Harvard University President Claudine Gay has resigned, and it is the shortest tenure of any president in the history of Harvard s history. This is a sad day in the annals of Ivy League universities, where the idea of free speech has been squelched.
00:00:23.900So, there has been an unrelenting attack from the Washington Free Beacon, etc., that to some degree seems to originate from Chris Ruffo, who's the guy who got all of these conservatives hopped up on critical race theory and going to their school boards and demanding that critical race theory not be taught to first graders and all this kind of stuff.
00:00:57.600Now, Claudine remained longer than others.
00:01:01.340The Penn president resigned during their testimony to Congress.
00:01:07.860This is all about basically dissent against Israel on campus, including protest, etc.
00:01:14.840Now, we don't have to revisit everything that they said.
00:01:18.760We talked about that when it happened back in, was it November or something like that?
00:01:23.900I would just say, as a reiteration, their testimony before Congress was completely sound.
00:01:33.820And I actually don't have any criticisms over what they said.
00:01:39.740They effectively did the Brandenburg test with the First Amendment as a model for what discourse should be on campus.
00:01:51.480So, you should not punish anyone for free speech.
00:01:57.440And you should obviously punish someone for what is harassment, you know, getting in someone's face, preventing them from going about their day, needlessly isolating an individual, death threats, etc.
00:02:17.160But other than that, free speech should be promoted, in fact, and facilitated.
00:02:23.360And that includes bold statements like, from the river to the sea.
00:02:29.720It might even include an extremely bold statement like, I think we should wipe Israel off the map.
00:02:38.560Because that does pass the Brandenburg test in the sense that it is an outrageous declaration, but it's something that is not a direct threat.
00:02:51.480It's a, you know, you could call it venting, or boasting, or whatever.
00:03:01.000But you should not fire people for the fact that they went a bit too far in their rhetoric.
00:03:09.500You can obviously fire them if they are engaging in what is harassment or threats, direct threats to an individual, directing violence.
00:03:18.920This is how the First Amendment is understood in the second half of the 20th century, basically.
00:03:26.560And everything that they said was completely sound.
00:03:30.220Now, these women were, and they were all women, were remarkably inarticulate, and maybe inarticulate is not the right word.
00:03:39.880They were articulate, but they were remarkably uncharismatic, and they were remarkably robotic and boring in the way that they articulated this ideal.
00:03:53.980And they aren't the kind of image we might have of a Harvard president who's a dazzling intellectual, but also a kind of avuncular character.
00:04:06.660You know, he comes in smoking a pipe and, you know, wearing tweed and is humorous and making various literary allusions, etc.
00:04:18.820I think if someone were like that, they probably could have gotten away with sustaining free speech on Ivy League campuses.
00:04:28.820But instead, we have these midwit social climbers like Claudine Gay, who were robotically, boringly, lifelessly articulating what is the standard of free speech in this country.
00:04:44.400And maybe on that, for that, they almost deserve their firing or shouldn't complain.
00:04:51.440But Claudine Gay was a little bit worse.
00:04:54.360She has engaged in what I can tell is a lot of lazy plagiarism.
00:05:05.080I think it's safe to say that Claudine Gay is not a terribly interesting scholar.
00:05:12.080She's obviously a product of affirmative action and just the kind of hopes and dreams of white liberals for what they want to see academia become.
00:05:25.400She is clearly just lifting sentences from other people's work now and without citing them.
00:05:35.560And I think, again, I would almost describe it as lazy more than anything.
00:05:39.980Because she even plagiarized a preface to a book or something in which she was thanking people.
00:05:46.660She's just lifting turns of phrases from other people's works.
00:05:50.920So she's acting like chat GPT in a way.
00:05:56.600Like, she is a human chat GPT who's paraphrasing, summarizing, and in some cases, just outright lifting sentences from other people's work, but kind of melding it together into something fairly new.
00:06:15.440We certainly all engage in paraphrasing.
00:06:17.880We're not the best in terms of, you know, putting forth an idea without citing it, without giving credit to someone.
00:06:24.420That is a sort of ethical crime, but this was worse.
00:06:31.800And so I understand it, but I don't know.
00:06:34.140I, in a way, feel sorry for her because, I mean, I hate to sound overly racist here, but why are we putting these people in a position that they're not going to succeed, where they're not going to succeed?
00:06:48.260In the sense of, why are we promoting these diversity hires?
00:06:55.640And just putting them in a place where they don't, I mean, they're going to act like chat GPT because that's how they think about academia.
00:07:04.640Like, you dot your I's and cross your T's, and they promote you because you're black.
00:07:10.100And you go with the flow of general academic opinion, and then you get invited to conferences where you can spout bromides and paraphrase other people's data.
00:07:22.820I mean, it's, she was good in the, I mean, it's a, maybe I'm being overly sympathetic.
00:07:29.920There's a certain degree of tragedy of this kind of thing where well-wishing white people throw her out there and she, she's never going to be able to succeed because she doesn't have the mind of a scholar in which you do engage in original thinking.
00:07:52.360And you do engage in original interpretation, and you do engage in a quest for truth in which you're, you're breaking through the walls.
00:08:02.780You're not being confined with what has happened before you.
00:08:06.320I don't think someone like this as a midwit and also to be brutally frank as someone with a great deal of African ancestry, this is just not how she's going to succeed in life.
00:08:20.800And it's just cruel to put these people in this position.
00:08:26.200But anyway, just to sum up my position on this, I don't think she's a great scholar.
00:08:35.140But the only reason why this is happening is because she is allowing, soundly allowing criticism of Israel.
00:08:44.820And so this notion that like the DEI regime has been dismantled and, you know, conservatives are now welcome on campus or whatever, that is just bullshit.
00:08:58.820This is solely about preventing any criticism of Israel.
00:09:04.600And if, I mean, understandably, if I were the next president of Harvard, a wonderful thought, but probably not going to happen.
00:09:16.160But if I were the next president of Harvard and I wanted to keep my job and I did it and I wasn't as principled as some others, I would crack down on criticism of Israel.
00:09:28.500And I would hire more pro-Israeli scholars just so we could have a bit of more hegemony on campus if I wanted to keep my job.
00:09:39.020And so it's like, this is entirely what this situation is about.
00:09:48.480No one cared about her lazy scholarship until she not even criticized Israel, but allowed, hypothetically allowed, the criticism of Israel to exist.
00:10:07.900And maybe you could say, and I actually tend to agree with this, in the long term, it might be good.
00:10:15.840Because when it's just very clear that there are overt penalties to, you know, reasonable criticism of the Jewish state, people start to wonder.
00:10:31.100It's a sign of losing legitimacy and hegemony on that issue.
00:10:38.780Yeah, plagiarism seems to be a kind of, it's a little bit of a cliche when it comes to the black academic, right?
00:10:47.720I mean, we even have the example of a Martin Luther King who's accused of plagiarism and committed plagiarism as far as anyone can tell.
00:10:56.260And of course, he's one of the important luminaries of black intellectual thought.
00:11:04.100I mean, of course, he was primarily a political activist, but his influence, you know, in academia, when it comes to, you know, the sort of black perspective, the black intellectual perspective, obviously, is pretty enormous.
00:11:27.240And to your point, it's, it comes down to laziness to some extent.
00:11:30.160Uh, so it's a really, it's really kind of an embarrassing thing, uh, to occur for, uh, you know, the president of Harvard or, you know, an intellectual at this level, a black intellectual at this level to be engaged in plagiarism.
00:11:45.260I mean, it's, it's just kind of inexcusable.
00:11:46.900Also, Mark, don't you think it almost also comes down to arrogance?
00:11:51.880Because, and I mean, I mean this seriously in the sense that, I mean, arrogant in a good way.
00:11:57.980If you're a real scholar or a writer, you don't think that someone else can phrase it as well as you can.
00:12:08.320You know, you don't want to plagiarize because you're smarter than everyone else.
00:12:13.660Like, there's a certain mentality of the intellectual where you want to make it new and break through the walls.
00:12:26.400Like, do it, you know, you can be inspired by other people and obviously, but like, your truth is so powerful and only you can deliver it and you just want to sign your name to it.
00:12:37.400That kind of bombastic arrogance or narcissism that is a quality of almost every great intellectual or artist.
00:12:48.380And the fact that she just does this petty crap kind of indicates to me that not only is she lazy, but she's just kind of a little social climber at the end of the day.
00:13:03.540You know, you want to say the right things, you don't want to rock the boat, you want to, you know, not offend, etc.
00:13:16.560I mean, Nietzsche blew up his entire academic career, extremely promising academic career.
00:13:22.660He was the youngest person ever to be given a chair at Basel.
00:13:25.880He blew it to smithereens with the birth of tragedy.
00:13:29.280I mean, there are some limitations to the birth of tragedy and whatever criticism we might have, you know, needless to say, Nietzsche gets the last laugh outside of like Burkhardt or something.
00:13:40.960Not a lot of his critics are being read and discussed to this day.
00:13:56.920I mean, why would you even be involved in intellectual pursuits if you're not trying to contribute something that's novel or new or look at it from a new angle, make a new discovery and so forth, right?
00:14:15.880But I, again, I don't respect Claudine Gay, but I really have a lot of just hatred for these hacks, Chris Ruffo, etc., who will stoop to these levels to defend Israel.
00:14:35.520You know, the allegations are there, and they're real, but I just don't get on board with them.
00:14:43.820Yeah, I mean, it's hard to fall in love with either side, obviously.
00:14:47.300So it's hard to, you know, I mean, looking at this Caducean conflict, it's right.
00:14:52.720You don't really feel like you have a dog in the race or a dog in the fight.
00:15:00.480I mean, I guess the only thing that we can say positive is that she was stumping to some extent for free speech against Israeli pressure on campus.
00:15:11.560So that's, you know, we're in favor of that as well, of course, right?