12/18/2023
Not a few people have noted that the impressive speed with which Black Harvard President Claudine Gay’s academic reputation has been nuked since she irritated the Israel Lobby. Being able to produce all this obscure information so quickly strongly suggests it had been stockpiled.
Which in turn raises the question: Upon whom else have files been compiled?
Turning away from this rather daunting topic to something else: How was it that no one at Harvard noticed that Claudine Gay, was a lightweight?
This was not difficult to spot as John Derbyshire discussed in Give ’Em An Inch, They Take A (Harvard) Yard:
…it’s Harvard. This President Claudine Gay must be quite a scholar to have been made president of the place, right?
Apparently not. Digging through her published research, reporters were surprised at how few of them there were — just eleven peer-reviewed articles. They also couldn’t help noticing big slabs of prose lifted from other scholars’ work without attribution…
What is her field, by the way? Comp-Sci? Physics? Anthropology? History? Did her dissertation give us a possible new way to get to quantum computing or cheap fusion energy? …
Er, no.
He summarized:
President Gay is, in other words, just another Affirmative-Action mediocrity, wafted up into the academic stratosphere on thermals of white ethnomasochism.
Derbyshire is positively kind compared to Claudine Gay, Plagiarist, Eugyppius.com, December 15, 2023. This is a devastating, first class polemic.
Claudine Gay is a pseudointellectual who specialises in being a Diverse Black Female Academic…Because Gay’s importance derives entirely from being a Diverse Black Female Academic, she is an underqualified mediocrity, and she has never published anything interesting. In fact, relative to the average tenured Harvard professor, she has never published much of anything at all.
Eugyppius [Tweet him] suggests there are two types of plagiarism:
Type 1 plagiarism reflects an anxiety about the project of composing competent prose and an inability to command the tone and terminology that journals and dissertation evaluators expect. I guess that if you are so intellectually under-equipped that you can’t differentiate between what is standard terminology and what are the original words of your peers, you could accidentally plagiarise, but being this incompetent is hardly an exoneration…
Gay definitely seems guilty of Type 1 plagiarism.
The Washington Free Beacon’s Aaron Sibarium provides this graphic example of Type 1 word theft:
Gay’s 1993 essay, "Between Black and White: The Complexity of Brazilian Race Relations," lifts sentences and historical details from two scholars, David Covin and George Reid Andrews, with just a few words dropped or modified. Covin is not cited anywhere in the essay. pic.twitter.com/lFofsT4yAO
— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) December 11, 2023
Further:
Type 2 plagiarism, which consists not of petty word theft but of the broader appropriation of others’ theses and ideas, is much more insidious.
Eugyppius notes Vanderbilt Professor Carol Swain (who is black) has accused Gay of precisely this: “A White Male Would Probably Already Be Gone,” by Christoper Rufo, ChristopherRufo.com, December 11, 2023.
Swain: When I look at her work, I feel like her whole research agenda, her whole career, was based on my work. It bothers me because I know that my work was a big deal in the early 1990s … I would say in particular about the articles that she published that went through reviewers and the people on her committee, I would’ve thought they would have noticed she was doing research that was building on my work…
I don’t believe her record warranted tenure, and I believe that I had to meet a much higher standard than she did … White progressives have always rewarded the blacks who supported their ideas. Someone more mainstream, like me, could never be rewarded in the same way.
VDARE.com has pleasant memories of Carol Swain’s courage and courtesy some 15 years ago.
Eugyppius concludes:
Gay is an obvious, blatant incompetent … If she wants to stay in education, she should resign and find a job teaching in obscurity at an elementary school somewhere.
Clearly, Claudine Gay is a weak reed, even by the standards of her Affirmative Action peers. Why did Harvard choose her in particular?
I believe the answer probably lies in one of the late J. Philippe Rushton’s most valuable VDARE.com essays: Solving The African IQ Conundrum: “Winning Personality” Masks Low Scores.
Rushton noted that average black African IQ appears to be 70, as
reported by Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen in their path-breaking book IQ and the Wealth of Nations.
and that even the average for black students at the prestigious University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa was only 84 over a 6-year study period.
However:
A typical academic story comes from professors who, on first exposure to African students, express their delight in the high levels of classroom performance. The students are described as engaged, offering lively opinions, and giving a clear impression of brightness. Only when the students took objectively measured essay or multiple-choice examinations did it become painfully obvious to even the most well-wishing faculty members that their grasp of abstract material failed to live up to their classroom rhetoric.
Rushton, one of the all-time great academic bomb-throwers, summarizes:
What I am suggesting then, is that Blacks have a self-assured “bright” talkative, personality, which leads many people to over-estimate their abstract reasoning ability.
Like any other group, Whites look upon themselves as the norm. Whites tend not to speak up if they don’t know the answer to a question. Nor do they like to intrude on the privacy of others. They erroneously assume that, because Africans are talkative, they must know what they are talking about.
Looks like the Harvard Corporation got snowed by (no doubt) an exceptionally fluent talker.
And that they overlooked the extraordinary black propensity for larceny (and other crimes).
Email Patrick Cleburne.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.