Senate Has Cancel Culture Gone Too Far?

When I read The Black Jacobins, CLR James' footnote struck me. Total Chad.

 

I just want to go over the series of events that have happened.

1) Students at universities participated in pro-Palestinian activism on campus
2) CEO Bill Ackman, alongside other conservative and Zionist activists, demanded that universities squash those protests and make public the names of students in pro-Palestinian groups.
3) While some universities squashed the pro-Palestinian activism, others did not.
4) Bill Ackman and the conservatives went after the presidents of the universities that did not by fishing to see if there was plagiarism in their bodies of work.
5) They found suspicious passages in the works of one: the president of Harvard.
6) After unrelenting attacks aided by an unnatural focus on this by the media, she resigned.
7) People who were observing this went into the works of Bill Ackman's wife at MIT and found suspicious passages, leading to accusations of plagiarism against her.
8) In response, Bill Ackman has vowed to have all the works of EVERY SINGLE FACUTLY MEMBER AT MIT checked for plagiarism.

What I need @Cynda to understand is that this isn't a normal series of events and it isn't the environment in which people's works should be scrutinized for plagiarism. It is important that one does not pass off the works of other people as their own and when you're submitting work that you've done, it gets checked for plagiarism. But we don't need to be going through someone's old works and latching onto improper citations from 20 years ago. This shouldn't be used as a weapon against someone because they didn't take an action you really really wanted them to take as a school administrator. This environment, one in which the media, laypeople, and activists with political agendas are making comments and attacking the accused, is not a suitable environment for someone's works should be scrutinized in. Investigations into plagiarism aren't meant to be struggle sessions. They're not when you're a student. They shouldn't be for school administrators either. Especially when the people leading these investigations are activists who are attempting to use it as a weapon to force college administrators into punishing students for unrelated activities.

So no, I don't think the big takeaway is that "plagiarism is plagiarism." It does matter who went looking into it. It does matter that right-wing activists went fishing into the past works of school presidents who didn't squash pro-Palestinian activism on campus. It matters that instead of being an orderly investigation, we had this aired through the news and social media, completely tainting any attempt at getting to the truth of the matter. It matters that the attacks were so rampant that the president of Harvard felt she was unable to do her job and resigned.

I'm sorry that you had a difficult time triple checking your citations and quotations under stress during the worst three years in recent memory. I think there's some discussion to be had over how plagiarism is talked about in academia and how stressful we make things for students. I think there's a difference between formatting your citation incorrectly or using a phrase you've used before vs lifting things wholesale from other works. And I think in the quest to make sure students do not cheat we overcorrect. But even through all that, if you made a mistake or you unthinkingly used a phrase that you thought came up with but actually you read it a while ago and forgot that you did (that happens, actually), the investigation into your paper shouldn't go the way the investigation into Claudine Gay went. That's why I think the actual potential plagiarism here is the least important part.

 

What’s his logic at this point? Is he going to be consistent and ask that his wife resign from her job? His wife has been accused of the very thing he’s gone after others for and in response he is trying to desperately excuse away his wife’s conduct whilst going after MIT faculty for that same conduct? To what end? He’s been absolutely humiliated, and he has no where to turn. It’s great when someone has enough money to actually coordinate these campaigns has it turned on them.

Also he’s very selective about the anti-semitism he chooses to call out. He absolved Musk of his recent anti-Semitic remarks. If he wants people to take him seriously as objectively calling out anti-Semitism he should actually do it objectively, instead of giving excuses to his friends and those in which his hedge funds invest money. More money than God doesn’t buy you consistency or common sense.

 

Like most billionaires, he has the thinnest skin ever.
That said, yeah, going after his wife's thesis is a rather dirty move, but it is surely proving a point.

Among the take-home messages, he appears to have a rather poor understanding of how academic articles work. He believes that copying and pasting wikipedia paragraphs verbatim is fair play, because "the whole point of wikipedia is to be a dynamic source of info" .

What bothers me the most is that now the attention is shifted toward the topic of plagiarism, whereas I would have preferred if he were called out for the level of influence that he could buy over the politics of university based on his donor status, which I find way more disturbing than this petty drama about academic integrity.

 

It was a rather dirty move to search for plagiarism by the Harvard President in the first place, so I think it’s fine that someone has proven a point by searching through his wife’s work. It’s amazing that he’s been caught off guard by it, and now has the audacity to try and defend his wife copying Wikipedia.

He’s also walked into another obvious trap by transparently doing the whole ‘billionaire uses money to oust university president and shame her publicly.’ I’m not sure how he doesn’t see this as a terrible PR move? If he just saw it as a necessary evil to fight anti-semitism, why on earth is he publicly defending Musk for what he endorsed (which both he and Shapiro handwaved away as just meaning ‘left wing Jews,’ as if that somehow doesn’t make it antisemitic)? The whole thing is bizarre, and he just comes across as looking like an inconsistent idiot. Amazing how billionaires can’t stay in their lane - we’ll tap you when we need some advice on hedge funds Bill.

 

He wrote another 2000+ words essay and I can tell you it's an incoherent rambling where it is evident that he knows absolutely nothing about this topic and it's embarrassing. I doubt he's even familiar with how the peer review process works.
He persisted in his confusion about the use of wikipedia as a source.

That said, it's also very scary, since he is so out-of-touch that he doesn't realize how his interference is perceived and he talks very frankly about using his wealth to dramatically change universities.

Like many things these days, this is a mixture of scary and painfully stupid.

 

A point that I think is worth contemplating. Harvard has literally the largest endowment of any academic university on the entire Earth. Over $49 billion. That's more than 12x Bill Ackman's entire net worth. Why does literally anyone care what this idiot has to say? He's out of his depth besides being a hack with an axe to grind. Wasn't the whole point of an endowment supposed to be shielding universities from this kind of influence? Why have it at all, if we still need to treat garbage like this as if it is serious?

 

“Consider the inherently irreconcilable conflicts of interest. Would you trust today’s university president to do an examination of their faculty? What are the chances that the reviews would be weaponized to go after faculty members whose politics were not favored by leadership?

We have seen this before with other tools used by university presidents and their deans. Consider the weaponization of MeToo accusations, speech codes, and the other tactics of cancellation that have destroyed free speech on campus, and many faculty members’ reputations, careers, and their families.”
- his tweet

Wait, he really lacks this much self awareness? That’s literally what you’re doing Bill. He’s pursued to have someone resign from their position because of positions they hold, even though their positions have been clarified since the hearings (after he granted Elon the opportunity to clarify his anti-Semitic tweets). He may think this is warranted, due to a lack of moral clarity for leadership, or however he wishes to describe it, but then just acknowledge that he’s fine with the ousting of people if they don’t align with his political views and/or their actions. Either he’s for diversity of opinions, or he wants faculty to align with him. I think it’s better to acknowledge the former than be a hypocrite.

He’s likely got lawyers and PR people drafting this stuff for him, or at least reviewing it. Are they so bad at their jobs that they can’t point out the contradictions in these statements for him? Just say “I don’t think these people should be in the position they have because I disagree with their views”. Spare us the libertarian nonsense.

 

I'm sure everyone's tired of Ackman and the plagiarism discussion, so here's a news reporter who tried his hand at stand up comedy and was fired because the jokes were supposedly offensive. Except here's the catch: he's a brown dude from a Muslim family. And when they fired him, the arbiter ordered his job reinstated.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7b...t-day-job-back-after-jokes-ruled-simply-funny

Note: the article has some bad words and vulgar language in the jokes (which is part of what got him fired). When WHYY fired him, they apparently cancelled his health insurance (which he needs for expensive medication) and they took down everything he did so he couldn't even point to his published works when looking for a new job.

Now we all know I'm not the biggest fan of comedians or "stand up comedy." But I'm even less of a fan of how much one's workplace owns their life. It's getting to the point in this capitalist society where we're just not allowed to express ourselves without punishment. Here's the facts: we need money to live. Nothing in this country is free; every basic necessity costs money. So we need to work. And more and more our jobs are starting to control everything we do outside our 9 to 5. Because if you stray out of line and do a societal faux pas, you get the ultimate punishment: poverty. Note: only if you're not rich and famous. If you're rich and famous, you get to do whatever you want.

There has to be a better way.

 

I do like that WHYY has said they consider expressing feeling subjected to racial microagressions to be a fireable offense.

 

And the Ackman mess rolls on, this time the guy who has no hesitation slagging off other's family now claims his own is off-limits. Why? According to a "code". Expect this to continue in one direction only - downwards.

 

I do believe that attacking the wife was kind of awful, but what he was trying to do disgusts me to the point that fair play is secondary.

Also, he's so close in doing 2+2 and realize that the arguments he makes for his wife are applicable to Gay as well.

 

100% this. Yes, in a vacuum, attacking his wife is wrong. But it's not in a vacuum. Ackman opened this situation up. He is the direct cause of his wife being attacked. This was the logical course of events that was always going to happen because of the actions he took.

 

More to the point, by his own logic, if plagiarism has such clear cut, bright lines, there’s no way his wife should be “accidentally guilty” regardless of how many people were scruitinizing her. As is, either he was o wehyping Gay’s offenses or is underplaying his wife’s. Either way we have to conclude the original incident was a pretext for political revenge.

 

Edit: probably not the right thread for this.

 

Billionaires are used to acting with impunity. I think going after his wife is fair play. We should keep in mind that this all started because Israel is committing genocide and Ackman feels that Ivy Leagues aren't coming down hard enough on the young people and faculty standing against it. These Nazi freaks deserve retaliation.

 

A final point about this whole plagiarism issue. Dissertation review committees exist. People have to defend their work. Part of that process is supposed to be screening for originality. While we shouldn't enable large scale cheating, it would stand to reason to me that if people's infractions are relatively minor, and they are still thought to be making substantial scholarly contributions on the whole, attribution errors should be penalties of the review committee, not the emerging scholar. I think that would be true for both Gay and whomever the billionaire's wife is.

 

I don't think I've ever seen or heard of a committee feeling like their goal is making sure there is not plagiarism. In my experience, it vets that someone can explain the work that they presented as their own and understand it, but not that no one else has done that first.

 

I would agree that's not their primary goal. But insofar as one criterion is novelty, they are already making an assessment about how original something this. I concede it's a different task to see if anything is incorrectly cited versus judging as gestalt whether the work is original or not, but in principle the tasks have clear linkages. Nor do I think it's necessarily a committee level goal versus one's primary advisor. My point is that if there's real interest here, there are already places where it could be naturally folded into the process. As Cynda notes, this is a process that often stretches over one or multiple years. There are many iterations before final approval. If we're going to at all pretend that this a mentored, collaborative process, it makes no sense for the scholar to bear all fault alone.

 

Plagiarism is pretty far from being one of the main problems in academia, which makes the whole controversy all the more bizarre. These enterpreneurs apply business rules to the academic world, so even when they are in good faith (not here), that misconception is one of the sources of confusion. This is also why they seem to consider their donations as if they became shareholders of the universities, and so they feel like they're somehow entitled to a certain corresponding voting power.
Now, Ackman proved to be completely clueless about the topic of academic publishing when he admitted that he thought copying and pasting from wikipedia was ok. But the twitter right doesn't know **** either, so here we are in a vicious cycle of clueless, yet arrogant people encouraging each other.

In his lengthy posts, that nobody read, Ackman made it clear that what he is really concerned about is actually some of the views that are dominant in academia, including, among others, the fact that minorities have less opportunities and that the system is biased in favor of white men, and that capitalism is a flawed system. So, even though he might believe that he's being subtle, it is transparent that plagiarism is not an issue with intrinsic validity but it is just used as a political tool to shape universities the way he wants.

And by the way, sadly, he's not the only big donor involved in this.

 

I'm not saying not as a primary goal, but not as any goal (in my experience).

 

I don't really have more to say than I've already said. You can't judge originality without also weighing whether something has been done previously or not. More broadly still, any mentored process is explicitly an admission that the primary author is not competent on their own to conduct the whole process independently. They are under supervision. I am not aware of any other example where an error that occurs under supervisor can not be said to imply anything about the supervisor, the process of supervision, or both. If a thesis advisor gets career credit for helping guide a scholar to the successful completion of their work, it stands to reason that they would also receive criticisms for faults that emerge.