Okay, so in my last Watcher (my first of the series, read here if you haven’t already!) I discussed HBomberguy’s video essay expose on James Somerton’s career-long plagiarism antics. Almost exactly a month after that video was released, Claudine Gay resigned from her position as the president of Harvard university.
Gay resigned because of accusations of plagiarism in her graduate work from 30 years prior, but as many academics later pointed out, if the logic of the criteria that was used to out Gay was applied to any other academic, everyone would be out of a job. Her ousting was part of a larger collaboration between right-wing and Zionist groups, who have aimed their ire at liberal students and staff at universities after Hamas’ attack on October 7th and the subsequent and ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people being carried out by Israel and supported by the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada.
But when Bill Ackman, the man who led the charge against ousting Gay, started his quest, he had no idea it would come back to bite his own wife in the ass.
About a week after Gay resigned, Business Insider revealed (like I said in my first watcher, this is going to be the year of reveals!) that Ackman’s wife, Neri Oxman plagiarized her doctoral dissertation. I’m not going to use the word “also” here because Oxman actually did plagiarize her work, no semantics are needed. Business Insider reports Oxman “stole sentences and whole paragraphs from Wikipedia, other scholars, and technical documents in her academic writing…”
…WIKIPEDIA?????? WIKIPEDIA??!!!????
It’s one thing to expose someone for being intellectually dishonest, but it’s another to use intellectual dishonesty to portray someone as intellectually dishonest and then have your wife be exposed as the actual, factual dishonest intellectual!! You cannot make this shit up! It’s like Hunter Harris says: If a man has not embarrassed you, he just hasn’t embarrassed you yet.
I’m going to link to some people below who give great explainers and leftist or feminist analysis on this story and I’m letting you know upfront that these recommendations have a moderate to heavy left-wing bias.
A Quick Explainer
TikTok user @travisssssssssss gives you a rundown of the situation
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Claudine Gay’s Op-Ed
Claudine Gay & The Calculated Downfall of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion
Stephanie, a lawyer and former DEI organizer in the tech industry, talks about the concept creep and co-opting of activist language, how it’s weaponized against the black and brown people who created it, and how Claudine Gay’s ousting ties into the larger conservative agenda to censor education, specifically around social sciences and black and Native American history.
More Legalese for Dummies
In the above video, Stephanie also takes the time to explain that Gay’s statements about hate speech on campus were legally defensible which was appropriate for the context, but that they were morally reprehensible.
In the TikTok below, user
explains that while Claudine Gay, Sally Kornbluth (President of M.I.T.), and Liz Magill’s (President the University of Pennsylvania) statements and the language they used make legal sense, to the common ear it sounds like they were evading and deflecting from disavowing antisemitism. This is what brought on a backlash from both bad faith actors and uneducated observers which cost Gay and Magill their jobs. But there’s a lot more to the story.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
Academic Freedom is Dead
Political consultant and lawyer Briahna Joy Gray interviews activist and foremost scholar on Israel-Palestine relations Norman Finkelstein, who explains what academic freedom is, gives us the tea on his spat with the infamous scumbag Alan Dershowitz, and what he describes as a myth of black/Jewish relations in the United States.
The Break Down: What Happened to Relations Between the Black and Jewish Communities?
After Kanye West, Dave Chapelle, and Kyrie Irving (my Lord Jesus Christ what a nightmare blunt rotation, I’d take Kid Cudi over that any day) stirred up controversy with their antisemitic comments, social commentator Dara Starr Tucker did a short breakdown on the history of black/Jewish community relations in the United States that I think works as a good follow up to Finklestein’s statements in his Bad Faith interview.
What Can We Learn from the Career Assassination of Claudine Gay?
Kimberly Nicole Foster, owner of the YouTube channel For Harriet, breaks down the allegations against Claudine Gay in a livestream, where they came from, and the consequences of people using their conditional privileges to create a backlash against DEI initiatives that will have strong consequences for future generations. She calls what happened to Gay “digital terrorism” and defines it as “the use of online harassment, stalking, bullying, threats, and doxing in pursuit of political aim.” Foster then ties Gay’s experience back to her own experience of digital terrorism perpetuated by an influencer in the manosphere.
Harvard Crimson article about Christina J Cross
I started writing this in February and thought the news would die down in the following months, only for another black woman professor at Harvard to be accused of plagiarism.