The thematic parallels between "Big Prestige" today and "Big Auto" in the 1970s are difficult to ignore: fingers in the ears over the end of an incredible demographic tailwind, rigid ideological certainty in their own righteousness ("what's good for General Motors is good for America"), childish certainty that the gravy train can't ever be stopped.
Worst of all, it's a bundle of professions notoriously prone to infighting
The value of the ivys isn’t really the education it’s the built in networking. Certainly they are academically solid but not really that much better than the better state schools etc.
They want you to believe differently but I see no objective evidence of superiority (although again they are certainly good). They win in life because they have connections
I love this comment not only because it's largely true, but also because it really reinforces the Big Auto analogy Mike H made above.
It's like, we'll sell you more or less this same car, but within a tiered prestige hierarchy that insulates us from competition because really you're buying the badge. You want a Cadillac because it's better than a Buick, you want a Buick because it's better than an Oldsmobile, and so on. You're on that particular ladder because of a semi-arbitrary preference for GM powertrains over Ford -- which you may or may not have acquired randomly from your dad -- but you'll literally fight other people over that loyalty. (Cf. college football.)
The whole gambit is that all of this is so entrancing that you'll never notice whether the product breaks down more often than a Toyota.
I'm curious: what do people think of UChicago? Having had a child go there, it seemed to me that, nws mostly very liberal professors, the school respected differing views and actually cared about scholarship. But I was an outsider, so who knows.
Following from the notion of "Americans WILL eschew bloated prestige brands for formerly low-prestige upstarts provided those upstarts are affordable and reliable" I think the Toyota here would be something akin to commuter (or formerly commuter and now quasi-commuter) schools like the University of Illinois-Chicago or the University of Cincinnati (I'm sure there are tons of other examples, those are just the ones I know somewhat well)
Part of the reason there's no Toyota is that states have been cutting funding for state universities for decades. I feel like maybe technology could be better applied to college level education, as well, but that's just a guess.
I have a little bit different perspective on this. My parents grew up in Warrensburg Missouri which had a small state teachers college my father attended. There was a bit of money in my Mom's family which paid for a college degree at the University of Minnesota. None of my paternal ancestors went to college. My maternal grandfather was a graduate of Culver-Stockton College in Canton, Missouri, the only one of his 10 siblings to attend college, and became a minister. After WWII, which my father spent as a submarine officer based in Perth Australia and my mother on a bomber in the UK, my father got a Phd in economics at the University of Chicago on the GI bill and after a brief stint at the Federal Reserve had a life-long career as an economics professor at Cornell. The point is none of the success they created for themselves in life came from family connections in Warrensburg, Missouri. I will also add I attended Brown University and Stanford law School, and saw at close hand the education at Cornell; there is a difference, and Brown was noticeably inferior. My experience of state universities is limited to my sister's long life as a faculty wife at the U of Arkansas. It isn't in the same league as Williams College and Yale where she got her education.
Once people lose trust in an institution it's really hard to earn it back, and there's going to be a lot of second and third-order problems come from that. Too many people in this country have seen the behavior of the leaders and faculty of Ivy league schools and other colleges and have concluded that the people who run them are lunatics who hate half the country and are under the spell of extreme ideological fervor.
It is a fact that Harvard's rules on plagiarism are much more draconian then for its faculty; a student is essentially immediately expelled, while a faculty member undergoes a review. However, it is also a fact that Claudine Gay plagiarized in papers written as a student, and in her graduate thesis; how should she thus avoid the punishment of a student. Had Gay been expelled while a student, it is unlikely she would have been hired to the faculty by Harvard (or any top tier institution).
Further, not covered in the discussion is the incredibly weak academic record for Gay, who stated that she only made "citation errors" and claims her work "spawned important research by other scholars". However, commentators more knowledgeable than I have stated her work has had little impact, and quantifiable impact factor is incredibly low (another fact).
The sad part here is that the Gay fiasco tarnishes the reputation of the truly brilliant scholars of color, leaving them subject to the claim that they are only there but for their race.
And as one final ironic tidbit, the Harvard Crimson, in decrying her dismissal as race-based, failed to remember that the very first accomplishment they themselves listed on her appointment as president was that she is Black.
Prof. Gay is the daughter of Haitian concrete magnates and attended Exeter, Harvard, Stanford, and Princeton. Her elevation to the presidency of Harvard, over a hypothetical black scholar with a stronger publishing record despite perhaps a less sterling pedigree, is almost too on-the-nose as an parody of Harvard’s “commitment” to putting a diverse gloss on its careful hoarding of privilege.
Boy ain’t that the truth. It’s almost absurd how little in common she has with the poor underclass of African-Americans that actually need this “commitment.”
I don't go to Harvard or teach there, but I teach at Northwestern. The idea that the student handbook is strictly enforced is an absolute joke. The administration is well aware that every student who gets expelled is not a future donor, so very few kids get expelled for these kinds of transgressions anymore. This is especially true of foreign students who are paying big bucks and I've seen some epic cheating scandals with absolutely nothing done about it. I even had one student that didn't even speak English, they cheated on the TOEFL and then the entire way through university and literally the admin did nothing as staff pleaded for help.
And I end up interviewing students with graduate degrees, but an inability to answer interview questions. About half my interview interviews experiences are "you answered a question but not the one I asked". Part of this is because lower quality candidates end up interviewing much more, but at some point you'd think universities would want to stop attaching their name to low quality candidates spamming resumes through corporate America.
When I was in grad school for a social science in the 2010s, one thing I noticed was that research findings that could be coded as “conservative” would consistently draw intense scrutiny from other practitioners, in the form of things like exhaustively reviewing the methodology for any hint of error or questionable definitions. Often these efforts would reveal decisions the researcher made that genuinely were questionable or could be challenged. But the question that always lingered for me was - if we applied this same level of scrutiny to liberal or apolitical research, how many of the same questionable practices would we find?
On a somewhat different note, I often felt that if one were to be a conservative practitioner in my discipline, while certain aspects of professional life would be tougher (like what I described above), there was also one intriguing advantage - while liberal practitioners were endlessly numerous, the scarcity of conservatives meant that if you were a conservative, it was easier to become a certain kind of public figure - not necessarily a tenured professor, but someone who was celebrated and cited approvingly by right-leaning think tanks, Republican politicians, certain conservative media outlets like the National Review, and so on. They’re happy to co-opt a little academic prestige and authority when it suits their purposes.
The "conservative practitioner in my discipline" line of work was basically my life for several years. Honestly I probably chased it for longer than I should've because I had precisely the same intuition as you about comparative advantage, which ultimately turned out to be wrong.
First off, most professorial types have no capacity to "become a certain kind of public figure" for reasons having nothing to do with ideology. You're sitting there in your seminar on Sumerian potsherds and realizing that everyone else wants to tell a story about the potsherds' intersectional resistance to heteronormative chalcocentricity. You, however, think they suggest the resilience of traditional practices in the face of creeping individualism. Your first thought is not, "let me get in touch with Richard Hananiah's agent." It's that there's a very narrow path by which interest in Sumerian potsherds leads to gainful employment, and if that path is closed off to people who want to talk (even brilliantly! relevantly!) about potsherds in vaguely right-coded ways, you're pretty much fucked.
The other part of this is that if you're an academic who happens to be a conservative, and your conservatism informs how you view your academic work, the most natural way for that to play out is to insist on seeing the intellectual life as a realm beyond politics, beyond rhetoric, beyond activism, beyond engagement.
There was admittedly a day when the doyens of that mode -- the Harold Blooms, the Saul Bellows -- could command attention as reactionary celebrities. But their like has long since passed from the earth, and I can't remember the last time I could click on a listicle of "18 ways the curvature of the Apollo Belvedere proves political action is sordid and disgusting."
I agree whole heartedly with this article and BBC would add a few thoughts:
One area I feel strongly about is that various social disciplines co-opted the term science because it gave them a sense of authority they didn’t really have. Sciences have to have refutable postulates and defined agreements on data methodologies. Barring a few items at the edges of cosmology the hard sciences largely accomplish this and produce results that can be replicated in other labs.
Social disciplines use tenuous statistical tricks to generate their theories and even discounting outright fabrication, it’s almost impossible to replicate data sets. Gravity is the same in Beijing as it is in Cambridge MA but many social experiments couldn’t even get off the ground in both if those places.
This is not to say that there isn’t expertise in social disciplines but it does not rise to the level of science. If you’re deciding a social policy you should take social academics opinion more seriously than mine.
If however your social discipline is at odds with more than half the population in the country it is likely that they are wrong at least on part. I think at some level the country knows this to be true and their decreasing support of higher ed is reflected in this.
Lines are much blurrier than you are making them out to be. Parts of biology, ecology, climatology etc are statistical models of complex systems. There are plenty of models of human behavior that are pretty darn reliable: consumer finance relies heavily on the predicability of human behavior to offer and price credit.
The issue isn't that human behavior doesn't follow principles, it's that academics have a novelty bias where people tend to publish novel ideas with weaker evidence. This happens in physics too; cool ideas get published without definitive support (see string theory, dark matter etc). As an industry researcher I'm paid for accuracy not novelty, so I can say obvious things like unemployment is highly correlated with consumer loan losses and people just care about the degree of that correlation and what it means for the bottom line. The issue isn't that social science can't be useful, it's that academia has very skewed incentives.
I think many of Gay’s defenders are taking issue with what’s going on because a. they really dislike Rufo and b. they know he doesn’t care at all about the plagiarism, it was just a way to get her for the stuff he really disliked. But that doesn’t change what she did, and in a vacuum an academic caught with similar evidence would face serious consequences. They got Al Capone for tax evasion; they got President Gay for plagiarism. Same idea.
I agree with many points here, but I'd differ on at least the following:
1) An underappreciated aspect of the Gay plagiarism story is that the initial allegations really were very weak tea and it was not unreasonable for the university and Gay's colleagues to stand by Gay at that point. The later allegations were stronger at which point Gay was compelled to resign. That strikes me as a sensible approach to that issue.
2) The removal of Ron Sullivan as a faculty dean was reasonable. Faculty deans are Harvard professors who are responsible for oversight of an undergraduate dormitory. You can't be defending a vicious serial rapist during the day and oversee a college dorm at night; you have to pick a lane. There's no principle of intellectual freedom which requires undergraduate women to tolerate that.
On #1 the correct approach would have been for Harvard to actually conduct a full investigation (as they claimed they did) to see if there were more substantial issues in her work before offering unanimous backing. Ideally this should have been done before she was hired of course!
Yeah this was totally inept on the part of the Corporation. They tried to bury the matter with a quickie review conducted by a panel whose identities were kept secret, and they didn't actually figure out what the true situation was before they lined up behind Gay. If they'd done a real investigation, they could have used that as grounds to avoid commenting ("we're waiting for the results of the investigation") and they would have learned the true extent of the plagiarism before going out on a limb.
Completely agree with this, and on point #2, I just don't understand why this was an issue. Is there even one case in the history of lawyering where the lawyer representing a rapist or serial killer became one themselves? I also doubt very much that there is a criminal lawyer in the country who hasn't represented a bad person. Should all lawyers be banned from interaction with society because of that?
I’m not sure if he should've been fired, but it is kind of gross to join a huge team of lawyers for an extremely rich guy who is clearly malevolent regardless of official guilt.
This isn’t “everyone deserves representation and therefore lawyers need to take abhorrent clients to make the system work.” It’s a rich guy exploiting a justice system that lets rich guys get away with stuff no one else would.
A lot of lawyers I know don’t go into personal injury cuz it’s scuzzy. It’s fine for lawyers to have a similar standard, especially so when they have a totally different day job.
You know what even more gross? This statement, "it is kind of gross to join a huge team of lawyers for an extremely rich guy who is clearly malevolent regardless of official guilt." That's what lawyers DO, it's the essence of their profession - that everyone deserves a defense. If 20-year olds on multiple SSRIs can't deal with this fact - they should leave college.
Everyone deserves a defense, not everyone deserves a $10 million defense team.
I realize I’m cutting against the ethos of the profession.
A lawyer should be ok with a full throated defense of Osama bin Laden or whoever, they shouldn’t feel good about being the 10th lawyer on a scumbags defense team
So are you saying that if he were the only lawyer representing Weinstein, like your bin Laden example, would have been ok? I don't think the angry students would agree with you.
Yes, you're cutting against the ethos of the profession, but so what? So much the worse for our profession, if it turns out we have the wrong ethos.
You're pointing to a deep question, one every lawyer should seriously confront. We in the US have adopted an adversarial system for resolving legal disputes. This is not an inevitability: other societies no less committed to the rule of law have chosen otherwise. We are, in fact, an outlier in our commitment to the idea that truth is best discovered and justice best served by relying on the parties themselves to develop arguments and frame issues for the court's consideration.
*The underlying, guiding premise* of this system is that having 10 attorneys for Harvey Weinstein better serves the cause of truth and justice than having 9. 11 is better than 10. And so on. Not necessarily in any one specific case, but in the aggregate and in general.
Maybe that's stupid. The argument for how it might be stupid practically writes itself. I could try to sell you on why it's not stupid, but the fact that it's directly correlated to the US paying way more lawyers way more money than any other society makes me an obviously biased and unreliable narrator.
But give me a break: none of this is Ron Sullivan's fault. Within the system as actually constituted, he was playing an appropriate role appropriately.
(And this is even apart from the fact that, if I understand the sequence of events right, he wasn't "the 10th" guy: Weinstein fired the one guy, and brought in Sullivan and another guy as co-guys.)
I am more sympathetic to the administration on this one. The resident Dean / house master position has additional responsibilities towards students well-being and the Weinstein case was unusually high-profile. I don’t think it should be viewed as a generalizable rule the way you are framing it.
I probably shouldn't have made my comment as attached in agreement with yours because we completely disagree on this. If students really can't handle what a house master does for a living, they have gotten much more snowflake-y than when I was there.
There’s a difference between defending the abhorrent, and signing up to be the 10th lawyer on the multizillion dollar defense team of someone abborrent.
I'm a lawyer myself and I don't think there's any principle that requires people to rigorously separate my professional practice from their feelings about me. It's fine that John Adams represented the British soldiers at the Boston Massacre but no one suggested that he should also be in charge of consoling the Attucks family. They are not complementary roles.
But that's not relevant here. Sullivan wasn't "in charge" of consoling Weinstein's victims. He was in charge of serving as house master. A proper analogy with John Adams is that because he represented the British soldiers he shouldn't be allowed to be in the society of people with negative feelings toward the British, ie the Americans. And we know from election results that that was not the case.
On (2), I agree there's "no principle of intellectual freedom" at stake. Whatever there is to be said for representing a client who seems obviously guilty, it's definitely not a matter of the untrammeled scientific impulse doggedly pursuing an inconvenient hypothesis wherever the facts lead. The concern here is not that Harvard stifled the free flow of academic debate over the guilt or innocence of Harvey Weinstein.
It's that Sullivan was pursuing a noble profession and doing exactly what a conscientious professional in that field would.
That professional norm wasn't, it's true, made for the sake of Ron Sullivan defending Harvey Weinstein. But it was made for the sake of Atticus Finch defending Tom Robinson. And as a profession and a society we've decided that rather than trusting ourselves to draw the line between those two cases, we're going to say that Sullivan defending Weinstein is doing as he should. We were right to make that decision. And -- some of us believe -- the rightness of that social and professional norm is something Harvard should honor and teach.
I teach at Northwestern, not quite an Ivy but close. The idea that you'd get kicked out of Northwestern for this style of plagiarism is absolutely false. I've had students do things many many times worse, especially foreign (Chinese) students who have run some pretty massive cheating scandals. The administration's response is generally a slap on the hand, if that. I think the entire endeavor has become deeply unserious in the last decade or so.
I once sat on NYU's graduate admissions committee and one of my jobs was to interview foreign students seeking admission to the university via Skype. I was instructed that during the interview I was to surprise the student by informing them that I was going to ask them a question and they were to write the response back to me in the form of an essay - which they were to type, on screen, while I sat and watched them. I assumed this was an attempt to catch those who'd cheated on the TOEFL and more generally - to weed out those whose English skills were subpar.
idk, man. I teach at large state R1, and here, most first violations of academic honesty would result in a zero on the assignment, but the second time around is basically auto suspension.
I think it depends on a lot of factors but especially the program - I teach a class in marketing and that gets handled a lot differently than when I took classes in engineering, etc. I think grad vs undergrad is a big difference too. Also state vs private schools I think are different worlds right now.
I am an academic in the hard sciences (experimental particle physics). I would be interested to hear your thoughts on what those of us in academia but outside the social sciences and humanities can do to help restore faith in/improve the trustworthiness of our institutions.
My guess is: nothing. You guys are the reason the social sciences and humanities ever had credibility to begin with; they’ve been spending down the credit you’ve built up for decades, sometimes faster and sometimes more slowly, and rarely adding any of their own. If I were you, I would be trying to create some distance from them.
It depends on what you mean by “distance”, but I don’t think that’s a viable path forward. Humanities are always going to be part of a full education—it would be undesirable to fully split universities so that physics and English departments were never at the same schools.
Certainly. But the goal would be to preserve public trust in (actual, empirical) science. That doesn’t need to entail anything substantial.
One example would be how universities are organized administratively, where you get a school of “arts and science”. I don’t see what benefit there is to that setup as opposed to a separate administration for liberal arts and for science - and if the idea is to conserve administrative resources, then bundle the sciences with engineering/technology, and throw in medicine too. Again, the goal is just to find low-cost ways to help the public understand that physics has less in common with social-justice activist anthropology than it does with materials science.
I cry no tears for Claudine Gay, but I am more than a bit amused that the plagiarism police have now come for Bill Ackman’s wife.
He was righteously mad at Harvard and eventually picked up the most convenient club to bash them with - despite the fact that plagiarism was irrelevant to his many gripes with Harvard. Now the club is being used to whack his wife.
Again, it was a legitimate, valid charge against Gay. But personally, I try to keep my attacks on people on what I’m actually angry about. Keeps things simpler.
I did feel slightly sorry for the university presidents in one respect: Elise Stefanik had them pinned down between their pro-Palestinian student bodies, their pro-Israel and Conservative donors, and their legal counsel who (I'm guessing) were telling them that the difference between free speech and harassment was context and whether the speech was persistent and intimidating, etc. I think the university president who was accused of smirking had that facial expression because of acute unease and because she knew what Stefanik was doing, and could see from Stefanik's faux outrage that she knew that she knew. Of course, more astute politicians would have handled this situation better and it's rather odd that they didn't seem to have a plan for hostile questioning beyond repeating their lines.
My field of distrust is wide these days, as that such a high percent articles cater to preconceptions or are cheap hits, as Josh is pointing out. So with any article that interests me, I follow any links to the original report or at a minimum google the topic or look it up on Wikipedia to see if it seems to hold up or what the bigger story is. Also, if a point makes me uncomfortable, I try to sit with it for a while to understand my reaction and the point the author is trying to make, rather than immediately rationalize against it.
Doing a very late reply because your take on this topic was exactly mine. I am not sympathetic to these U presidents but Stefanik was just playing "gotcha" and really was not being fair to them. And I read the smirk just like you did.
We must treat our enemies fairly (unless they pose some genuine danger and unfairness is the only means to eliminate them) or risk losing the greater game.
There should've been sweeping accountability measures taken following the replication crisis. Whole departments should've been disbanded. If College X's psychology department has *reduced* on net our understanding of how psychology works, then that department has been worse than useless and shouldn't exist.
It's not enough for individuals to be fired, but even that doesn't seem to have happened in most cases.
I no longer trust the whole field of psychology, social sciences, etc., and won't until those fields take on the responsibility of ensuring the validity of their research. It's a shame, those are important areas of study!
(All that said, the congressional questioning on Israel *was* a well-laid, BS trap. And on plagiarism, I think we should do more time discounting of misdeeds. Minor plagiarism 25 years ago probably shouldn't be a terminal finding.)
It is a fair point that the plagiarism was well in the past. Regardless, the plagiarism scandal in conjunction with the poor congressional hearing shows that Gay was clearly unfit for the role. As a president of a university you are supposed to be both a scholar and an effective figurehead, and she was neither.
In regards to the trap comment, I disagree. It was only a trap because they walked directly into it. Saying "genocide is bad" is not a hard thing to say. And the smug looks on all three of these president's faces indicates that they did not take these hearings seriously. And clearly that was an error.
They shouldn't have taken them seriously, it was BS political posturing! Why call those three out of the thousands of colleges in the US with similar dynamics?
The trap was that Stefanik made it hard to decry "genocide" without also agreeing that the pro-palestinian groups *were* advocating genocide. You could play the same trick on the other side - Israel is literally killing tens of thousands of Muslims right now. Is going to a pro-Israel rally and advocating for US arms support pro-genocide? If I lead in with the first statement (Israel's killing muslims) and then ask you if support genocide of Israel's, isn't that a trap? What if part of your job is not taking a side in the war - how do you answer then? Oh, and you have 10 seconds to figure it out. Oh! And even if your answers to 20 other senate grillings are perfect, 1 bad one and you're f'd.
The thread through my comments is that I think being a public figure and answering hostile questions contemporaneously is really hard. Accountability to the core job is important, not bad judgement in one-liners or 25-YO plagiarism.
I don't understand why Gay was allowed to go back and restate her articles to correct the plagiarism. Is that really a thing? It just seems like everyone should take the easy path and plagiarize. You'll either not get caught or get caught and just go back and correct it. Either way you've saved yourself a lot of work.
The whole 'truth is relative' argument is not a good argument in a scientific study. The whole premise of the scientific method is that truth is *not* relative and can be discovered through careful observation.
Once you accept that then your paper has no more claim to relevancy as anything published on One America Network.
It's a tragedy that the very serious concern of rising antisemitism on college campuses has turned into a pissing match amongst cynical politicians and elite university admins. That people like Bill Ackman and Chris Rufo and Claudine Gay have become central figures in the story is exceedingly unserious. And, finally, Barro (a Harvard guy too I believe) here suggests that the aforementioned niche cultural wars are an indictment on academia itself.
It really sucks that the institutions built to protect ethnic and religious minorities on campus are now subjected to that same culture angst. I can even concede that many DEI initiatives have indeed suffered from identity politics that ultimately do not serve to protect the cause. However, it seems most are incapable of making that observation without also calling for the dismantling of DEI, and that is likewise a tragedy.
Lost amidst this chaos is how many universities have genuinely structured a foundation of DEI initiatives and religious scholar institutes to combat antisemitism as well as the pressing demand to protect Arabic and Islamic students as well.
It shouldn't be a surprise that Harvard and Penn stupidly walked into that trap. But it's insanity to portray that mistake as an indictment on academia as a whole.In fact, it usually requires a large dose of hubris to believe that what happens at Harvard is reflective of academia anywhere else, anyways.
Even still, Yale Presisent Peter Salovey was never subjected to the same treatment as his counterparts. Instead, Salovey has been expeditiously communicating with the Yale community since 10/7 and has performed adequately to address the avalanche of demands this era poses. It's not lost on me that Salovey has a unique ancestry traced back to Poland, Jerusalem, and Austria. A background that makes him well adept to address the nuances at hand. He also understands that Yale, like many Ivies, has a proud tradition of Jewish scholars - one that does not need to be mocked by this entire episode of political fart huffing. And so he avoided the carnival on capital hill, but apparently doesn't represent academia the way Caludine Gay does?
In a political fight that's asawth with unserious actors from Stefanik, to Gay, to Rufo, Barro pulls the same card that Nate Silver has recently been exhausting-i.e. the political fights that appear on my Twitter feed are the entire summation of the problems I'm now providing commentary on.
It's like binge watching Soap Operas and then decrying how melodramatic television has become.
The thematic parallels between "Big Prestige" today and "Big Auto" in the 1970s are difficult to ignore: fingers in the ears over the end of an incredible demographic tailwind, rigid ideological certainty in their own righteousness ("what's good for General Motors is good for America"), childish certainty that the gravy train can't ever be stopped.
Worst of all, it's a bundle of professions notoriously prone to infighting
The value of the ivys isn’t really the education it’s the built in networking. Certainly they are academically solid but not really that much better than the better state schools etc.
They want you to believe differently but I see no objective evidence of superiority (although again they are certainly good). They win in life because they have connections
I love this comment not only because it's largely true, but also because it really reinforces the Big Auto analogy Mike H made above.
It's like, we'll sell you more or less this same car, but within a tiered prestige hierarchy that insulates us from competition because really you're buying the badge. You want a Cadillac because it's better than a Buick, you want a Buick because it's better than an Oldsmobile, and so on. You're on that particular ladder because of a semi-arbitrary preference for GM powertrains over Ford -- which you may or may not have acquired randomly from your dad -- but you'll literally fight other people over that loyalty. (Cf. college football.)
The whole gambit is that all of this is so entrancing that you'll never notice whether the product breaks down more often than a Toyota.
The main difference though is I don't believe there's a Toyota here
I'm curious: what do people think of UChicago? Having had a child go there, it seemed to me that, nws mostly very liberal professors, the school respected differing views and actually cared about scholarship. But I was an outsider, so who knows.
Following from the notion of "Americans WILL eschew bloated prestige brands for formerly low-prestige upstarts provided those upstarts are affordable and reliable" I think the Toyota here would be something akin to commuter (or formerly commuter and now quasi-commuter) schools like the University of Illinois-Chicago or the University of Cincinnati (I'm sure there are tons of other examples, those are just the ones I know somewhat well)
Throughout the main article I was wondering about when Big State U would appear, and I keep wondering still right here: it's Big State U.
Part of the reason there's no Toyota is that states have been cutting funding for state universities for decades. I feel like maybe technology could be better applied to college level education, as well, but that's just a guess.
CUNY Baruch
Money left on the table.
"that you may or may not have acquired randomly from your dad" - that's a great bit
I have a little bit different perspective on this. My parents grew up in Warrensburg Missouri which had a small state teachers college my father attended. There was a bit of money in my Mom's family which paid for a college degree at the University of Minnesota. None of my paternal ancestors went to college. My maternal grandfather was a graduate of Culver-Stockton College in Canton, Missouri, the only one of his 10 siblings to attend college, and became a minister. After WWII, which my father spent as a submarine officer based in Perth Australia and my mother on a bomber in the UK, my father got a Phd in economics at the University of Chicago on the GI bill and after a brief stint at the Federal Reserve had a life-long career as an economics professor at Cornell. The point is none of the success they created for themselves in life came from family connections in Warrensburg, Missouri. I will also add I attended Brown University and Stanford law School, and saw at close hand the education at Cornell; there is a difference, and Brown was noticeably inferior. My experience of state universities is limited to my sister's long life as a faculty wife at the U of Arkansas. It isn't in the same league as Williams College and Yale where she got her education.
Once people lose trust in an institution it's really hard to earn it back, and there's going to be a lot of second and third-order problems come from that. Too many people in this country have seen the behavior of the leaders and faculty of Ivy league schools and other colleges and have concluded that the people who run them are lunatics who hate half the country and are under the spell of extreme ideological fervor.
It is a fact that Harvard's rules on plagiarism are much more draconian then for its faculty; a student is essentially immediately expelled, while a faculty member undergoes a review. However, it is also a fact that Claudine Gay plagiarized in papers written as a student, and in her graduate thesis; how should she thus avoid the punishment of a student. Had Gay been expelled while a student, it is unlikely she would have been hired to the faculty by Harvard (or any top tier institution).
Further, not covered in the discussion is the incredibly weak academic record for Gay, who stated that she only made "citation errors" and claims her work "spawned important research by other scholars". However, commentators more knowledgeable than I have stated her work has had little impact, and quantifiable impact factor is incredibly low (another fact).
The sad part here is that the Gay fiasco tarnishes the reputation of the truly brilliant scholars of color, leaving them subject to the claim that they are only there but for their race.
And as one final ironic tidbit, the Harvard Crimson, in decrying her dismissal as race-based, failed to remember that the very first accomplishment they themselves listed on her appointment as president was that she is Black.
Prof. Gay is the daughter of Haitian concrete magnates and attended Exeter, Harvard, Stanford, and Princeton. Her elevation to the presidency of Harvard, over a hypothetical black scholar with a stronger publishing record despite perhaps a less sterling pedigree, is almost too on-the-nose as an parody of Harvard’s “commitment” to putting a diverse gloss on its careful hoarding of privilege.
Boy ain’t that the truth. It’s almost absurd how little in common she has with the poor underclass of African-Americans that actually need this “commitment.”
I don't go to Harvard or teach there, but I teach at Northwestern. The idea that the student handbook is strictly enforced is an absolute joke. The administration is well aware that every student who gets expelled is not a future donor, so very few kids get expelled for these kinds of transgressions anymore. This is especially true of foreign students who are paying big bucks and I've seen some epic cheating scandals with absolutely nothing done about it. I even had one student that didn't even speak English, they cheated on the TOEFL and then the entire way through university and literally the admin did nothing as staff pleaded for help.
And I end up interviewing students with graduate degrees, but an inability to answer interview questions. About half my interview interviews experiences are "you answered a question but not the one I asked". Part of this is because lower quality candidates end up interviewing much more, but at some point you'd think universities would want to stop attaching their name to low quality candidates spamming resumes through corporate America.
When I was in grad school for a social science in the 2010s, one thing I noticed was that research findings that could be coded as “conservative” would consistently draw intense scrutiny from other practitioners, in the form of things like exhaustively reviewing the methodology for any hint of error or questionable definitions. Often these efforts would reveal decisions the researcher made that genuinely were questionable or could be challenged. But the question that always lingered for me was - if we applied this same level of scrutiny to liberal or apolitical research, how many of the same questionable practices would we find?
On a somewhat different note, I often felt that if one were to be a conservative practitioner in my discipline, while certain aspects of professional life would be tougher (like what I described above), there was also one intriguing advantage - while liberal practitioners were endlessly numerous, the scarcity of conservatives meant that if you were a conservative, it was easier to become a certain kind of public figure - not necessarily a tenured professor, but someone who was celebrated and cited approvingly by right-leaning think tanks, Republican politicians, certain conservative media outlets like the National Review, and so on. They’re happy to co-opt a little academic prestige and authority when it suits their purposes.
The "conservative practitioner in my discipline" line of work was basically my life for several years. Honestly I probably chased it for longer than I should've because I had precisely the same intuition as you about comparative advantage, which ultimately turned out to be wrong.
First off, most professorial types have no capacity to "become a certain kind of public figure" for reasons having nothing to do with ideology. You're sitting there in your seminar on Sumerian potsherds and realizing that everyone else wants to tell a story about the potsherds' intersectional resistance to heteronormative chalcocentricity. You, however, think they suggest the resilience of traditional practices in the face of creeping individualism. Your first thought is not, "let me get in touch with Richard Hananiah's agent." It's that there's a very narrow path by which interest in Sumerian potsherds leads to gainful employment, and if that path is closed off to people who want to talk (even brilliantly! relevantly!) about potsherds in vaguely right-coded ways, you're pretty much fucked.
The other part of this is that if you're an academic who happens to be a conservative, and your conservatism informs how you view your academic work, the most natural way for that to play out is to insist on seeing the intellectual life as a realm beyond politics, beyond rhetoric, beyond activism, beyond engagement.
There was admittedly a day when the doyens of that mode -- the Harold Blooms, the Saul Bellows -- could command attention as reactionary celebrities. But their like has long since passed from the earth, and I can't remember the last time I could click on a listicle of "18 ways the curvature of the Apollo Belvedere proves political action is sordid and disgusting."
I agree whole heartedly with this article and BBC would add a few thoughts:
One area I feel strongly about is that various social disciplines co-opted the term science because it gave them a sense of authority they didn’t really have. Sciences have to have refutable postulates and defined agreements on data methodologies. Barring a few items at the edges of cosmology the hard sciences largely accomplish this and produce results that can be replicated in other labs.
Social disciplines use tenuous statistical tricks to generate their theories and even discounting outright fabrication, it’s almost impossible to replicate data sets. Gravity is the same in Beijing as it is in Cambridge MA but many social experiments couldn’t even get off the ground in both if those places.
This is not to say that there isn’t expertise in social disciplines but it does not rise to the level of science. If you’re deciding a social policy you should take social academics opinion more seriously than mine.
If however your social discipline is at odds with more than half the population in the country it is likely that they are wrong at least on part. I think at some level the country knows this to be true and their decreasing support of higher ed is reflected in this.
Lines are much blurrier than you are making them out to be. Parts of biology, ecology, climatology etc are statistical models of complex systems. There are plenty of models of human behavior that are pretty darn reliable: consumer finance relies heavily on the predicability of human behavior to offer and price credit.
The issue isn't that human behavior doesn't follow principles, it's that academics have a novelty bias where people tend to publish novel ideas with weaker evidence. This happens in physics too; cool ideas get published without definitive support (see string theory, dark matter etc). As an industry researcher I'm paid for accuracy not novelty, so I can say obvious things like unemployment is highly correlated with consumer loan losses and people just care about the degree of that correlation and what it means for the bottom line. The issue isn't that social science can't be useful, it's that academia has very skewed incentives.
I think many of Gay’s defenders are taking issue with what’s going on because a. they really dislike Rufo and b. they know he doesn’t care at all about the plagiarism, it was just a way to get her for the stuff he really disliked. But that doesn’t change what she did, and in a vacuum an academic caught with similar evidence would face serious consequences. They got Al Capone for tax evasion; they got President Gay for plagiarism. Same idea.
Agree entirely. And one does not “really have to hand it to Rufo” to accept that Claudine Gay sinned.
I agree with many points here, but I'd differ on at least the following:
1) An underappreciated aspect of the Gay plagiarism story is that the initial allegations really were very weak tea and it was not unreasonable for the university and Gay's colleagues to stand by Gay at that point. The later allegations were stronger at which point Gay was compelled to resign. That strikes me as a sensible approach to that issue.
2) The removal of Ron Sullivan as a faculty dean was reasonable. Faculty deans are Harvard professors who are responsible for oversight of an undergraduate dormitory. You can't be defending a vicious serial rapist during the day and oversee a college dorm at night; you have to pick a lane. There's no principle of intellectual freedom which requires undergraduate women to tolerate that.
On #1 the correct approach would have been for Harvard to actually conduct a full investigation (as they claimed they did) to see if there were more substantial issues in her work before offering unanimous backing. Ideally this should have been done before she was hired of course!
Yeah this was totally inept on the part of the Corporation. They tried to bury the matter with a quickie review conducted by a panel whose identities were kept secret, and they didn't actually figure out what the true situation was before they lined up behind Gay. If they'd done a real investigation, they could have used that as grounds to avoid commenting ("we're waiting for the results of the investigation") and they would have learned the true extent of the plagiarism before going out on a limb.
Completely agree with this, and on point #2, I just don't understand why this was an issue. Is there even one case in the history of lawyering where the lawyer representing a rapist or serial killer became one themselves? I also doubt very much that there is a criminal lawyer in the country who hasn't represented a bad person. Should all lawyers be banned from interaction with society because of that?
I’m not sure if he should've been fired, but it is kind of gross to join a huge team of lawyers for an extremely rich guy who is clearly malevolent regardless of official guilt.
This isn’t “everyone deserves representation and therefore lawyers need to take abhorrent clients to make the system work.” It’s a rich guy exploiting a justice system that lets rich guys get away with stuff no one else would.
A lot of lawyers I know don’t go into personal injury cuz it’s scuzzy. It’s fine for lawyers to have a similar standard, especially so when they have a totally different day job.
You know what even more gross? This statement, "it is kind of gross to join a huge team of lawyers for an extremely rich guy who is clearly malevolent regardless of official guilt." That's what lawyers DO, it's the essence of their profession - that everyone deserves a defense. If 20-year olds on multiple SSRIs can't deal with this fact - they should leave college.
Everyone deserves a defense, not everyone deserves a $10 million defense team.
I realize I’m cutting against the ethos of the profession.
A lawyer should be ok with a full throated defense of Osama bin Laden or whoever, they shouldn’t feel good about being the 10th lawyer on a scumbags defense team
So are you saying that if he were the only lawyer representing Weinstein, like your bin Laden example, would have been ok? I don't think the angry students would agree with you.
Yes, you're cutting against the ethos of the profession, but so what? So much the worse for our profession, if it turns out we have the wrong ethos.
You're pointing to a deep question, one every lawyer should seriously confront. We in the US have adopted an adversarial system for resolving legal disputes. This is not an inevitability: other societies no less committed to the rule of law have chosen otherwise. We are, in fact, an outlier in our commitment to the idea that truth is best discovered and justice best served by relying on the parties themselves to develop arguments and frame issues for the court's consideration.
*The underlying, guiding premise* of this system is that having 10 attorneys for Harvey Weinstein better serves the cause of truth and justice than having 9. 11 is better than 10. And so on. Not necessarily in any one specific case, but in the aggregate and in general.
Maybe that's stupid. The argument for how it might be stupid practically writes itself. I could try to sell you on why it's not stupid, but the fact that it's directly correlated to the US paying way more lawyers way more money than any other society makes me an obviously biased and unreliable narrator.
But give me a break: none of this is Ron Sullivan's fault. Within the system as actually constituted, he was playing an appropriate role appropriately.
(And this is even apart from the fact that, if I understand the sequence of events right, he wasn't "the 10th" guy: Weinstein fired the one guy, and brought in Sullivan and another guy as co-guys.)
I am more sympathetic to the administration on this one. The resident Dean / house master position has additional responsibilities towards students well-being and the Weinstein case was unusually high-profile. I don’t think it should be viewed as a generalizable rule the way you are framing it.
I probably shouldn't have made my comment as attached in agreement with yours because we completely disagree on this. If students really can't handle what a house master does for a living, they have gotten much more snowflake-y than when I was there.
It sounds like it would’ve been a good learning opportunity for the students, on the hard topic of defending the abhorrent.
And remember, the stated objection was that the presence of Mr & Mrs Sullivan made some students “feel unsafe.” Which is absurd.
There’s a difference between defending the abhorrent, and signing up to be the 10th lawyer on the multizillion dollar defense team of someone abborrent.
I'm a lawyer myself and I don't think there's any principle that requires people to rigorously separate my professional practice from their feelings about me. It's fine that John Adams represented the British soldiers at the Boston Massacre but no one suggested that he should also be in charge of consoling the Attucks family. They are not complementary roles.
But that's not relevant here. Sullivan wasn't "in charge" of consoling Weinstein's victims. He was in charge of serving as house master. A proper analogy with John Adams is that because he represented the British soldiers he shouldn't be allowed to be in the society of people with negative feelings toward the British, ie the Americans. And we know from election results that that was not the case.
On (2), I agree there's "no principle of intellectual freedom" at stake. Whatever there is to be said for representing a client who seems obviously guilty, it's definitely not a matter of the untrammeled scientific impulse doggedly pursuing an inconvenient hypothesis wherever the facts lead. The concern here is not that Harvard stifled the free flow of academic debate over the guilt or innocence of Harvey Weinstein.
It's that Sullivan was pursuing a noble profession and doing exactly what a conscientious professional in that field would.
That professional norm wasn't, it's true, made for the sake of Ron Sullivan defending Harvey Weinstein. But it was made for the sake of Atticus Finch defending Tom Robinson. And as a profession and a society we've decided that rather than trusting ourselves to draw the line between those two cases, we're going to say that Sullivan defending Weinstein is doing as he should. We were right to make that decision. And -- some of us believe -- the rightness of that social and professional norm is something Harvard should honor and teach.
I teach at Northwestern, not quite an Ivy but close. The idea that you'd get kicked out of Northwestern for this style of plagiarism is absolutely false. I've had students do things many many times worse, especially foreign (Chinese) students who have run some pretty massive cheating scandals. The administration's response is generally a slap on the hand, if that. I think the entire endeavor has become deeply unserious in the last decade or so.
I once sat on NYU's graduate admissions committee and one of my jobs was to interview foreign students seeking admission to the university via Skype. I was instructed that during the interview I was to surprise the student by informing them that I was going to ask them a question and they were to write the response back to me in the form of an essay - which they were to type, on screen, while I sat and watched them. I assumed this was an attempt to catch those who'd cheated on the TOEFL and more generally - to weed out those whose English skills were subpar.
idk, man. I teach at large state R1, and here, most first violations of academic honesty would result in a zero on the assignment, but the second time around is basically auto suspension.
I think it depends on a lot of factors but especially the program - I teach a class in marketing and that gets handled a lot differently than when I took classes in engineering, etc. I think grad vs undergrad is a big difference too. Also state vs private schools I think are different worlds right now.
I am an academic in the hard sciences (experimental particle physics). I would be interested to hear your thoughts on what those of us in academia but outside the social sciences and humanities can do to help restore faith in/improve the trustworthiness of our institutions.
My guess is: nothing. You guys are the reason the social sciences and humanities ever had credibility to begin with; they’ve been spending down the credit you’ve built up for decades, sometimes faster and sometimes more slowly, and rarely adding any of their own. If I were you, I would be trying to create some distance from them.
It depends on what you mean by “distance”, but I don’t think that’s a viable path forward. Humanities are always going to be part of a full education—it would be undesirable to fully split universities so that physics and English departments were never at the same schools.
Certainly. But the goal would be to preserve public trust in (actual, empirical) science. That doesn’t need to entail anything substantial.
One example would be how universities are organized administratively, where you get a school of “arts and science”. I don’t see what benefit there is to that setup as opposed to a separate administration for liberal arts and for science - and if the idea is to conserve administrative resources, then bundle the sciences with engineering/technology, and throw in medicine too. Again, the goal is just to find low-cost ways to help the public understand that physics has less in common with social-justice activist anthropology than it does with materials science.
I cry no tears for Claudine Gay, but I am more than a bit amused that the plagiarism police have now come for Bill Ackman’s wife.
He was righteously mad at Harvard and eventually picked up the most convenient club to bash them with - despite the fact that plagiarism was irrelevant to his many gripes with Harvard. Now the club is being used to whack his wife.
Again, it was a legitimate, valid charge against Gay. But personally, I try to keep my attacks on people on what I’m actually angry about. Keeps things simpler.
I did feel slightly sorry for the university presidents in one respect: Elise Stefanik had them pinned down between their pro-Palestinian student bodies, their pro-Israel and Conservative donors, and their legal counsel who (I'm guessing) were telling them that the difference between free speech and harassment was context and whether the speech was persistent and intimidating, etc. I think the university president who was accused of smirking had that facial expression because of acute unease and because she knew what Stefanik was doing, and could see from Stefanik's faux outrage that she knew that she knew. Of course, more astute politicians would have handled this situation better and it's rather odd that they didn't seem to have a plan for hostile questioning beyond repeating their lines.
My field of distrust is wide these days, as that such a high percent articles cater to preconceptions or are cheap hits, as Josh is pointing out. So with any article that interests me, I follow any links to the original report or at a minimum google the topic or look it up on Wikipedia to see if it seems to hold up or what the bigger story is. Also, if a point makes me uncomfortable, I try to sit with it for a while to understand my reaction and the point the author is trying to make, rather than immediately rationalize against it.
I appreciate that Josh is such an exception.
Doing a very late reply because your take on this topic was exactly mine. I am not sympathetic to these U presidents but Stefanik was just playing "gotcha" and really was not being fair to them. And I read the smirk just like you did.
We must treat our enemies fairly (unless they pose some genuine danger and unfairness is the only means to eliminate them) or risk losing the greater game.
There should've been sweeping accountability measures taken following the replication crisis. Whole departments should've been disbanded. If College X's psychology department has *reduced* on net our understanding of how psychology works, then that department has been worse than useless and shouldn't exist.
It's not enough for individuals to be fired, but even that doesn't seem to have happened in most cases.
I no longer trust the whole field of psychology, social sciences, etc., and won't until those fields take on the responsibility of ensuring the validity of their research. It's a shame, those are important areas of study!
(All that said, the congressional questioning on Israel *was* a well-laid, BS trap. And on plagiarism, I think we should do more time discounting of misdeeds. Minor plagiarism 25 years ago probably shouldn't be a terminal finding.)
It is a fair point that the plagiarism was well in the past. Regardless, the plagiarism scandal in conjunction with the poor congressional hearing shows that Gay was clearly unfit for the role. As a president of a university you are supposed to be both a scholar and an effective figurehead, and she was neither.
In regards to the trap comment, I disagree. It was only a trap because they walked directly into it. Saying "genocide is bad" is not a hard thing to say. And the smug looks on all three of these president's faces indicates that they did not take these hearings seriously. And clearly that was an error.
They shouldn't have taken them seriously, it was BS political posturing! Why call those three out of the thousands of colleges in the US with similar dynamics?
I don't think your characterization of the Stefanik exchange is accurate. For example, she did say "genocide is bad." One quote from Gay: "That type of hateful speech is personally abhorrent to me." Here's the transcript, from Stefanik's website: https://stefanik.house.gov/2023/12/icymi-stefanik-demands-answers-from-harvard-president-claudine-gay-on-harvard-s-failure-to-condemn-antisemitism-and-anti-israel-attacks-on-campus
The trap was that Stefanik made it hard to decry "genocide" without also agreeing that the pro-palestinian groups *were* advocating genocide. You could play the same trick on the other side - Israel is literally killing tens of thousands of Muslims right now. Is going to a pro-Israel rally and advocating for US arms support pro-genocide? If I lead in with the first statement (Israel's killing muslims) and then ask you if support genocide of Israel's, isn't that a trap? What if part of your job is not taking a side in the war - how do you answer then? Oh, and you have 10 seconds to figure it out. Oh! And even if your answers to 20 other senate grillings are perfect, 1 bad one and you're f'd.
The thread through my comments is that I think being a public figure and answering hostile questions contemporaneously is really hard. Accountability to the core job is important, not bad judgement in one-liners or 25-YO plagiarism.
Josh is that meme of the lady yelling “why can’t you just be normal?” at her child in the back seat.
I don't understand why Gay was allowed to go back and restate her articles to correct the plagiarism. Is that really a thing? It just seems like everyone should take the easy path and plagiarize. You'll either not get caught or get caught and just go back and correct it. Either way you've saved yourself a lot of work.
The whole 'truth is relative' argument is not a good argument in a scientific study. The whole premise of the scientific method is that truth is *not* relative and can be discovered through careful observation.
Once you accept that then your paper has no more claim to relevancy as anything published on One America Network.
It's a tragedy that the very serious concern of rising antisemitism on college campuses has turned into a pissing match amongst cynical politicians and elite university admins. That people like Bill Ackman and Chris Rufo and Claudine Gay have become central figures in the story is exceedingly unserious. And, finally, Barro (a Harvard guy too I believe) here suggests that the aforementioned niche cultural wars are an indictment on academia itself.
It really sucks that the institutions built to protect ethnic and religious minorities on campus are now subjected to that same culture angst. I can even concede that many DEI initiatives have indeed suffered from identity politics that ultimately do not serve to protect the cause. However, it seems most are incapable of making that observation without also calling for the dismantling of DEI, and that is likewise a tragedy.
Lost amidst this chaos is how many universities have genuinely structured a foundation of DEI initiatives and religious scholar institutes to combat antisemitism as well as the pressing demand to protect Arabic and Islamic students as well.
It shouldn't be a surprise that Harvard and Penn stupidly walked into that trap. But it's insanity to portray that mistake as an indictment on academia as a whole.In fact, it usually requires a large dose of hubris to believe that what happens at Harvard is reflective of academia anywhere else, anyways.
Even still, Yale Presisent Peter Salovey was never subjected to the same treatment as his counterparts. Instead, Salovey has been expeditiously communicating with the Yale community since 10/7 and has performed adequately to address the avalanche of demands this era poses. It's not lost on me that Salovey has a unique ancestry traced back to Poland, Jerusalem, and Austria. A background that makes him well adept to address the nuances at hand. He also understands that Yale, like many Ivies, has a proud tradition of Jewish scholars - one that does not need to be mocked by this entire episode of political fart huffing. And so he avoided the carnival on capital hill, but apparently doesn't represent academia the way Caludine Gay does?
In a political fight that's asawth with unserious actors from Stefanik, to Gay, to Rufo, Barro pulls the same card that Nate Silver has recently been exhausting-i.e. the political fights that appear on my Twitter feed are the entire summation of the problems I'm now providing commentary on.
It's like binge watching Soap Operas and then decrying how melodramatic television has become.