DISESTABLISHING THE CLERISY.

If you take two weeks away from the internet, your enemies bodies might float past you.  We can open today's history lesson with the news that Harvard's Claudine Gay has resigned her presidency* at Harvard.  "Well, bye," quips Glenn "Insta Pundit" Reynolds, still hoping for the third fury to step out of line and disappear.  Let's not spike any footballs just yet, notes Power Line's Steven Hayward.  "Of course the problem is that Gay’s resignation will change little at Harvard, or any other elite university."

Her resignation statement, which lacks self-awareness, makes Richard Nixon's look gentlemanly.

“It is with a heavy heart but a deep love for Harvard that I write to share that I will be stepping down as president,” Gay said in a statement Tuesday.

“This is not a decision I came to easily. Indeed, it has been difficult beyond words because I have looked forward to working with so many of you to advance the commitment to academic excellence that has propelled this great university across centuries,” she said.

“But, after consultation with members of the Corporation, it has become clear that it is in the best interests of Harvard for me to resign so that our community can navigate this moment of extraordinary challenge with a focus on the institution rather than any individual,” Gay said.

Now to the serious work of reclaiming higher education.  In "Dissolve the Universities," Law and Liberty contributor Helen Dale offers a perspective from afar on the self-beclownment of the Three Furies.  The abstract reads, "The superstitio in our universities may lead those institutions to the same fate as the monasteries under Henry VIII."  The essay is worth reading in its entirety.  If you are easily provoked, I recommend swallowing your coffee, beer, or what have you before reading.

The essay sets the tone for a roundup of the ongoing reckoning for the U.S. News-favored institutions of indoctrination what used to be higher education.  Apparently the sideshow in the North of England can be more grotesque than that of the North American itinerant circus.

Various party people tried to convey to me the calamitous nature and effect. I’m afraid I struggled to believe them. Nothing could be that bad, I thought, especially given US Congresscritters are far politer than UK Commons MPs or—to make the contrast even starker—Australia’s by turns amusing and spittle-flecked parliamentarians.

When I did finally see it—24 hours later—it seemed I was watching Australia’s Senate Estimates, except the accents were all wrong. An attack-dog politician in the Australian style was going after three university vice-chancellors (what we call university presidents) who were making an absolute meal of their testimony. Kids these days say “cringy” or “cringeworthy,” but I prefer my mother’s phrase: toe-curlingly embarrassing.

I started to wonder if it were made so ruinous because we could all see their faces. There was a moment there, with the Penn woman’s awful gurning—her mouth twisting into a smile—where I wanted to pick up a corner of the carpet and crawl underneath. It was almost unwatchable. I concluded the visuals were making it worse—gurning is something done for shits and giggles at parish fairs in the North of England—and hunted down a BBC Radio 4 report on the controversy which, of necessity, was audio-only.

I was wrong. Even without video, it’s just as awful.

In the tonier parts of West Philadelphia, that Condescending Smirk is the non-verbal version of the mic drop, or perhaps the bat-flip.  Normals recognized it for what it was, and Normals are angry.  Ms Dale's continuation, though, is instructive.

Since then, I haven’t been able to get it out of my mind’s eye. I don’t think there’s any coming back from that. This is how an institution’s social licence is lost. It reminded me of the infamous big tobacco hearing where major cigarette manufacturers straight up lied to Congress about the link between smoking and cancer.

It's possible that Harvard excused Ms Gay because the one thing they couldn't handle was being mocked.  Being serious, though, doesn't help when everybody knows the fraud is in progress.

The universities are like big tobacco: they’re never going to be good places full of good people, and you need to accept that. No matter how much you enjoy them, cigarettes will kill you. The universities’ number is in the process of coming up.

From there, she pivots to Fatso Henry's crackdown on the monasteries. There's a lesson for the state flagships, the land-grants, the regional comprehensives, the mid-majors, and the community colleges, if they'd but pay attention (we'll get to the adult videos coming out of a subprime party school in Wisconsin anon.)

Whether a given monastery was held in contempt or considered a worthy institution depended on the role it had played locally. If it gave out poor relief, educated local children, participated in regional markets, and provided spiritual services, it tended to be beloved. It was inwardness, unworldliness, and failure to engage with society—while taking people’s money in tithes—that did many of them in. If you don’t share, we won’t support was a real gripe of long standing.

Locking away both human and economic capital never goes down well, and resentment was not unique to England and Wales or Reformation Europe: it arose in other civilisations with their own monastic traditions. In 843, China’s Tang Dynasty Emperor Wuzong—like Henry VIII, short of cash—dissolved his country’s Buddhist monasteries. He began by ending their tax-exempt status. Also like Henry, he probably didn’t start the process intending to extirpate all monasticism, but that’s what it became.

Monasteries had an appeal to Higher Authority that might have kept the tax man away.  But if you pay more attention to supposed Sins Against God than you do to the Condition of the Flock, you're going to have a problem.

In one area where religious houses were loved and supported, it led to serious popular revolt: the 1536 Pilgrimage of Grace started in Yorkshire and soon spread to other Northern counties. Robert Aske, leader of the Pilgrimage, testified that “the suppression of abbeys was the greatest cause of the said insurrection,” pointing out that Northern religious houses “gave great alms to poor men and laudably served God.”

That might have been true of some congregations. There were others, as corrupt in their own way as the indulgence-sellers financing the construction of St. Peter's Basilica (consecrated, let us note, a few years after the Puritans established their colony in Salem), and their continued appeal to the old ways failed.

One theological point on which Henry agreed with both Thomas Cromwell and Cromwell’s intellectual influencers (Desiderius Erasmus and Luther) was that monasteries were riddled with superstitio.

Superstitio is not a nice word in either Classical or Ecclesiastical Latin. Pagan Roman critics of early Christianity called the new kid on the religious block superstitio. Unlike other Classical Latin words—as sometimes happened once the language ceased to be a spoken one—superstitio did not change its meaning. It remained shorthand for bonkers religious nonsense with emotionally incontinent roots.

In 1535, what was the substantive content of Cromwell’s superstitio as found in the monasteries? Fake relics and fake miracles—and pointless pilgrimages to see both—designed to empty credulous people’s pockets. Cromwell inveighed against superstitio from the outset: “They shall not show no relics or feigned miracles for increase of lucre.”

Claudine Gay, Elizabeth Magill, and Sally Kornbluth didn’t turn up trying to sell Elise Stefanik a piece of the True Cross or an ampoule of San Gennaro’s blood, but they may as well have. They believe things—as their testimony and behaviour both before and since shows—that are vacuous nonsense, rooted in emotionally incontinent wibble. They’ve adopted a tendentious definition of racism that blinds people to injustices against any group seen as dominant. They’ve divided the world into simplistic categories of oppressors and oppressed, of whites and people of colour, of colonisers and colonised. They’ve concluded discrimination is justified on behalf of the marginalised. They think “my truth” can be substituted for “the truth.”

And there remain paid lackeys without character or knowledge who will defend the fake relics and the pointless pilgrimages of today.  Take Washington Post court intellectual Ruth Marcus.  "Harvard’s Claudine Gay should resign."  Please.  The lede is straightforward.

She plagiarized her acknowledgments. I take no joy in saying this, but Harvard President Claudine Gay ought to resign. Her track record is unbefitting the president of the country’s premier university. Remaining on the job would send a bad signal to students about the gravity of her conduct.

Rather than leave it at that, she has to, what is the word, contextualize her Road to Damascus moment.

This was not my original instinct. I thought, and continue to believe, that Gay’s accusers and their allies were motivated more by conservative ideology and the desire to score points against the most elite of institutions than by any commitment to academic rigor. This was, and is, accompanied by no small dose of racism and the conviction that a Black woman couldn’t possibly be qualified to lead Harvard.

In addition, the initial reports of plagiarism seemed small-bore. Gay’s missteps did not seem to involve sweeping appropriations of carefully crafted words or thoughtful ideas but a failure to put mostly boilerplate language inside quotation marks.

Moreover, plagiarism in the digital age is a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God event; every writer should worry about the risk of the accidental cut-and-paste. I like to think I’d recognize and remove any language I hadn’t written, but who can be certain? It is always best to cite — and even over-credit — the work of others. Charitableness begins at home.

The Devil made Christopher Rufo and the rest of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy do it, you see.  That came up in a recent University Diaries post, relying, perhaps on private information from a recent family gathering in Cambridge.  "Rufo is disgusting. This doesn’t mean he’s wrong."  Reason's Robby Soave adds,

Examples of plagiarism were first identified by the conservative writer and activist Christopher Rufo, following Gay's much-derided congressional testimony regarding antisemitism on campus. Rufo has all but declared war on the Ivy League, which has prompted many academics to ignore his claims on grounds that he is acting in bad faith; Harvard Law School professor Charles Fried told The New York Times that Gay was fending off an "extreme right-wing attack on elite institutions."

"If it came from some other quarter, I might be granting it some credence," he said, referring to the plagiarism accusations. "But not from these people."

Similarly, NAACP President Derrick Johnson dismissed all criticism of Gay as "political theatrics advancing a White supremacist agenda."

This attitude, though common, is profoundly mistaken. The charges facing Gay are serious, as recent coverage by mainstream outlets—like the Times and CNN—has finally conceded. Neither Rufo's alleged political agenda nor the timing of these revelations should matter if they are in fact true. There's nothing inherently racist or white supremacist about applying Harvard's own standards for students and faculty to the president of the institution. On the contrary, excusing plagiarism at the most elite levels of academia merely because the people calling it out are on the wrong team would constitute a profound betrayal of the very values the academy supposedly values. Harvard, which has done very little to address the charges, should take note.

It's a sad state of affairs when the world we live in is one in which standards of academic conduct of long pedigree might be evidence of racist or white supremacist attitudes, but we'll turn to that another day. The evidence that Claudine Gay is a fabulist is extensive.

Gay is guilty of plagiarism by the code of conduct of any modern academic organization, certainly including Harvard and Phillips Exeter Academy, where she went to school and was a trustee until this past June.

Gay’s record of dishonesty is extensive. At last count, incontrovertible examples of plagiarism have been uncovered in seven publications spanning 14 years, including her Harvard dissertation. Any one of even her less egregious infractions—shorter phrases lifted from cited works without quotation marks—would land a Harvard student in hot water. Any one of her larger infractions—paragraphs lifted from works not cited at all—would almost certainly result in suspension. And any student who displayed this full range of behavior would be expelled.

Everyone knows this. The members of the Harvard Corporation know this. The five living former presidents of Harvard who “offer[ed their] strong support” know this. Those scholars from whom she plagiarized but who inexplicably deny that she did so, or say that they don’t care, know this. (Fortunately, some do care, most prominently Carol Swain.) Gay herself knows this, surely, despite saying, “I stand by the integrity of my scholarship.”

As long as Gay remains president—indeed, as long as she remains a member of the faculty—Harvard is in greater trouble than its higher-ups appear to understand. For one thing, lawyers will take note of the bizarre statement from the Harvard Corporation that “President Gay is proactively requesting four corrections in two articles to insert citations and quotation marks that were omitted from the original publications.” She has now made those requests.

"Proactively requesting four corrections." Presumably not to the parameter estimates or the conclusion.  In higher education, unlike in baseball, we don't know whether the equivalent of the general manager expressing his "strongest confidence" in the field manager is a clear sign that the field manager will soon be gone.

So let it be with Claudine Gay.

Our universities are being run by terminally stupid people.  I'll let Mr Soave make the closing argument.

People are free to conclude that Gay's transgressions are not quite serious enough to merit termination. They are also free to point out that such sloppiness is probably rampant in higher education and certainly under-policed. (At some point, though, this isn't really an excuse for Gay—but rather a broader indictment of the entire project of elite education.)

Which has, to return to Ms Dale's argument, revealed itself as Big Tobacco with the robes of the pre-Reformation Church of Rome.

Claudine Gay, defrocked Harvard president.  There's Sprecher in the cooler.