Harvard Mystique Going Poof - This Was So Overdue

 

"Harvard Honor Council student

accuses school of double

standard, says President 

Claudine Gay must resign over

plagiarism scandal" 

New York Post, December 31, 2023

As a former adjunct professor at the Universities of Michigan, Pittsburgh and Connecticut and as a current professional editor I know what constitutes plagiarism. Like Claudine Gay, I also went through Ph.D. training so I wonder what was she thinking when she presented her material without the required citations. 

It's no longer fashionable to put folks on the couch with psychobabble. We investigate lines of thought.

Maybe we will never know Gay's thought processes. But it's fun to speculate: the default of being the smartest kid in the class, the assumption of specialness or simply being too clever by far?  

What we do know, though, is that her entire situation seems to be darkening. Alleged plagiarism is only a piece. 

All that might not have developed into the "this" had it not been for a guy on Wall Street. He did a version of Hamlet. That was Apollo's CEO Marc Rowan. He put out there an observation: Something is rotten in the the state of higher education. 

Rowan's initial focus was what he perceived as antisemitism in higher education. His course-correction strategy, which he communicated to other wealthy influencers, was to back off on future donations. It was a bleeder. Myriad other constituencies began to dig around for other evidence of rot. Yeah, the ongoing scrutiny of Gay's research publications went high-profile. Politically motivated? Irrelevant. It is what it is.



There are those of us who had been students at Harvard who came to anticipate that the "tower" would eventually have to fall. Wasn't the whole thing being held together by what was mattering less and less.

A sign of the shifts is that current Harvard Business School MBAs are receiving fewer offers. 

Over at the Harvard Law School, Edelson isn't recruiting and plenty of other law firms might do the same if there aren't changes. 

Early Admission applications to Harvard undergraduate are down 17%. 

How branding brainwashed I might have been when I was euphoric in receiving the fat envelope from Harvard in the late 1980s. Who was I then? 

In most cases you have only one shot in communications. Jane Genova is a communications coach and content-creator. Complimentary consultation (please text 203-468-8579 or email janegenova374@gmail.com) 




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