I haven’t gotten too worked up over evidence of plagiarism in Harvard affirmative action president Claudine Gay’s sparse record of published academic work. I didn’t want to throw the first stone in case it turned out that, say, at 4:37 AM on April 13, 2012 on my iSteve blog, I happened to copy and paste a whole paragraph from somebody but then fell asleep before remembering to attribute it to its author.

But so far I haven’t seen any evidence of me having done that. Nonetheless, having posted millions of words, I can’t imagine there aren’t embarrassing slip-ups of that nature somewhere in my corpus.

Moreover, it’s not like President Gay’s epochal intellectual breakthrough for which she became boss of Harvard was stolen by her from an obscure dissertation in Slovenian. How do we know that? Because nobody has ever accused Gay of ever publishing anything influential or interesting..

John McWhorter has a good observation:

There are indeed degrees of plagiarism. What we’re seeing is just how *ordinary* a scholar Gay has been. Her main commitment has never been to research and writing. It’s a kind of “let’s just get on with it” text-grabbing typical of … .. 1 newbies, 2 people less than deeply focused on writing conventions and 3 in a hurry. Scholars do it all the time, though not usually ones beyond a certain, well, gravitas. Her only 11 real papers is thus unsurprising. She may really have not known she had done anything wrong.

That kind of scholarly slipshodness and intellectual indifference would seem tolerable in somebody whose highest academic ambition was to rise to Assistant Dean of Student Affairs at Directional State U. The world needs ditchdiggers and college administrators, too.

But president of Harvard?

Still, Gay’s example raises an interesting analogous question. Gay is bored by scholarship but engaged by DEI Jobs-For-The-Girls academic politics.

In contrast, many real scholars are fascinated by scholarship but are bored and repelled by the now mandatory DEI Hiring Statements required of job applicants to prove their fealty to hiring and promoting people like Claudine Gay because Gay belongs to the privileged categories of black, woman, and, especially, black woman.

Would it be okay to plagiarize your DEI statement from some dweeb? How using ChatGPT to gin one up?

You’re not required to have creative, unique scholarship in anything but DEI. I imagine that if a white applicant had been found to copy any part of their DEI statement they’d be looked on less favorably than certain university presidents

— Wishes she didnt care about this stuff (@thismomisoverit) December 20, 2023

Let me guess that the next crisis in academia will be that black applicants for tenure track positions will get caught more often using AI to concoct their job market papers, but white applicants will get caught more using AI to concoct their DEI statements.

Which will be considered more scandalous?

[Comment at Unz.com]

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