Now you have to actively ignore bad information sites, always scan for new sources (institutional or individual), monitor ongoing quality, proactively find sources on an ever evolving array of topics. It is challenging.
But also interesting and rewarding. Sometimes you come across the oddest little points in the most unexpected places.
I usually read Ann Althouse's blog. She is a retired constitutional law professor interested in law, language, localism, and careful analysis of words. She has reasonably good commenters who add to the conversation she starts.
She has a post on the controversy surrounding Claudine Gay, President of Harvard University who, with two other university presidents, beclowned herself before Congress by pretending to stand for freedom of speech (despite the worst university ranking for free speech), refusing to acknowledge that she allowed antisemitic bullying and physical intimidation of students and at the same time making jesuitical arguments about when chants for antisemitic genocide might become unacceptable. It was a wretched demonstration of the collapse of university leadership.
Immediately following the hearings, it emerged in multiple rounds of revelations, that Gray's meager scholarship was riddled with plagiarism and non-attribution of other people's scholarship.
There is a further emerging scandal about how the Harvard Board has handled the catastrophe.
Another (black) professor is highlighting the challenge to the Mandarin Class and this is who Althouse is citing. Gay is clearly now (as she always has been) a token DEI affirmative action appointee who was never qualified in any fashion to lead Harvard. It is now inescapably obvious. But Harvard has invested so much, so far, in denying the undeniable that their only two choices of action are both unacceptable.
They can force Gray's resignation and acknowledge that the hoi polloi were always correct, that she was an unqualified DEI appointment. Or they can keep her in position and be seen to support terrorism, genocide, plagiarism, antisemitism and hatefully selective support of free speech. And be seen to have been lying all along.
Althouse's post: "It has always been inconvenient that Harvard’s first Black president has only published 11 academic articles in her career and..."
Commenter Oh Yea said... makes a very relevant observation.
If I were black and/or female I would be particularly offended that Dr. Gay was the best Harvard could hire even if DEI was the primary hiring criteria.
Indeed. It is one thing to embrace DEI racism and make appointments based on race. It is entirely another to demonstrate that when hiring based on race, that there are actually no qualified candidates. The Harvard Board is sotto voce, and entirely inadvertently, amplifying a message they desperately don't want to send.
Commenter tim in vermont said... connects two dots which I independently knew but which I have not seen anywhere otherwise connected.
I think it's great that there is an open plagiarist at the top of Harvard, just like our august POTUS is a plagiarist. It's a perfect symbol of what we have become as a nation.
Biden has always been an intellectual lightweight and moral reprobate, a characterization cemented way back during Biden's first presidential campaign in 1988. There were a series of unfavorable revelations during the campaign which eventually sank it. But one of the more spectacular revelations was when Biden repurposed an autobiographical speech from British politician Neil Kinnock without attribution. As if the plagiarism were not bad enough, Biden refashioned some of his own life story in order to match the details of Kinnock's autobiographical speech. It was a spectacular display of intellectual and moral vacuousness. Finally, Kinnock's was a recent speech, occurring just a few months earlier.
Biden appropriated someone else's speech, someone else's lifestory, lied about his own life to make it match, and did this to another prominent politician (in another country) whose speech was made just a few month's before Biden's appropriation of it. It was almost as if Biden were demanding to be caught.
The incident is today downplayed by the media as an obviously embarrassing inconvenience but it was emblematic of much of Biden's career and in character with Obama's counsel “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up.”
It is certainly ironic that the possible capstone of Biden's first term is a bringing together of two members of the Mandarin Class who are both without merit and both of whom relied upon plagiarism.
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