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Assuming students sign up, plagiarist Claudine Gay to teach “reading and research” class at Harvard

Harvard: where you get can get a shoddy education centered on hate and bigotry
Harvard: where you can spend a lot of money
getting a shoddy education

Claudine Gay, former Harvard president and now a known plagiarist, is now scheduled to teach a “reading and research” class this coming fall at Harvard.

Harvard University’s former president who resigned after numerous plagiarism allegations is slated to teach a graduate level “Reading and Research” course this upcoming semester. Professor Claudine Gay returned to teaching and her reportedly nearly $900,000 annual salary after resigning the presidency after ongoing plagiarism accusations and criticism of her response to campus antisemitism.

…Gay taught the same class in the spring. It is a graduate-level independent study type class.

The commentary on Gay’s future teaching work has generally generally been outraged and amused, since in a sane world the last person any college should want as a teacher is a proven plagiarist. Allowing such a failure to run classes only stains the reputation of the college.

However, there is another aspect to this story that most pundits are missing. Gay’s course would be quickly canceled if students did not sign up. Universities don’t pay professors to teach empty classrooms, or even classrooms with less than a half dozen students. Like everything else, universities expect classes to sell, and if they don’t college administrators won’t fund them. No point in paying a teacher and a classroom if no one wants to attend.

Harvard however is stuck paying Gay that $900K salary, as long as she is listed as a professor there. It needs to schedule her teaching assignments. If those classes don’t sell, it will then be in a better political and legal position to terminate her position.

Thus, it is now up to the students at Harvard to tell us where they stand on plagiarism. If Gay’s class gets cancelled due to lack of interest, it will tell us that this new generation is actually paying attention, and truly wants to set good standards. They will be doing what Americans should have been doing for the past three decades: Bluntly rejecting bad ideas and those who promulgate them. We will have a gleam of hope for the future.

If the class proceeds, however, it means the students at Harvard want to attend the class, no matter the guaranteed mediocrity of the teacher or the material presented. The students at Harvard will be telling us they aren’t interested in getting a good education, but are instead focused on virtue signalling. They will sign up for this course not to learn how to do good research, because Gay has no skills in this matter, but to show their support of Gay politically.

If therefore you are thinking of hiring any Harvard graduate in the future, I think it behooves you to find out if that student had attended Gay’s classes. It will tell you a great deal about whether you want such a person working for you.

Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 

The print edition can be purchased at Amazon. from any other book seller, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

9 comments

  • Andi

    Minor edit in several locations: “plagiarist”

  • Andi: Thank you. I wonder if I will ever remember the correct spelling of this word.

  • You want to stop burglaries and bank robberies?

    Hire a burglar and a bank robber?

  • Alton

    Worked with Olde Man Kennedy at the SEC for FDR.
    Till he was sent to the Court of St. James, London
    Where his nosing up to the Adolf GANG, got Senior Kennedy hauled back to the USA.
    Pronto

    Thus the oldest Kennedy son had to take to BOMBERS (Britain):TO remove the stain…
    He never made it back to be number One inline For the Oval Office.

  • F

    I’d suggest renaming the course to “Fairytales and Flasehoods”

  • wayne

    Weezer –
    “Buddy Holly” (1994)
    https://youtu.be/kemivUKb4f4
    (4:01)

    “Ooh-wee-hoo, I look just like Buddy Holly,
    Oh-oh, and you’re Mary Tyler Moore…
    I don’t care what they say about us anyway.
    I don’t care about that!”

  • Edward

    The college education that you pay for should be something that betters your life. We buy things because we believe we will be better off for having spent that money on them. If the teacher has such poor morals that she plagiarizes, then can she teach us something that makes us better off?

    The main form of ‘better off’ that college gives us is the ability to do jobs that we could not do out of high school or that we could not do four years out of high school. We pay a lot of money for college, and we may go into debt for years or decades, so the income we get from the better job had better be worth the loss of four years of income that we would have had with our high school diplomas as well as the money paid or owed.

    What kind of principles are our college students learning when the universities reward unethical behaviors? What kind of morality do the students already have if they sign up for classes taught by those same immoral people? Or perhaps today’s students think that they would be better off if they engage in unethical behaviors. After all, many city and county prosecutors will not prosecute shoplifting, so they are teaching-by-example that theft is acceptable in their cities and counties.

    How many employers want to hire unprincipled, immoral, unethical graduates?

  • markedup2

    How many employers want to hire unprincipled, immoral, unethical graduates?

    It depends entirely on their skin color and gender identity.

  • COLUMBIA STUDENTS HATE JEWS

    Students at Columbia University hate Jews, and some of them are Jews!

    “And among his chosen terminology and his carefully crafted anti American philosophically Marxist messages he used the word “Folks” or “Folk” all the time in his speeches.”

    “And this NEW “progressive” word “FOLX” takes it to the next level in targeting and demonizing the Jews.”

    https://www.sigma3ioc.com/post/columbia-students-hate-jews

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