Why was an investor pushing for anything regarding academia? Who listened and why did they act on it? So much of this doesn’t make sense.
He’s a right-wing ideologue who saw a chance to break what he saw as left-leaning parts of academia.
He’s a right-wing ideologue who saw a chance to break
Sounds about right
Because he thinks his money buys influence and he was pissy when it didn’t initially. He’s also a racist who went after a Black woman because he could.
For the record, Business Insider isn’t reporting on his wife because she’s his wife. They’re reporting on his wife because she’s at least as much a plagiarist as Dr Gay.
Even so, her alleged plagiarism seems like a weak case; playing devils advocate and assuming an internal review had no teeth and a soft touch…
The three corrections to Dr Gay’s 1997 PhD dissertation were announced as part of a review into her work conducted by the Harvard Corporation, the university’s most senior governing body. The review found three instances of “inadequate citation” in her dissertation.
They had to go back to 1997. Not in publications or continuing work since, not a consistent effort to cheat in numerous cases - three passages in a lengthy PhD dissertation. Worthy of attention and explanation, absolutely. But Harvard didn’t feel it merited demotion, condemnation or resignation, even when they were under Congressional scrutiny.
Oh, I agree completely. This appears to be simply the sort of oversight that happens all the time and in no way deserves the issue that was made of it by a racist activist who managed to get her fired. It’s telling that the board didn’t turn on her until they scattered for vacations and his cronies and lobbyists were able to get to them individually.
Given her background, it’ll be interesting to see how long it takes, if ever, for his wife to similarly atone for her misdeeds, however slight.
Because universities are businesses with shareholders?
No. They aren’t… Not at all.
They shouldn’t be, but in practice, they are.
They don’t. Not typically, anyway. A private university may have a list of donors (and some donors may get specific buildings named after them) and a Board of Trustees, but the two aren’t related.
Harvard is structured as a non-profit, as it happens. There’s a lot to say about how the system is so corrupt most non-profits are rigged as means to funnel operating expenses to the C-level types, but, in theory, non-profit, no shareholders to be beholden to.
For-profit universities do exist, but tend towards the Trump University scale of education.
My experience is of the UK higher education system, but from what I’ve seen, deeply embedded neoliberal ideology is prevalent across many universities.
What this means in practice is an excess of metrics, and steadily increasing bureaucracy. Whether the university has a hundred million pound endowment or it’s one of the “poorer” ones, I see the same insidious patterns.