oppressed. Second, they assume that “oppressed” is synonymous with “virtuous” and “noble.” To take an extreme example, a serial killer in solitary confinement because he insists on murdering his fellow inmates is surely oppressed, but he is just as surely neither virtuous nor noble.
Peter
Jan 7 2024 at 2:02pm
I’m going to devil advocate you here a little Richard from our past conversation and I’ll say upfront I agree with the point you are making here generally speaking but I think a valid flaw, and one I’m sympathetic to, is that serial killer wasn’t executed hence deserves humane treatment as a fellow citizen AND human. We can separate him physically from society so he can’t harm others while not treating him barbarously in the form of US solitaire confirnment and we can afford as a rich nation to be magnanimous hence yes he could still be virtuously oppressed regardless of his crime. There is literally no reason prisoners can’t be afforded the comforts, and safety, of a working class lifestyle sans pure spite by their jailers and those that sent them there.
Monte
Jan 4 2024 at 1:51pm
Au contraire mon frère. You are reasoning in terms of whiteness. Whiteness refers to the way that “white people, their customs, culture, and beliefs operate as the standard by which all other groups are judged.” Absent any proof of motive or intent, we must assume that Gay (as the first black president of Harvard) is innocent of any and all charges of plagiarism. At worst, she is guilty only of “sloppy attribution.”
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