#tertiary education

[hasellia]

ARGHR Why does ecology have to be so FUN and Interesting while university has to be so stressful and neurodivergent unfriendly!aaaahhhhhhhhgghghghhghgggguggg

[tenth-sentence]

Women were 35 per cent more likely to go to university than men, and in 2017, for the first time in its history, Oxford University gave more places to women than men.

"Normal Women: 900 Years of Making History" - Philippa Gregory

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Ari David Blaff

Published: Sep 12, 2021

The National Student Clearinghouse (NSC), a non-profit education organization, published a report earlier this year that ought to have alarmed many Americans. Compared to the prior semester, the decline in male university enrollment was double that of women:

Enrollment declines are steeper for men than for women across all sectors (declined by 400,000 and 203,000 students, respectively). This trend is especially visible in the community college sector, with male enrollment dropping by 14.4 percent compared to a 6 percent decline in female enrollment. Also, the increase of 44,000 female students (+1 percent) is contrasted with a drop of 90,000 male students (-2.7 percent) in the public four-year institution sector.

If this trend continues, an NSC executive confirmed, “In the next few years, two women will earn a college degree for every man.”

This isn’t news, however. While COVID-19 has played a major part in the overall decline in enrollment, the unfortunate reality is that boys and men have been struggling academically for decades. Male and female academic performance began to diverge in the 1950s:

The Harvard economist Richard Murnane has tracked high school graduation rates since the 1970s and concluded that men have essentially stagnated at around 80 percent (slightly below the ~85 percent indicated by the table above), while women continued to rise, today approaching 90 percent. Women are the principal reason that national graduation rates are up.

The educational advancement of women is strange when viewed alongside the floundering of men. By the end of the 2021 academic year, roughly 60 percent of all college students—a record high—will be women. Estimates from the American Student Government Association now peg female leadership at around 60 percent of all student body presidents and 74 percent of vice presidents. Douglas Belkin recently explored these issues in the Wall Street Journal and found that, of the 1.5 million fewer aspiring students who colleges drew in the past five years, 70 percent of the decline was attributed to men. “[H]igher education’s dirty little secret,” as one consultant called it, is now so bad that certain schools have quietly implemented an “affirmative action for boys” to balance the groaning gender disparity.

* * *

This is an unwelcome development for boys already struggling to tread water alongside resilient girls. Boys, particularly black boys, are disciplined at higher levels than girls. In 2017, a team of researchers led by MIT economist David Autor analyzed a decade of Florida schooling records from 1992 to 2002 which revealed that boys were penalized more frequently. Rather than simply comparing gender disparities in suspensions and school absence, the group analyzed brothers and sisters from identical households and discovered that boys received more suspensions and were absent more often despite hailing from the same social environment. Summarizing the research, Jeff Guo wrote in the Washington Post, “It’s not yet clear why girls are so tough, but they seem much better suited to the challenges of modern childhood.” Indeed, childhood adversity holds long-term negative influences for male development to which women appear to be far less susceptible.

These findings were echoed in a study by Brown University’s Jayanti Owens in 2016 that found four- and five-year-old boys were “less likely to learn and more likely to be held back in school” than girls for exhibiting similar misbehaviour. Despite boys exhibiting higher rates of maladaptive behaviour such as difficulty paying attention, “regulating emotions, delaying gratification, and forming positive relationships with teachers and peers,” when such traits manifested appeared in girls, they were treated differently. “Implicit stereotypes,” Owens writes, “may lead to increased grade retention and disproportionately harsh discipline, such as school suspension or expulsion, which in turn are associated with lowered achievement and, ultimately, attainment.”

Since boys are also expelled more, they spend less time in classrooms learning, accelerating the already yawning educational gap behind studious girls. While a host of factors contribute to the ongoing academic struggle of boys—such as single-parent households and the disproportionate influence of low socioeconomic status—administrative discipline compounds these underlying issues. Taken together, boys’ behavioural issues alongside educators’ unequal treatment, Owens estimates, account for nearly 60 percent “of the gender gap in schooling.”

Nor is America exceptional in this regard. Across the mostly developed Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), boys are lagging behind girls. A meta-analysis led by a team of Australian academics concluded, “Overall, girls had significantly higher grades than boys by 6.3 percent.” Likewise, male enrollment throughout the OECD has been largely declining since the 1980s.

* * *

The accomplishments of women across the developed world over the past century are truly remarkable and merit acknowledgment. Issues along socioeconomic and racial lines linger, but the trajectory of female inroads in education and employment has blazed a trail for women to achieve a level of success, independence, and autonomy unthinkable even two generations ago.

The same cannot be said of men. Lost education and lost prestige have been exacerbated by an inability to discuss men’s issues thoughtfully. Partly, this is a by-product of the toxicity found in certain corners of the men’s rights movement. However, much of it comes from the corrosiveness of gender politics. Modern Americans struggle to square the stereotype of white male privilege with what the title of Warren Farrell’s brilliant book calls The Boy Crisis.

Speaking with Jerlando Jackson, a department chair at the University of Wisconsin, Douglas Belkin writes that many campuses avoid the issue altogether because of bad optics. “[F]ew campuses have been willing to spend limited funds on male underachievement that would also benefit white men, risking criticism for assisting those who have historically held the biggest educational advantages.” Jackson, an African American academic, argues, “As a country, we don’t have the tools yet to help white men who find themselves needing help … To be in a time when there are groups of white men that are falling through the cracks, it’s hard.” Another issue Belkin highlights has been studied by Keith Smith, a mental health counselor at the University of Vermont. Smith found that men face disproportionate disciplinary consequences for misbehaviour while under the influence of drugs and alcohol. As a result, he proposed the creation of a men’s center catered to helping them through the difficulties of university. Women on campus were having none of it. Smith reported that “Why would you give more resources to the most privileged group on campus?” was a common objection.

Unboxing the illusion of male academic privilege is something that should have been done decades ago. Beyond the extensively documented academic decline of men across most developed nations, boys are far more likely to be disciplined, face expulsion, and therefore lose valuable time learning. Accordingly, boys “report significantly higher rates of grade repetition (by 4.5 percentage points) and lower educational expectations.” These problems are compounded by boys being diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) at four times the rate of girls, with the former representing a comfortable majority of special education students. By 2018, when Stanford researchers released a landmark study assessing 10,000 of the country’s 12,000 school districts from 2008 to 2014, the findings could not have been clearer. “In no district,” the New York Times summarized, “do boys, on average, do as well or better than girls in English and language arts. In the average district girls perform about three-quarters of a grade level ahead of boys.” By comparison, gender parity in math scores has largely been achieved, though in some districts boys outperform girls.

Researchers place the roots of academic divergence around the fourth grade as reading habits solidify amongst girls and wither for boys. This produces dramatic consequences for their development as girls subsequently consume approximately 100,000 more words per year than boys. To say, then, that boys and men are “the most privileged group on campus” is to be intellectually stuck in the America of a century ago.

* * *

Unfortunately, it’s such outdated thinking that has left Americans incapable of understanding any issue affecting men beyond hot-take headlines. The reality of boys struggling throughout the educational pipeline is all the more uncomfortable given that these academic environments can be most hostile to them. Gender studies academics who decry “bro culture” and “patriarchy” ignore the tragic condition of some boys today. This enables activist scholars to dismiss reforms that may be beneficial. For instance, the gender reading gap converges later on in earlier adulthood. According to an OECD working paper, once boys and girls “leave compulsory schooling and have greater opportunities to choose their own reading materials or are required to read at the workplace,” they display similar reading skills. So, perhaps greater educational flexibility through revising assigned reading lists would address male reading underperformance better than claptrap about patriarchy and privilege.

Exploring the issue of gender representation at the teaching level could also be an interesting avenue for further inquiry. Since the late-20th century, teaching has actually become more gendered, skewing female. Whereas two-thirds of public-school teachers in the early ‘80s were women, by the 2010s that had crept up to three-quarters. Coupled with the stigmatization male teachers face in a predominantly female profession, we should consider whether the absence of male role models influences the outcome of impressionable boys. After all, racial disparities are shown to have an educational impact. Research from the Brookings Institute notes that the implications have yet to be determined for the teaching gender gap but such questions, once again, fall outside the purview of activists searching for a male bogeyman.

Christina Hoff Sommers documented much of this two decades ago in her seminal work, The War on Boys. “Schools shortchange girls,” the American Association of University Women then declared. Patricia O'Reilly, a professor of education and director of the Gender Equity Center at the University of Cincinnati, argued, “It is really clear that boys are no. 1 in this society and in most of the world.” Evidently, having a ringside seat to the unfolding crisis doesn’t move certain educators. Moreover, these very people have promoted an academic environment in which universities stumble over one another to announce funding, grants, and initiatives for women, while carefully avoiding the third rail of male academic failure.

* * *

The good news is that the issues affecting boys today are not the result of female success; the levers by which we can help men should not come at the expense of women. But that is precisely how gender equality discussions have been framed. The website of the global humanitarian organization Plan International has a page dedicated to explaining “a Man’s Role in Gender Equality Activism” which opens with an instruction that men must acknowledge their privilege. While it is demanded that men “stand with women and girls in their daily struggles for the eradication of patriarchal, sexist, and misogynist constructs,” there’s no mention of the hurdles men face. To suggest that boys might not have it all made within such circles is tantamount to sexism.

This zero-sum competition for sympathy and attention has distorted our ability to be compassionate. Look no further than the well-established fact that men commit the overwhelming majority of suicides across the globe. Instead of addressing the topic as part of a gender equality movement by advocating on behalf of struggling men, the Australian charity, One Woman Project, published a 2019 blog post entitled, “The Gender Disparity in Suicidality is a Myth.” Eleanor McKelvey, the organization's Head of Online Engagement, writes: “[W]hilst it is true that 75 percent of deaths from suicide in Australia are male; suicidality is not an exclusively male epidemic. Women are three times more likely to attempt suicide than men.” What exactly is she fighting about? It seems that the problem is understood as a contest in which the winner is determined by whoever has the more distressing suicide statistics. Distastefully, McKelvey uses the tragedy of male suicide to crowbar in the gratuitous assertion that “young, white, straight cis-men have not been the primary victims of our historically ignorant stance on mental health.” This is the politics of resentment at its worst.

That same year, the Washington Post ran an op-ed entitled, “Why the Patriarchy Is Killing Men,” about this very issue. This is in keeping with incendiary tweets sent by Chidera Eggerue, another prominent feminist commentator, following a question about male suicide. “If men are committing suicide because they can’t cry,” she wrote, “how’s it my concern?” Eggerue insisted that the comments served a higher cause. “My points run deeper and I’m requesting that we create a dialogue about the bigger issue of patriarchy.” If dying men are a political football to gender equality activists, imagine the controversy helping men on campuses would provoke.

The taboo against humanizing the struggles of boys and men must end. True gender equality activists should re-commit themselves to the principle embodied in their name. When we see young men, regardless of race or ethnicity, struggling in school while their female peers glide past them, we should help them, not condemn or belittle them as progressive activists have tended to do. Young boys will be the true victims, falling ever-further behind, if these gender turf wars thwart our ability to speak to and hear one another.

[ Via: https://archive.md/89S4p ]

==

When attempts to help those who need help the most must be conducted in hushed tones for fear of the wrath of shrill scolds, the "privilege" cannot lie where they pretend it does.

We're not supposed to notice that those we're most afraid of, the ones who get their way the most often, the ones who silence, the ones who control policy, are the one who claim to be, or claim to speak on behalf of, the ones who are "marginalized."

"Privilege" is being able to control society - from government to industry to media to entertainment to education - and still pretend you're the real victim.

[slacktivist]

Cut your divisions. Slice your faculties. Now bleed out.

[choppedstrawberrykiwi]

😭���😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭

[educationday]

The future at risk: Why investing in Education is critical.

Each year of education for a person yields approximately a 10% rise in annual earnings, outpacing returns from the stock market. 

Watch The future at risk: Why investing in Education is critical!

[thisisgraeme]

Unlock the Potential of AI in Education (Literature Review): Transformative Insights and Future Directions

Discover how AI is transforming education and creating personalised, inclusive learning experiences in Aotearoa New Zealand. Dive into the latest advancements and future directions!

The Impact of AI in Education Literature Review Artificial Intelligence (AI) has emerged as a transformative force in various sectors, and education is no exception. With the ability to personalise learning, automate administrative tasks, and enhance educational outcomes, AI holds substantial promise for revolutionising the educational landscape. This post summarises the literature review…

[whats-in-a-sentence]

Two years into my uni degree I was feeling half-hearted about my undergraduate studies.

"In/Out: A Scandalous Story of Falling Into Love and Out of the Church" - Steph Lentz

[educationcompanion]

Higher Education Institutions in Zambia 2023

Welcome to this article on the higher education institutions in Zambia. Over the years, the sector has witnessed significant growth and transformation, with new institutions and programs emerging to meet the evolving needs of students. Traditional Universities: The Pillars of Education Zambia is home to several esteemed traditional universities, such as the University of Zambia and Copperbelt…

[scholarsdreamcom]

Post-Secondary Education

Post-secondary education is the sure path to building a successful career.

[twirlingspaghetti]

I hate that I want good education and to be challenged academically. But we are short of schools that provide good education, and it's either your soul is the payment or their tuition are up our ceilings.

[dialogue-queered]

Australian Issues Primer

Comment: This is an astonishingly good article on the state of tertiary education funding in Australia.

Beginning with a long-term decline of public funding per head along side the dramatic increase in domestic access to tertiary study, the solution to 'square the circle' has been to corporatise the public universities around international student markets. Because of the uncertainties surrounding the latter, staff contracts are excessively casualised to preserve budgetary flexibility - a trend dramatically illustrated by the mass lay-offs in the sector in response to covid processes with estimates ranging up to 36,000 staff let go. Few of those jobs have returned.

In 2022, most Australian universities ran very large deficits only highlighting the issues, and a key cause was the non-return of full-time domestic students post-pandemic restrictions. Learning challenges around online or hybrid delivery have compounded the issues.

The entire sector faces a maelstrom of change.

John Ross 6 July 2023

Extract 1: Why had the [tertiary education] sector...found it necessary to retrench so many staff in year one of the Covid-19 pandemic, only to report record surpluses in year two?

Extract 2: Nobody knows just how many Australian university workers lost their jobs in 2020, but a UA survey produced an estimate of 17,300. This figure – a combination of permanent employees, casuals and fixed-term staff who were not rehired because of Covid impacts – was about six times as high as the retrenchment tally in the UK, according to an early calculation. And it was likely an underestimate, with a University of Melbourne analysis finding that up to 36,000 casual jobs had disappeared across Australia.

Extract 3: While the Go8 [Group of 8 'elite' universities] had monopolised an extra billion dollars of research funding granted as a Covid relief measure, the stock market was the main contributor to the surpluses, with most institutions reaping seven- or eight-digit windfalls from investments and the sale of a holding company for their shares in education business IDP.

Extract 4: Of the 32 Australian universities that published their 2022 financial accounts by this article’s publication deadline, 26 reported deficits. Their collective A$4.8 billion surplus in 2021 collapsed into a A$1.2 billion shortfall in 2022. But that reversal was mainly because of a A$3.4 billion drop in investment earnings. Earnings from overseas students declined by just 1.2 per cent, or A$100 million, compared with 2021. And of the 32 universities, 12 even managed to increase their revenue from this source, some by tens of millions of dollars.

Extract 5: The pain of 2020 prompted much introspection about a higher education business model so heavily reliant on a revenue stream as potentially uncertain as international education. But [academic expert, Andrew]Norton says there is little sign of universities weaning themselves off this income source – partly because they have no obvious alternative.

Extract 6: Adding to the disincentives to walk away is the fact that domestic students’ appetite for study appears to be more brittle than that of their international classmates. Across the 32 institutions that have published their 2022 accounts to date, receipts from the three major income streams for domestic study – Hecs-Help (student loans for government-supported undergraduates), Fee-Help (student loans for non-supported students, typically postgraduates) and the Commonwealth Grant Scheme (teaching subsidies for government-supported students) – fell last year by 4 per cent, or A$465 million, almost five times the loss from international education.

Extract 7: [Universities Australia (UA) chair, John] Dewar says local students are “under-loading” on higher education as opportunities for paid employment soar. “They just enrol in fewer subjects. They’ve effectively turned themselves into part-time students because there are lots of job opportunities out there,” he says. “If there’s a rise in unemployment, I’m sure they’ll start coming back to fuller loads. These things can change quite quickly. But I know that last year, and to some extent this year, a lot of universities are experiencing quite a soft domestic demand – which is why the return of international students is important.”

Extract 8: Monash’s [VC Margaret] Gardner adds that government funding for domestic student education has not been indexed to match inflation during the past decade, while the proportion of “secure” research funding of three to five years’ duration has also been decreasing.

Extract 9: Universities’ reaction to precarious revenue streams has been to casualise their labour force, Norton says. “The employment model that universities have defaulted into served them very well over the last few years,” he explains. “It stopped any of them from going broke because they could reduce their costs reasonably quickly” by shedding staff.

While the National Tertiary Education Union rails against casualisation – and universities increasingly accept that it is not “sustainable” – Norton does not see it changing while the cost of retrenching permanent academics remains high. “A few hundred” casual staff are being offered permanent contracts under newly negotiated enterprise agreements, he concedes, but this is “a drop in the ocean”.

But is it acceptable for the risks to the sector’s revenue model to be borne primarily by the staff with the least secure employment and, usually, the worst progression opportunities?

Extract 10: But how can universities accept the risk of funding secure employment for all their staff when the demand for their courses from domestic and, particularly, foreign students is so brittle? One answer, [consultant, John] Bagshaw says, is to use some of the proceeds of international education to “self-insure” against possible future downturns in that revenue stream – effectively, by setting money aside in a “rainy day fund” to cover retrenchments should they be financially imperative.

That may not be as difficult as it sounds, he says, because it only requires a one-off investment that might be a fraction of total international earnings. “Once you have the next year’s enrolments, the liability window has passed, so you only have to keep a year’s cash aside," he says. "It might be a lot of money. It might be A$100 million. But next year, it’s still A$100 million. This way, while there’s still risk, it doesn’t all fall on the casual employee. It would enable more casuals to have ongoing employment.”

Extract 11: Other contingency mechanisms might include a mutual savings club, into which all Australian universities paid according to their share of international enrolments. Or universities could seek commercial insurance.

Extract 12: Some universities are actively recruiting in “new international education channels”, says Zac Ashkanasy, head of higher education with the Nous Group management consultancy. But prospective students in those markets are “more price-sensitive”, he warns. “There are online opportunities that didn’t previously exist. Whether it’s direct offshore online delivery or more novel online pathways to an Australian institution, those represent new models to create a more resilient international student pipeline.” The problem is that “the margins for those new channels are lower. You might still be able to get the volume of students. But you may not be able to get the level of financial margin, which just adds to the pressure on universities.”

Extract 13: University of Queensland vice-chancellor Deborah Terry said full funding of research would be “nirvana”. As a first step, money to pay for overheads needed to be raised towards 50 cents for every dollar granted by the main funding agencies: “It’s 19 cents in the dollar now, and that is not sufficient. Increasing that…would be a very significant step forward.”

Griffith University vice-chancellor Carolyn Evans described research funding as the “existential crisis” facing Australian higher education.

Extract 14: [Education academic, Andrew Norton strikes a contrarian note]: “My view is that whatever extra money the commonwealth gives [universities] for research will not change the international student market at all. No matter how much you give them, they’ll spend it all and they will be back asking for more.”

Extract 15: Many in the sector regard more research as a good thing, of course. The Go8 hails the role of research in strengthening civil society, underpinning national well-being and generating solutions to global challenges – not least, Covid-19 itself. Go8 chief executive Vicki Thomson says the pandemic has helped shine a spotlight on the scale of cross-subsidisation of research [i.e. from international student revenue].

[tenth-sentence]

I was beginning an Arts degree, majoring in Philosophy, hoping to discover during my tertiary studies a way of rationally defending the faith I held so dear.

"In/Out: A Scandalous Story of Falling Into Love and Out of the Church" - Steph Lentz

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Ryan Hills and Zach Kessel

Published: Dec 21, 2023

Harvard and its president Claudine Gay are doing damage control amid an ongoing plagiarism scandal, with the embattled leader requesting even more corrections to her past work, this time her 1997 Ph.D. dissertation — the foundation of her academic career.

But the total of seven corrections requested so far still leave dozens of other instances of potential plagiarism unresolved. And scholars who believe their work was plagiarized have told National Review that they were never contacted by Harvard as part of its investigation into Gay’s academic work.

For instance, it does not appear that any of the corrections will address portions of Gay’s doctoral dissertation drawing heavily from the work of Vanderbilt University professor Carol Swain, in some cases reproducing her writing word-for-word without citation.

Swain — who has been outspoken about her feelings on the plagiarism scandal — told National Review that she is concerned with Harvard’s response to the revelations of its president’s academic-integrity issues.

“I have a problem with the way Harvard has reacted to the entire situation, because it seems like — with the assistance of some of their professors and other elites — they’re trying to redefine what is plagiarism,” Swain said, “and they’re making the argument that there are different levels and, by extension, that some of it is acceptable. That is a problem for higher education in America.”

A number of experts and academics contacted by National Review said that the examples of potential plagiarism that have been flagged are serious, and the large number of instances suggest a pattern.

Lee Jussim, a social psychologist and distinguished professor at Rutgers University, said he’s “never seen anything like” the plagiarism scandal involving Gay.

“I can tell you, I expelled a student from my lab when I first got to Rutgers who I caught doing something not all that different — probably less — than what she has done,” he said.

On Wednesday night, the Harvard Corporation announced that Gay is requesting three corrections to her dissertation. The requests come after news outlets published several examples that appear to show Gay failing to cite other researchers and in some cases using their language word-for-word in her dissertation without attribution.

The three corrections to her dissertation come after Gay previously requested four corrections in two of her academic articles.

The Harvard Corporation has not referred to any of Gay’s mistakes as plagiarism, but rather as instances of “inadequate citation” and “duplicative language without appropriate attribution.”

This week, National Review analyzed 30 of the disputed passages, which include many that remain unaddressed in the corrections that Gay has requested to date.

The 30 disputed passages arise from four publications: a 1993 history magazine, her 1997 Harvard dissertation, and two Urban Affairs Review journal articles from 2012 and 2017. In some of the cases, Gay appears to have put her citations in the wrong place or to have failed to put quotation marks around language she took verbatim from other academics. In other cases, she appears to have lifted large swaths of language from other researchers — including some of her Harvard colleagues — without any attribution at all.

Gay is even accused of lifting language from a Harvard colleague for the acknowledgement section of her dissertation.

Prominent academics, plagiarism experts, Harvard students, and the Boston Globe editorial board are now calling for Harvard to take an even closer look at Gay’s academic record, and to be clear about what, exactly, they find.

Harvard’s citation policies are clear that quotations be placed in quotation marks and cited, and that paraphrased material “be acknowledged completely.” The policies prohibit both “verbatim plagiarism”— failing to properly quote and cite specific language — and “mosaic plagiarism,” which involves copying bits and pieces from sources and changing some words “without adequately paraphrasing or quoting directly.”

“Taking credit for anyone else’s work is stealing, and it is unacceptable in all academic situations, whether you do it intentionally or by accident,” a Harvard policy states. The policy was much the same in 1997, when Gay wrote her doctoral dissertation.

The policy appears to be rigorously enforced against the students Gay presides over: During the 2020-2021 academic year, while Gay was serving as dean of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, 27 students were forced to withdraw from the university after being found in violation of the school’s academic-integrity policies, the Harvard Crimson reported.

The university first learned of the plagiarism allegations in late October from the New York Post, according to a summary of the Harvard Corporation’s review, portions of which were posted on X on Wednesday night by a reporter with The Chronicle of Higher Education. National Review has requested a copy of the summary from Harvard.

In a statement supporting Gay earlier this month, the fellows of Harvard College wrote that after they became aware of some of the allegations, they initiated “an independent review” of Gay’s published work by “distinguished political scientists.” The review revealed “a few instances of inadequate citation” but “no violation of Harvard’s standards for research misconduct.”

The statement was vague, and did not specify any specific problems with Gay’s work. Gay “proactively” requested four corrections to two articles from 2001 and 2017 “to insert citations and quotation marks that were omitted from the original publications,” according to the statement.

The review of the initial allegations was conducted by a three-member panel of experts who “have no ties to Harvard and are among the nation’s most respected political scientists,” according to a summary released on Wednesday..

A subcommittee of the Harvard Corporation, the university’s governing body, reviewed the rest of Gay’s published work, but didn’t initially review her dissertation, according to the summary. The subcommittee reviewed her dissertation only after media reports flagged potential issues.

The Harvard Corporation said in its summary of its review that Gay’s errors, including the citation errors in her dissertation, were “regrettable.”

“Neither the independent panel nor the subcommittee of the Corporation found evidence of intentional deception or recklessness in Gay’s work, which is a required element for a determination of research misconduct,” under the school’s governing policy, the summary states.

Harvard’s delay in identifying errors in Gay’s doctoral thesis “means that they, almost certainly, did not do a thorough review of her past work,” according to Jonathan Bailey, a plagiarism expert and consultant who publishes the website Plagiarism Today.

“It’s frustrating that Harvard (or even Gay herself) didn’t thoroughly investigate her prior works and, seemingly, just checked and responded to the initial allegations. They had an opportunity to get ahead of this and missed it,” Bailey said.

For Swain, the Vanderbilt University professor whose work Gay’s doctoral dissertation drew heavily from, Gay’s failure to adhere to ethical standards in something as foundational as her doctoral dissertation presents a significant problem for Harvard.

“To earn a doctorate, you have to have a dissertation that’s supposed to be original in some sort of way. You defend it and they hand you a doctorate, but they cannot hand you a doctorate for work that’s plagiarized,” Swain said in an interview with NR. “So that’s the bigger issue that they’re avoiding. And what they are hoping is that people who understand academia won’t raise those questions.”

The 30 plagiarism allegations provided to National Review appear to be the same ones that were previously provided to the Washington Free Beacon. On Tuesday, the Free Beacon reported on a handful of additional allegations against Gay, including alleged plagiarism in two more of her publications.

Attempts by National Review to reach Gay and a Harvard spokesperson on the phone and via email were unsuccessful this week.

‘Between Black and White’

The earliest allegations of plagiarism against Gay stem from a November 1993 article she wrote for a history magazine called Origins. Originally published by a Canadian firm, Origins is now a joint online publication of the Ohio State University and Miami University of Ohio history departments. Origins is not an academic journal.

Gay’s article, Between Black and White: The Complexity of Brazilian Race Relations, is six-pages long and focuses on the lack of collective political action by Afro-Brazilians. At the time, Gay was a recent graduate of Stanford University and a graduate student at Harvard.

Gay’s article doesn’t have any citations, but the piece includes a “Suggestions for Further Reading” section at the end, which mentions five works.

Of the 30 allegations of plagiarism against Gay reviewed by National Review, eleven of them came from her Origins article. In several cases, the language Gay uses in the article is similar to the language used by three other academics, two of whom she included in her suggested readings and one of whom was not mentioned at all.

For example, this paragraph from Gay reproduces language first used in an article by historian George Reid Andrews published a year earlier, but doesn’t attribute it to him. Gay included a book by Andrews in her suggested reading list.

Gay: It was a younger generation of Afro-Brazilians, many with one or more years of university education, that were among the first and most eager respondents to the MNU ‘s organizational call. Their eagerness was in large part a measure of the economic and political exclusion they had suffered under the military dictatorship. As their numbers grew, it was their aspirations and rhetoric which came to define the organization. The movement became an expression of frustration among upwardly mobile Afro-Brazilians denied admission to the middle-class status to which their education and qualifications entitled them. To that extent, the aspirations of these activists were too removed from the lives of the poor to facilitate cross-class linkages.

Compare that to the language used by Andrews in his journal article.

Andrews: a younger generation of Afro-Brazilians, many with one or more years of university study, were starting to organise a new black movement in response to the economic and political exclusion which they were experiencing under the dictatorship. This movement, most vividly symbolised by the Movimento Negro Unificado, created in Sao Paulo in 1978 … This new movement of the 1970s and 1980s was to a large degree the expression of frustration among upwardly mobile Afro-Brazilians denied admission to the middle-class status to which their education and qualifications entitled them. Its activists worked hard at recruiting support in the slums and favelas of the urban periferia, but their rhetoric and aspirations often seemed somewhat removed from the lives of poor and working-class blacks facing the immediate, grinding problems of poverty, crime and hunger.

In at least two cases, the language Gay used in her article is similar to the language that David Covin, an academic and activist, used in a 1990 journal article. Here is one example:

Gay: On June 18, 1978, representatives from a number of Afro-Brazilian organizations, outraged by a series of racially-motivated incidents, joined forces in Sao Paulo to form the Unified Movement Against Racial Discrimination (MUCDR). As their first project, MUCDR organized a July 7, 1978 demonstration to protest two acts: (a) the April 28 beating death of black worker Robson Silveira da Luz, by a Sao Paulo policeman; and (b) the May expulsion of four young black athletes from the volleyball team of the Tiete Yacht Club because of their color. Two thousand people participated in the protest on the steps of the Municipal Theater. The organizers read an open letter to the population in which they outlined their campaign against “racial discrimination, police oppression, unemployment, underemployment and marginalization.”

Compare that to language used by Covin in his journal article from just a few years earlier:

Covin: The earliest manifestation of the MNU was the Unified Movement Against Racial Discrimination (MUCDR). Representatives from a number of Black organizations, entidades, met at the Center of Black Art and Culture in São Paulo on June 18, 1978. They resolved to create a movement to defend the Afro-Brazilian community against racial exploitation and human disrespect. They designated as their first activity a demonstration to be held at 6:30 p.m. on July 7, 1978, at the Chá viaduct in São Paulo. The demonstration was to protest two acts: (a) the torture and assassination of a Black worker, Robson Silveira da Luz, by policemen in São Paulo on April 28, 1978; and (b) the dismissal of four Black male children from the volleyball team of the Tiete Yacht Club in May, 1978, because of their color (Gonzalez, 1982, p. 43). The demonstration was held on the designated date on the steps of the Municipal Theater of Sao Paulo. Two thousand people were present (Gonzalez, 1982, p. 48). An open letter to the population was read.

Gay did not cite Covin or include his work in her suggested reading list.

Harvard looked into Gay’s Origins article as part of its initial investigation but determined that it did not merit correction since the article is 30 years old and the journal generally did not require citations or quotations, according to the summary of its investigation.

Bailey, the plagiarism expert and consultant, called the lack of citations but the inclusion of a suggested reading list in the Origins article “weird.”

Steven McGuire, an advocate for free expression and a fellow with the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, said that not understanding the magazine’s citation standards makes it harder to judge, but it’s notable because similar issues continue to pop up in Gay’s later work, including in her dissertation.

“There seems to be a consistent or ongoing pattern there of at least sloppiness that meets the definition of plagiarism that just doesn’t seem to be acceptable for a professional scholar, let alone someone who is president of one of our most elite academic institutions in this country,” he said.

Benjamin Johnson, a Ohio State University spokesman, said the university has not heard from anyone at Harvard about amending the article, which remains online.

‘Taking Charge’

The 30 allegations of plagiarism reviewed by National Review include three from Gay’s 1997 dissertation, “Taking Charge: Black Electoral Success and the Redefinition of American Politics.”

In at least two cases, Gay is accused of cribbing language without attribution from Bradley Palmquist, an assistant professor of government at Harvard at the time, and from Stephen Voss, who was a colleague in her Ph.D program. One  example includes language that is almost identical to language used by Palmquist and Voss in a paper presented just a year earlier.

Gay: The idea behind the “method of bounds” is that the beginning point for any ecological inference should be the knowledge a researcher has for certain. This knowledge includes the fact that any proportion is by definition bound by 0 and 1. Furthermore, the marginals of a table, Xi (black population density) and Ti (total turnout) dictate the minimum and maximum possible values of the cells in the table. King’s method makes direct use of this information to establish absolute bounds on the values of the quantities of interest.

Compare that to a similar paragraph from Palmquist and Voss.

Palmquist and Voss: The beginning point for any ecological inference should be with the knowledge we have for certain. Almost from the beginning of methodological work in this area, researchers have used the fact that proportions must by definition be between 0 and 1 (Duncan, Cuzzort, and Duncan 1961; Achen and Shively 1995). Recently, Gary King (n.d.) has emphasized the particular advantages of using the precinct-by-precinct constraints. Making direct use of this information to establish absolute (i.e. not probabilistic) bounds on the percentages of the internal cells is entirely straightforward. For any single table (either of a precinct or of a the [sic] state as a whole), the marginals dictate a minimum and maximum possible value for each of the cells.

Gay has requested to add “quotations and/or citations” to portions of her dissertation drawn from Palmquist and Voss, according to Harvard.

In an interview with National Review before Gay requested the corrections to her dissertation, Voss said he did not believe all the allegations of plagiarism against Gay were clear cut and added that he did not take personal offense. He did not publish his paper but presented it at a conference, he said, and the content in question often involved technical language. But, he said, his examples are “considered the smoking gun.”

“We’re not even cited, so a lot of the justifications people have been giving for what Claudine did don’t apply to my paper,” Voss said. “Things like, ‘well, she cited it but just not near where she was using their words,’ or, ‘she quoted them but didn’t point out that these other things were quotes too,’ all these sorts of excuses that were given don’t apply to mine.”

Voss said no one at Harvard gave him a heads up about the allegations of plagiarism or their review of those allegations.

“I’ve not heard from Claudine Gay, and in fact not heard from anyone at Harvard, either when they conducted their investigation or, you know, someone in their public-relations office to try to coach me on how to answer,” Voss said. “I have literally not heard from a single person at Harvard University since this story emerged.”

Gay also is accused of lifting language from a Harvard colleague in her dissertation’s acknowledgment section. In her acknowledgement, Gay wrote that she is grateful to her advisor, professor Gary King, who “reminded me of the importance of getting the data right and following where they lead without fear or favor.” She also thanked her family, “who drove me harder than I sometimes wanted to be driven.”

Jennifer Hochschild, who was a professor at Princeton at the time and who is now at Harvard, used those same phrases in the acknowledgements of a paper she published a year earlier.

Hochschild downplayed the importance of what she said were minor errors on Gay’s part, telling National Review that Gay simply recycled “standard phrases that we all use in acknowledgements.”

“There’s obvious political and ideological — as well as substantive — reasons behind this whole thing, and I wish to hell she’d been more careful,” Hochschild said. “But I think we have more interesting issues to worry about, and I wish you guys were worried about more interesting issues. It’s not quite making a mountain out of a molehill, but a different person in a different context and different political temperature would be treated differently.”

Like Voss, Hochschild told National Review that no one from Harvard reached out as part of their investigation into Gay’s record; she only learned of the allegation when a reporter reached out.

Redefining Plagiarism?

Earlier this month, journalists Christopher Rufo and Christopher Brunet published additional allegations of plagiarism in Gay’s dissertation. They found at least three problematic patterns of usage and citation in Gay’s dissertation, they said.

According to Rufo’s and Brunet’s reporting, Gay appears to have taken language and ideas from Swain, the former Vanderbilt professor. Gay’s dissertation contains nearly word-for-word reproduction of passages from her 1995 book, Black Faces, Black Interests: The Representation of African Americans in Congress.

A feature in the September-October 2023 issue of Harvard Magazine titled A Scholar’s Scholar tracks Gay’s career in celebration of her July 2023 ascendancy to the university’s highest leadership position. Her dissertation is described in the piece as having included “significant findings,” but Swain believes the work simply drew from her own research, for which she was never credited.

“That article specifically mentions the areas where her research was so significant, and those were the areas that my research sort of pioneered,” Swain said. “I looked at some of her articles [after the initial allegations] and there was one in particular — in the American Political Science Review — on descriptive representation. I would have expected her to engage my work, to put a citation in the article, because she was building on ideas that came directly from my research.”

Swain said she learned that Gay appeared to have copied her language and ideas after Rufo’s initial thread on X bringing the allegations to light. The university did not contact her over the course of its clandestine investigation into Gay’s writings, which was only brought to light as a result of reporting on the similarities between the Harvard president’s published work and that of academics like Swain.

‘Moving to Opportunity�� & ‘A Room for One’s Own’

There are at least 16 allegations of plagiarism in two of Gay’s Urban Affairs Review journal articles, Moving to Opportunity: The Political Effects of a Housing Mobility Experiment from 2012, and A Room for One’s Own? The Partisan Allocation of Affordable Housing from 2017.

In both cases, Gay is accused of not putting quotation marks around direct quotes and of putting citations in the wrong place – in some cases, she appears to have cited a source on one page, but then fails to cite them when she uses their information again pages later.

In A Room for One’s Own? for example, she cites the work of her Harvard Colleagues, Stephen Ansolabehere and James Snyder Jr., on one page of her 30-page paper, but doesn’t cite them again, even when she seems to use their language and work later in her paper.

For example, Gay’s paper reads:

Gay: Theory predicts an interaction between county partisanship and party control, such that the more Democratic a county, the more LIHTC allocations it should receive when the state is under Democratic control; if the relationship is symmetrical, as Hypothesis 1 predicts, a more Republican county should benefit when the state is under Republican control

Compare that to language in Ansolabehere and Snyder’s paper from 2006:

Ansolabehere and Snyder: Theoretical arguments predict an interaction between partisanship of voters and party control of state government. Democratic counties are expected to receive more transfers when the state is under Democratic control than when the state is under Republican control; and Republican counties should receive more transfers when the state is under Republican control.

In A Room for One’s Own, Gay also uses language that appears to be drawn from a previous paper by Miami University professor Anne Williamson, who told the Post she was “angry” when she first learned that Gay had relied on her work without citation.

Contacted after Harvard announced the initial corrections, Williamson told National Review she was “satisfied that Dr. Gay has pledged to add appropriate quotation marks and citations to articles where she may have inadvertently drawn on my work (and the works of others) without attribution.”

Several academics who have reviewed the allegations and spoke to National Review said they believe that at least some of the allegations clearly constitute plagiarism.

“If you take the material altogether, it seems to me likely that a student who would have been subjected to disciplinary action for failing properly to quote and credit,” Robert George, a Princeton professor, said in an email.

Bailey, the plagiarism expert, agreed that at least some of the allegations “are serious and I would want investigated. The cribbing of Palmquist and Voss’s language stood out, he said. However, he doesn’t believe that several others rise to that level.

“A lot of these didn’t show anything to me other than two writers talking about the same topic in somewhat similar ways,” he said.

Harvard, he said, should be more transparent, including releasing the results of the review its panel already conducted.

“That sounds like a minimal thing to expect,” Jussim, the Rutgers professor, said. “At this point, someone probably should go through everything she’s written, because who knows if all of it has even been uncovered.”

Ultimately, he said, he suspects Gay will be protected. Most high-level university administrators are “not really there for their scholarship,” he said, and that likely includes Gay.

If advancing ideology is Gay’s primary mission as Harvard president, he said, “who cares about any of this?”

A Double Standard?

Harvard has a track record of punishing students for plagiarism in accordance with its official policy, but the prospect of selective treatment for high-profile faculty members and administrators has been raised before.

A 2005 Harvard Crimson editorial complains of a “woeful double standard” between the expectations for students and for faculty, pointing to professor Laurence H. Tribe’s failure “to credit text lifted verbatim from Henry J. Abraham’s book ‘Justices and Presidents’” in his own 1985 “God Save This Honorable Court.”

“For the public face of Harvard and for internal relations as well,” the editors wrote at the time, “it is crucial that the university maintain more consistent disciplinary rules for instances of academic dishonesty.”

In fall 2022, the Harvard Crimson reported that, during the 2020-2021 academic year, 27 students were forced to withdraw from the university after being found in violation of the school’s academic-integrity policies. Ninety-nine of the 138 cases the university’s “Honor Council” reviewed during that period were found to be legitimate instances of academic dishonesty. The academic year on which the Crimson reported coincides with Gay’s time overseeing graduate and undergraduate studies as dean of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

“I don’t know how Harvard thinks that this situation is currently tenable,” McGuire said. “What Claudine Gay has done appears to violate the standards that they hold their own students to. And Harvard has not even come out and said it’s plagiarism.”

[ Via: https://archive.md/sFCA0 ]

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The fact that Harvard invented the Newspeak term "duplicative language" specifically to mask their presidents plagiarism is a good indicator of how compromised the school is.

[bemtele]

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