Academia Will Not Learn

No lessons learned. No changes to be made. No Ls will be taken.

Submitted by acadanon

Chris Rufo’s successful reveal of Claudine Gay’s plagiarism was something of a win. Gay will go back to being a no work professor but at an elevated salary. She will now become a victim, and we wait with anticipation for the Netflix adaptation of this story. It is a big win for her personally, even if she loses the figurehead job at the helm of Harvard. What was she doing anyway as top dog at Harvard? What are many of us doing in academia? It has been written that Harvard is a hedge fund with a college attached. Academia is a credential machine with a small research community attached.

Some people know college is a scam but few really understand it. The common man would not suspect Harvard to be that bad. Bill Ackman was shocked to discover the evil treachery at Harvard, which is the university his daughter attended. For all the criticism of Rufo just seeing one president replaced by another president of similar politics, his attacks, and the inability of the left wing to take a single, small L, revealed far more about the academic system than anyone in academia wanted to let out into the public.

The immediate concern is the plagiarism that is widespread in academia. Claudine Gay had some whoppers for her examples, but the threat of an AI or LLM search for plagiarism is real. Citation issues plague not just undergraduates but all academics, but odd coincidences and outright lifting will be spotted and put many academics under the microscope. That academics defended this when they know in their hearts this would be cause for grading a paper at a zero or reporting a freshman to a dean was the first sign that these fools I work with did not see the bigger danger and instead reacted in knee-jerk political ways. Had they taken the L quickly, less would have leaked out.

Plagiarism is real and something we academics are instructed to root out early on to prevent bad habits. Every university has their approach and procedures for dealing with eighteen year olds who plagiarize. A university known for its strict approach to plagiarism is the University of Oxford. Oxford's honor code emphasizes the importance of honesty and originality in academic work. The university takes plagiarism seriously, employing sophisticated plagiarism detection tools to scrutinize students' submissions. Students found guilty of plagiarism at Oxford face a range of consequences, including academic penalties, fines, and in some cases, expulsion from the university.

The University of Virginia also stands out for its commitment to academic integrity through its honor code. Southern universities often pair honor codes with open book finals as a test of one’s honor. Established by students in 1842, the code has undergone various revisions but has consistently focused on maintaining a community of trust and honesty. The university employs an honor committee comprised of students and faculty to investigate and adjudicate cases of academic misconduct, including plagiarism. Penalties for plagiarism at the University of Virginia can include academic probation, suspension, and even expulsion, depending on the severity of the offense. I knew professors who would give a student a zero and use them as a warning to the rest of the class. Shame works on teenagers. There is no shaming a tenured professor.

To add to all of this, the left relies on their credentials for any rationale for control. Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s 2020 campaign was a joke as a mayor of a small city should never be on the ballot for president especially when under age forty. Any criticism of his flimsy resume was met with a flurry of responses, articles and even social media posts about his schooling credentials. Almost everything in his life portrayed as an accomplishment was a slip of paper or award from some external authority. Those authorities were securely within the system of governance in America. This applies to everyone within the system, and our students receive their slip of paper allowing them higher status employment and roles within the permanent bureaucracy.

The left then went on the attack to go after Chris Rufo’s own credentials as he listed the Harvard Extension School as one of the institutions he attended. One of Harvard’s own, Professor Jennifer Hochschild, did what a left wing authority figure would do and appealed to her credentials while attacking Rufo’s credentials. His HES degree is not real Harvard and those students are not real Harvard students. His credential is fake unlike hers. Instead of taking the L, she opened up Harvard to lawsuits by denigrating her employer. By stepping into the fray, she also opened herself up to evaluation. For the record, Professor Hochschild is a professor of African and African American Studies (she is also white). This was not a physics department professor descending the mountain to declare who is and is not a Harvard man. It was a grievance studies professor.

In my time in academia, I went from idealist who loved the idea of pushing the edge of my science to cynic. I took adjunct jobs, loaded my station wagon and dragged my wife and later child, across the country for the hopes of tenure track. Student quality decline is undeniable. Do we provide an education? Even in my department, the set aside one easy course for artsy or weaker students was a given. I can click on links for several courses in my department now that have nothing to do with science, and are focused on the subject via a grievance study filter. Filler courses have loaded up to employ more professors from grievance study demographics. Even when the tenure track offer came through and my research era was going to begin, I was not quite pushing the edge of science. I was told my research funding was for solar panel efficiency projects. I have been on interview panels for potential new hires. I assume as long as the current DEI world exists, I will be the last white male they hire.

Credentials are all we churn out. Collect tuition, build new, gigantic additions to buildings, and hand out diplomas like candy. There is no search for truth. We are not pushing the boundary of thought. Academia is a lumbering giant that is drunk on money. The community of academia has become so dependent on respecting each other’s degrees and pieces of paper that we cannot even police our idiotic brethren from scoring own goals. The greatest risk to academia is that it is so above accountability that it will destroy itself via stupidity and hubris. Harvard will survive. The brand has too much sex appeal. The endowment is too big. No one else is Harvard though, even if they all act like it.