Scientific culture is experiencing a crisis of its own creation.
Left-wing media is increasingly dismissing the then countless plagiarism and various scandals that are currently rocking the ebony tower. However, this expanding trend represents an existential issue for organizations that have long relied on thin claims about their lofty status in our society.
Numerous other faculty and administrators of variety, equity, and inclusion have been the subject of serious accusations of plagiarism following the departure of Harvard President Claudine Gay in January, who had a month prior had a terrible performance at a House committee hearing on antisemitism.
Christina J., a renowned associate professor of sociology at Harvard, is the most recent. Cross, whose articles on competition and individuals have been published in The New York Times. She’s been accused of lifting large portions of uncited work and claiming it as her own—among another, smaller transgressions.
The Left’s information on these scandals—copied and placed, it seems—is that theft has been “weaponized” by the Right.
” As the society war lurch on, the Right has found a great tool with which to beat the university—taken straight from the school’s army itself: says of plagiarism”, wrote the editorial committee of the Harvard Crimson in February.
Yes, how able those suggest conservatives use fundamental academic standards against academics to fuel the” culture war,” which our impartial and utterly normative universities will undoubtedly not engage in.
The academy’s supporters have even adopted the adage, “racism crying.”
Tiresome, but all quite repetitive.
I will have to accept one point, though: In a particular feeling, theft has been “weaponized”, by the Right, which holds no strength in education outside of a handful of little, isolated paragons. Higher education has just made itself so susceptible to criticism, making this style of condemnation even more feasible.
In order to compare the peoples who were largely preyed upon and useless in the days following Muhammad’s birth, to use a traditional analogy. The Quran was what those who lived under dhimmitude had. Their only defense came from blatantly deceiving their new leaders of their own beliefs. That made their Muslim rulers face the choice between weakening their principle and stifling their trust, which was finally determined by their position and power.
That’s the problem facing universities.
While universities do n’t punish politically incorrect students for shutting down speakers and other types of illiberal behavior, they do, at least, make an effort to punish those who have broken their most fundamental standards.
Here’s a problem, though: Do dishonesty and other kinds of crises have been such a problem if our wealthy organisations were n’t filled with so many useless, underwhelming tricks?
That may sound mean, but it’s impossible not to notice that the quality of our most elite schools—and of the people who staff them—is quickly dropping.
Stories about left-wing snobbery on college campuses were once commonplace generations ago. But now, something new is happening.
Now, many Americans, even ones who placed a huge amount of faith in higher education despite its flaws, are coming to see that they are n’t even providing the most fundamental service they—at least in theory—promise to provide, namely, an elite education delivered by scholars in pursuit of the truth.
With the expensive, borg-like takeover of DEI initiatives that have bled into all disciplines, it has become clear to all who are not wholly blind that higher education now places more emphasis on ideology and identity politics than teaching and scholarship.
In the end, those who hired and appointed the DEI administrators and “anti- racism” swamis like Ibram X. Kendi did n’t expect them to produce high- quality research. No, they are there to demonstrate institutional support for leftist ideologies. Nothing else has changed, and the one thing that made them able to amass such power is now disappearing.
Consider this: After going almost 20 years without one, Harvard University’s history department finally brought back an introductory history course. The previous yearlong survey course was dropped in 2006 for being too” Eurocentric”, according to the Harvard Crimson.
A description of the class makes it sound more like an NPR podcast than a rigorous course of study at one of the most prestigious universities in the world. It’s apparently been designed to teach “empathy”, and according to one of the professors, “on Wednesdays, they will ‘ riff’ on recent headlines for a portion of the lecture”.
I only have to wonder what famous Harvard alum John Quincy Adams would think of this particular course. Before enrolling in the school, students were required to be familiar with Latin and have a thorough understanding of the classics.
Now, they do n’t even require courses in Latin or Greek to complete a degree in the classics.
Higher education has abandoned its role of trustworthy research and the transmission of Western ideas to new generations, revealing the dirty open secret. It is becoming more and more likely to enforce narrow left-wing ideology and ensure that all other governmental, political, and civic institutions in the West adhere to the same standard of ideological gatekeeping.
Legacy admissions may be declining, but they are being replaced by brand-new, smuggler, so-called “meritocratic” pseudo-elites who lecture America about all its problematic history while making justifications for real evil in the here and now.
These institutions hardly have any claims to moral authority, as the aftermath of the Hamas terrorist attack on October 7 clearly demonstrated. The overall package includes savagery and hating the West as well.
Even though elite academic institutions have a lot more power than they have ever had, they do have a lot of power as a whole.
These schools are ultimately dependent on the support, both social and material, of the rest of society. They have been in operation for ten years, almost entirely devoid of both private and public funding. Additionally, higher education has a sizable bill on its graduates that they anticipate paying for from the taxpayer.
Let me ask: Would you rather pay with your groceries with any money left over than to make sure a Starbucks employee with a name tag can receive his or her psychology degree? Exactly.
The old-fashioned goodwill is long gone. In its place is well- earned doubt and hostility.
Higher education now has a choice: abandon DEI and brutal ideological enforcement in a return to true merit, or double down on them with the waning support from the rest of society.
