Sunday, December 24, 2023

Academia as the Augean Stables

From this thread:
Ham for the win.

Genevieve Guenther is a product of academia.  From Wikipedia.

Guenther received her bachelor's degree from Columbia University and her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2004, in Renaissance literature.

So, a humanities professor.

But

Genevieve Juliette Guenther is an American author and climate change activist. A former Renaissance scholar, she is the founding director of the media watchdog organization End Climate Silence. She is currently affiliate faculty at the Tishman Environment and Design Center at The New School.

From professor of Shakespeare to a climate change activist professor - quite a career shift.  No wonder AGW has such a challenge establishing itself as a credible scientific field if its more vocal participants are from the humanities.

What is this whole storm in a tea cup?

I came across the first accusation a couple of days ago.  What I then read was (extracted from tweets)

Dr. Genevieve Guenther
@DoctorVive 
 
One of the most powerful English professors of the past 40 years stole an argument I made in a seminar presentation, turning it into the core of his next book. 

The week after my presentation, he came into the classroom and he read a conference paper he was going to deliver at the Shakespeare Association that month, re-articulating exactly what I had said about the same material the week before. The 15 or so grad students around the seminar table were dumbfounded. Jaws on the floor. 

2/n

She is coy about actually making a direct accusation, presumably for fear of being sued.  I am not sure how sound a strategy that is because she keeps dropping increasingly obvious hints so that it quickly becomes apparent that she is probably accusing Stephen Greenblatt of plagiarism.  

He, ironically given the circumstances of Harvard President Claudine Gay, is a professor of Shakespeare at Harvard.  From Wikipedia:

Greenblatt was born in Boston and raised in Newton, Massachusetts. After graduating from Newton High School, he was educated at Yale University (BA 1964, PhD 1969) and Pembroke College, Cambridge (MPhil 1966). Greenblatt has since taught at the University of California, Berkeley, and Harvard University. He was Class of 1972 Professor at Berkeley (becoming a full professor in 1980) and taught there for 28 years before taking a position at Harvard University. He was named John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities in 2000. Greenblatt is considered "a key figure in the shift from literary to cultural poetics and from textual to contextual interpretation in U.S. English departments in the 1980s and 1990s."

I am interpreting "contextual interpretation" to mean that he has been part of the wave of academicians pushing the Woke transformation of the past thirty years.  

And as an aside, we have a plagiarist Harvard Shakespearean professor Stephen Greenblatt who works for a plagiarist president of Harvard University, Claudine Gay, who is being accused during the administration of president Joe Biden whose first presidential campaign was sunk by his plagiarism.  

With an appropriate head nod to Sir Walter Scott and acknowledgement of his inspiration.

Oh how tangled become our lies
When first we start to plagiarize

Anyway.

Clickthrough on the embedded Genevieve Guenther tweet for the full elaboration of her accusation (plus the responses.)
She knows her academic audience and gets a lot of support for how the mean male professor used power dynamics to exploit her naive doctoral student self to steal her ideas for his book.  There is plenty of support for her position and moral outrage going around.  

But accusations without names is pretty mealymouthed.  In fact, there is more than a whiff of moral corruption on the part of the accuser.  Just make your accusation, don't tease an audience with clues and hints.  This feels far more about gaining attention than actually revealing an injustice or righting a wrong.  Very passive aggressive academia.

She may very well be a victim of plagiarism but her presentation of her own case undermines it.

Ham's joke is about the end of Guenther tweet thread.  Guenther has made her veiled allegation.  A Woke male humanities professor at Berkeley stole her doctoral student ideas and published a book based on it.  Plagiarism and sex power dynamic issues.  Which naturally leads to . . . 

Dr. Genevieve Guenther
@DoctorVive

Again, the person I'm talking about is perhaps the most celebrated scholar in the field — and a hugely successful crossover author. And EVERYONE KNOWS HE'S A PLAGIARIST. 

So if there are any doubts over double standards—comparing one white professor stealing whole arguments to a black grad student repeating banal phrases, performing "scholarliness," in her fucking acknowledgements, which are not even ideas—let this anecdote help put them to rest.

The right is going after Gay because they don't want the kids at Harvard to have any sort of an anti-racist education and they're not even trying to hide it. DON'T FALL FOR IT, FFS. Support Gay. Support DEI. Support anti-racism. 

And, yes, US right-wing politics are so dangerous right now that I feel like I have to defend the president of fucking *Harvard*, which is absurd, but that's the power of today's white supremacists, to make *Harvard* a bastion of racial sanity. What a time to be alive. 

Wait . . . What did I just see?

A profound indictment of plagiarism by the powerful in academia leading to . . . a defense of plagiarism by the powerful in academia (a defense of Gay), and an attack on those seeking to expose plagiarism and double standards in academia.  

Well, my goodness.  That was an unexpected crash into the wall.  

The Woke defending the plagiarists and the exploiters.  In the words of that grand old Harvard man, Henry Kissinger in another context:

It's a pity they both can't lose.

Neither Gay nor Greenblatt have had their day in court.  With even the Harvard and DEI friendly Washington Post turning against her, Gay's days may be numbered.

Greenblatt?  Guenther might be simply an aggrieved fabulist envious of a successful and accomplished professor.  After all, he is a man which, in the world of Woke, is the original sin.  It is conceivable that Guenther's entire plaint is a product of the aggrieved intersectionalist Woke cult of victimhood mind.  

I especially enjoyed Greenblatt's Swerve, How the World Became Modern.  As an argument, I don't find it completely convincing.  As a history of a particular book (Lucretius' On the Nature of Things) and a history of medieval and Renaissance Europe, it was entertaining and informative.  If he plagiarizes, it decreases his personal stature but doesn't take away from his accomplishment.  From a moral perspective, regrettably, all artists and creators are human and therefore subject to the litany of human failings.

Does Guenther's accusation have merit?  No idea.  Certainly possible.  Maybe even plausible.  Her presentation of her argument undermines its own credibility, performing an academic strip tease, removing one more veil of modesty at a time as Guenther effectively reveals the person she is accusing without wanting to accuse.

In the end, there may be a real charge.  Maybe Greenblatt is indeed a serial plagiarizer.  

On the other hand, Guenther's accusation may simply be the product of an infect Woke mind all twisted up in intersectionality.  We may be looking at a three classes of victim, with one of them trying to assert primacy as well as claiming to be a white knight for the beleaguered racial minority.

This might be a youngish white Woke woman redeeming her unearned privilege by accusing an elderly Jewish man of a crime (plagiarism) already also committed by a middle-aged black woman.  Talk about competitive victimhood.  I have no idea who has the points in this match.  

As a nation, we need to undertake the herculean task of cleaning the academic Augean stables.  It won't be easy but it is most certainly necessary.

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