I remember how it was -- JR
Harvard Honor Council student accuses school of double standard, says President Claudine Gay must resign over plagiarism scandal
She is academic garbage. She shames all real scholars by occupying a leadership position. Her only qualification for her position would seem to be her skin color. The usual Leftist racism at work
A member of Harvard’s student Honor Council called for the resignation of university president Claudine Gay over her ongoing plagiarism scandal — accusing the school’s governing body of having one standard for the embattled administrator and another for the student body.
“Gay’s getting off easy,” the student, who sits on the council tasked with deciding sanctions for classmates caught plagiarizing, wrote in a letter published anonymously in the Harvard Crimson Sunday.
“Let’s compare the treatment of Harvard undergraduates suspected of plagiarism with that of their president,” they wrote.
“When students — my classmates, peers, and friends — appear before the council, they are distraught. For most, it is the worst day of their college careers. For some, it is the worst day of their lives. They often cry.”
First time plagiarism infractions — which can stem from omitted quotation marks, and incomplete or absent citations — typically result in one term of probation and the stripping away of the student’s “good standing” status, which prevents them from studying abroad or even graduating, the author wrote.
Repeat offenses can result in students being forced to withdraw from the university for two semesters, according to the letter, published in Harvard’s student newspaper.
“What is striking about the allegations of plagiarism against President Gay is that the improprieties are routine and pervasive,” the letter said.
Gay was found to have used “duplicative language without appropriate attribution” in some of her academic work, the school’s governing body, the Harvard Corporation said after an investigation.
Instead of Gay being forced to step away from the university as students would for similar offenses, Harvard stood behind its president and allowed her to correct the mistakes, the student letter noted.
“That the Corporation considers her corrections an adequate response is not fair to undergraduates, who cannot simply submit corrections to avoid penalties,” the student wrote.
“When my peers are found responsible for multiple instances of inadequate citation, they are often suspended for an academic year. When the president of their university is found responsible for the same types of infractions, the fellows of the Corporation ‘unanimously stand in support of’ her,” the letter said, citing the Corporation’s statement about the scandal.
The scandal has left many calling for Gay’s resignation and others shrugging the mistakes off as unintentional.
“A sober-minded assessment of the plagiarism charges indicates that Gay’s behavior constitutes plagiarism, but since the errors do not appear intentional, they do not warrant her resignation,” the Harvard Crimson’s editorial board wrote in an op-ed published Saturday.
The member of the student Honor Council dismissed arguments excusing the plagiarism for being unintentional as ridiculous.
“While a single lifted paragraph could be blamed on a lapse in judgment, a pattern is more concerning,” the student wrote.
“There is one standard for me and my peers and another, much lower standard for our University’s president. The Corporation should resolve the double standard by demanding her resignation.”
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Harvard Should Pay Its Fair Share
What can we do about the corruption of American higher education? Milton Friedman had an idea 20 years ago: Tax the schools rather than subsidize them. That reflected a change of heart. In “Capitalism and Freedom” (1960), he argued that college education had enough “positive externalities” to justify subsidies. But when I was researching a book in 2003, I emailed him (then 91) and asked if he still believed that.
He replied: “I have not changed my view that higher education has some positive externality, but I have become much more aware that it also has negative externalities. I am much more dubious than I was . . . that there is any justification at all for government subsidy of higher education. The spread of PC”—political correctness—“would seem to be a very strong negative externality, and certainly the 1960s student demonstrations were negative externalities. . . . A full analysis along those lines might lead you to conclude that higher education should be taxed to offset its negative externalities.”
The past 20 years have seen negative externalities multiply: discriminatory hiring, promotion and contracting; the exclusion of conservative scholars; the suppression of speech. The case for taxing universities is stronger than ever.
A small move in that direction occurred in 2017, when Congress enacted an endowment tax. But it is small and applies only to some 35 wealthy private schools. House Ways and Means Chairman Jason Smith wants to increase that levy, but the effect would still be limited, since it would exclude public schools with small endowments.
A far better approach would be for state governments to reduce subsidies and introduce some taxation—local levies on property or state sales taxes for tuition and fees. The feds could help by getting out of the student-loan business and taxing schools’ investment income. Why should ordinary citizens pay a 23.8% tax on capital gains while Harvard, with its $50 billion endowment, pays nothing?
https://www.wsj.com/articles/harvard-should-pay-its-fair-share-taxation-higher-education-7ebe95db
***************************************************Universities Are Prioritizing Their Health Systems Over Teaching. That’s Killing Academic Freedom
Higher education has had a historically bad year.
In June, the Supreme Court imposed constitutional restraints on how universities select its own students. Throughout the summer, Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis trumpeted his bullying of higher education in the state, making it a centerpiece of his presidential campaign. And most recently, university presidents were humiliated during a congressional testimony on antisemitism on campus. One central lesson emerging at year’s end is that, more than ever, we in higher education need our university leaders to be bold and articulate defenders of academic freedom. Yet this is precisely what they have not been able to do.
Before we blame the individuals on center stage, however, we should look at the structural causes that brought us to this moment. A big reason for our disenchantment is that the job of a university president no longer prioritizes being a pioneering thought leader, but instead requires the skills of a savvy lobbyist. For most large universities, administrators’ attention has increasingly focused on outside funding and large revenue generators and away from student instruction and traditional scholarship.
One significant reason — one that has been wholly unappreciated but is growing in importance — is the role many universities play in our nation’s health sector. Universities with health systems are better understood as health systems with universities. As such, they are highly dependent on the graces and whims of policymakers, and their leaders are structurally restrained from asserting independence against, or challenging the wrongheaded politics of, elected leaders. In the end, academic freedom is the big loser.
Window into the Politics of Higher Education
It is not just Desantis, the Supreme Court and Congress. Many state legislatures have targeted higher education to advance their political objectives, and my home state of North Carolina offers a vivid microcosm of what might be called the new politics of higher education.
This legislative term, the state’s General Assembly advanced a number of bills this year that targeted academic ventures on the state’s University of North Carolina flagship campus, including a bill that would eliminate tenure, an effort to prescribe how instructors are to teach American history, and a budgetary intervention aimed to promote certain political ideologies.
The UNC faculty protested vocally, as nearly 700 signed a letter decrying the state’s recent actions “violate the principles of academic freedom and shared governance that undergird higher education in N.C. and the U.S.” UNC administrators, however, have not protested. Instead, UNC leaders aggressively sought special favors for its health system. The crown prize was the North Carolina Senate vote, 48-0, to grant the UNC Health system immunity from federal antitrust laws (after public scrutiny, the measure did not pass the state House).
We should be clear: health policy experts — including researchers at UNC’s renowned Gillings School of Global Public Health — agree that this is a horrendous policy move. The federal antitrust laws, designed to prevent monopolies and preserve competition, are gravely needed in the health sector (in the Senate’s limited debate, this much was conceded), and voluminous research has shown that hospital monopolies severely raise health care costs while reducing quality.
The mystery is not why the state considered implementing such unwise policy, since legislatures routinely extend special privileges to favored institutions. The real curiosity is why, with its academic integrity threatened and its independence on the line, UNC invested its limited political capital to ask for such a naked political favor.
The University-turned-Health System Finances
One answer — albeit a distressing one — is that UNC, like many large universities, is really a hospital system with a university appendage. UNC Health has a budget that is about $2.2 billion more than the entirety of UNC’s flagship campus in Chapel Hill ($3.5 billion vs $5.5 billion). This is also true for North Carolina’s private universities that operate health systems, like Duke University, whose health system has a budget $1.1 billion larger than the remainder of the university ($4.5 billion vs $3.4 billion). Moreover, both health systems are growing faster than the rest of both campuses.
These facts are important because the financial health of hospitals is highly dependent on political decisions. For example, the North Carolina General Assembly’s legislative session this year included debates over Medicaid expansion, which would infuse enormous sums of additional dollars into the state’s health sector, and “certificate of need” rules that would govern whether current hospitals could prevent competition from new entrants. The legislature — like all other state legislatures — also routinely makes decisions on insurance eligibility, the array of services that medical professionals may offer (so called scope-of-practice rules) and the tax-exempt status of many health care facilities.
So, perhaps it is not surprising that UNC leaders prioritized legislation that enhanced the financial security of its hospital system rather than measures that would protect its Chapel Hill faculty. And perhaps it is not surprising the University of Pennsylvania, MIT and Harvard — each of which rely heavily on government, foundation and industry funding (UPenn’s health system has a budget that is more than twice the university’s) — might seek presidents who exhibit the cautious effectiveness of corporate leaders, who can assure cooperation with policymakers and compromise with ideologues, rather than visionaries who inspire resoluteness
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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