John Lennon's son dislikes every little thing about diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.
Seán Ono Lennon attacked DEI on X Wednesday following ex-Harvard President Claudine Gay's resignation.
"Have you guys heard of DEI?" Seán asked. "It stands for ‘Dumb Evil Idiots.'"
The musician claims those fighting institutional racism and oppression create it in the process.
"And absolutely no one should be surprised by this," Seán said.
The songwriter also claimed environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing, which encourages businesses to engage in environmental and social activism, translates to "Exploiting Seems Good."
More at link
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January 04, 2024, 11:33 AM
selogic
It didn't take long for them to play the " racism " card . That was a given though .
January 04, 2024, 07:56 PM
sjtill
As I told a friend today: Harvard a Gay New Year—until it didn’t. He thought it a joke worthy of Jay Leno.
_________________________ “Remember, remember the fifth of November!"
January 04, 2024, 08:12 PM
mikeyspizza
Radio talk show was saying that what we need now, since she's a professor, is for a student to turn in a plagiarized piece, and when she fails them on it, the student cries discrimination, racism, LGBTQ, whatever, and sues the shit out of them.
January 04, 2024, 08:13 PM
parabellum
That's a brilliant idea. Truly, that is brilliant.
It is understandable that Claudine Gay is furious over her forced resignation, her calamitous fall from grace, and the public consensus about the great damage done to Harvard by her presidency.
But still playing the wounded-fawn is no excuse or defense.
Thus Claudine Gay’s recent New York Times disingenuous op-ed alleging racism as the prime cause of her career demise, was, to quote Talleyrand, "worse than a crime, it was a blunder.” And her blame-gaming will only hurt her cause and reinforce the public’s weariness with such boilerplate and careerist resorts to racism where it does not exist.
Gay knows that her meteoric career trajectory through prestigious Philips academy, Princeton, Stanford, and Harvard was not symptomatic of systemic racism, but rather just the opposite—in large part through institutional efforts to show special concern, allowances, and deference due to her race and gender.
And she knows well that her forced resignation was not caused by a conspiracy of conservative activists. It came at the request also of liberal op-ed writers in now embarrassed leftwing megaphones like the New York Times and the Washington Post, black intellectuals, and academics—and donors who usually identify, like the vast majority of Harvard philanthropists, as liberal Democrats.
Gay knows too that in her now notorious congressional testimony, had she just offered an independent assessment of the epidemic of anti-Semitism on her campus and a Harvard plan to stop it (rather than joining in the finger-in-the-wind groupthink of the other two presidents), and had she not been guilty of long-standing, serial, and flagrant plagiarism, she would still have her job.
Gay knows that other white university presidents have recently been forced to resign for far less culpable behavior than her own. Pennsylvania president Liz Magill was forced to quit after her December 5 seeming inability or unwillingness to act against blatant anti-Semitic speech and conduct on her own campus, or Stanford’s president Marc Tessier-Lavigne for co-authoring, some decades earlier, scientific papers whose results were not always based on authenticated data.
Again, as for Gay’s insinuations of a cabal that took her down, she also knows that such a charge is no more true or false than the public outrage, both liberal and conservative, over Magill’s obtuseness, or the largely leftwing effort to remove the white male Tessier-Lavigne.
Gay knows that she herself has disciplined and censored lots of Harvard professors, among them preeminent black scholars, such as Roland Frier and Ronald Sullivan, on speculative allegations far less egregious than her own serial plagiarism and inconsistent policies of addressing “hate speech" . Did anyone suggest she was then a “racist”?
Gay knows that as president she oversaw a code of behavior that routinely severely disciplined students, staff, and professors for plagiarism of a nature far less serial and systematic than her own.
Gay indeed knows that her plagiarism was far more serious than suggested by her half-hearted defense of her scholarship (“I have never misrepresented my research findings, nor have I ever claimed credit for the research of others.”).
In fact, when anyone—again and again—copies word-for-word whole paragraphs without attribution or quotation marks, or lifts entire sentences and appropriates the thoughts of other without sufficient footnotes that is precisely “misrepresentation" and claiming “credit" where credit is not due. If a Harvard president and full professor makes such a defense of intellectual theft, what will it say in the future about Harvard?
Gay knows that her claim of being proactive in correcting some lifted passages was not proactive at all. It was entirely reactive and came only in response to criticism of her scholarly methods.
Gay knows that she has done irrevocable damage to Harvard, given the Harvard Corporation, its legal team, its 700 supportive faculty letter-signers, and its satellite freelancers all embarrassed themselves and further and gravely eroded the institution’s reputation and credibility by going out of their way to defend the indefensible solely on her behalf:
by threatening legal action against the New York Post for airing the legitimate charges of plagiarism, by creating a new, ad hoc vocabulary to legitimize her plagiarism (“duplicative language”/“missteps”), by also echoing her charges of racism (and in surreal fashion without any self-awareness that if such charges were true, then Harvard would not have forced her to resign or at least would have refused her resignation), by claiming that anonymous complaints of her intellectual theft were somehow illegitimate by virtue of their whistleblower status, by absurdly insinuating that plagiarism is not plagiarism if the plagiarized does not complain.
There was one key issue that Gay neither raised nor much less resolved: given that now Professor Gay has made no effort to explain item-by-item, all the allegations of decades-long and habitual plagiarism, does she feel now exempt from such charges as a Harvard professor of political science?
And if so, is her faculty exemption of the sort usually accorded other professors and students under similar suspicion of plagiarism?
In the end, was it really asking too much of a Harvard president just to do two things? 1) Explain to Congress why there was a problem of anti-Semitism at Harvard, and then outline the concrete steps she would take to stop the spread of growing anti-Semitic speech and conduct at her campus, and 2) just don’t plagiarize the work of other scholars?
January 05, 2024, 05:21 PM
RoverSig
As one commentator noted after reading Gay's articles, she wasn't a very good scholar anyway.
January 05, 2024, 05:55 PM
ZSMICHAEL
They are calling for Penny Pritzgers head.{She helped get Claudine the job}. Her brother is JB Pritzger Illiniois Governor.(I believe she is Jewish}.
January 05, 2024, 06:57 PM
Sigmund
quote:
Originally posted by Pipe Smoker: “Gay will be replaced by Alan M. Garber, Provost and Chief Academic Officer, who sat behind her at the infamous December 5 hearing, nodding as she made her remarks. …”
What truly disgusts me is the fact that despite what we now know to be irrefutable truth, Gay was only pressured to step down as president. She still holds a teaching position which she will undoubtedly poison young minds with lies about the entire incident.
The obvious result for such egregious plagiarism throughout her entire career should include being stripped of every diploma, every accolade, every benefit her ill gotten position includes. But she remains, protected by the onerous hierarchy that exists at not only Harvard, but in the twisted elitist world view.
“Remember to get vaccinated or a vaccinated person might get sick from a virus they got vaccinated against because you’re not vaccinated.” - author unknown
January 06, 2024, 08:42 AM
chellim1
Ms. Gay is a sterling example of how DEI is the antithesis of meritocracy...
The Big Takeaway from Harvard -- Diversity is the Enemy of Meritocracy
"Some things are apparent. Where government moves in, community retreats, civil society disintegrates and our ability to control our own destiny atrophies. The result is: families under siege; war in the streets; unapologetic expropriation of property; the precipitous decline of the rule of law; the rapid rise of corruption; the loss of civility and the triumph of deceit. The result is a debased, debauched culture which finds moral depravity entertaining and virtue contemptible." -- Justice Janice Rogers Brown
"The United States government is the largest criminal enterprise on earth." -rduckwor
The diversity ideology marches on at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
MIT president Sally Kornbluth announced on Wednesday that the university would soon reveal its inaugural Vice President for Equity and Inclusion (VPEI). If one wanted evidence of the disconnect between university culture and the outside world, Kornbluth’s announcement provides it.
Since October 7, universities have been the focus of nearly unprecedented public attention, triggered by student and faculty support for the Hamas terror attacks on Israel. Alumni from schools like Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania charged their universities with complicity in anti-Semitism and demanded that Jews be included in the roster of “marginalized” groups protected by the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) bureaucracy.
Eventually, however, it dawned on the rebellious donors that the DEI complex was not the solution to perceived anti-Semitism but part of the problem, since the DEI apparatus enforces the progressive world view that the West (now embodied by Israel) is unremittingly racist, colonialist, and oppressive. The alumni demand for adding “anti-Semitism training” to the DEI portfolio of “anti-hate trainings” turned into its opposite: a demand that the DEI apparatus be shut down entirely. (Harvard donor Bill Ackman’s conversion in this regard has been unusually public.)
It’s been hard to miss this new consensus among university critics. National and state legislators, governors, and other public figures have called for the elimination of DEI administrations. Denunciation of the equity and inclusion bureaucracy is now part of every call to reform of the post–October 7 university—to the point that left-wing defenders of the university are railing against what they view as conservatives’ exploitation of the Hamas campus crisis to defund essential diversity initiatives.
And yet here was Sally Kornbluth on January 3, blithely trumpeting the imminent arrival of MIT’s latest diversity sinecure, the VPEI. The university already has an Institute Community and Equity Officer (ICEO) charged with being a “thought leader on the subjects of community, equity, inclusion, and diversity,” according to the ICEO’s official description. This equity officer oversees MIT’s Strategic Action Plan for Belonging, Achievement, and Composition, which requires each academic program to improve the “representation” of “underrepresented” graduate students, faculty, postdocs, and undergraduates. The Strategic Action Plan for Belonging, Achievement, and Composition posits that the “composition of our community, and of our leadership, should reflect a commitment to diversity.” It provides no argument for why MIT’s “composition” should “reflect a commitment to diversity,” nor evidence for why such a commitment is compatible with colorblind academic excellence.
The new VPEI will be certain to take the ICEO’s work into unimagined dimensions of identity-based enforcement.
Kornbluth has heretofore avoided the intense heat directed at the now-ousted presidents of the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard, despite having given a similarly robotic (and similarly hypocritical) defense of campus free speech at the now-infamous December 5 House hearing on anti-Semitism. The best that could be said of Kornbluth’s congressional performance was that she avoided the condescending hauteur and sense of aristocratic weariness with GOP yokels that characterized then-Harvard president Claudine Gay’s testimony. MIT’s Jewish alumni started organizing after what they viewed as the administration’s inadequate response to student lawlessness during a pro-Palestinian occupation of MIT’s main campus building on November 9, 2023. But the MIT alumni have yet to reach the critical mass or clout of alumni from the Penn and Harvard business schools. Kornbluth’s seeming blindness to DEI’s loss of legitimacy raises further questions about her fitness to lead MIT, however, at the very least on grounds of sheer political cluelessness.
MIT is a science school. Its faculty and graduates have furthered mankind’s conquest of disease, catastrophe, and ignorance by prying loose the secrets of the universe, the atom, and the cell. Nowhere in that triumph of knowledge and discovery did a conscious engineering of “representation” and “diversity” play a role. MIT recognized scientific excellence and pursued it, in whatever color, shape, or sex it came.
Now, however, MIT, too, has succumbed to the ideology of color-consciousness, as the 2020 cancellation of a speech on planetary science by geophysicist Dorian Abbot made clear. (Abbot had co-written an unrelated article supporting meritocratic excellence in college admissions and faculty hiring.) An MIT computer scientist, Mauricio Karchmer, has just resigned, citing the priority put on “promoting a particular world view” in “many of MIT’s departments and programs.”
Kornbluth exemplifies a rule of thumb: anyone in a university leadership position not affirmatively opposed to race politics supports antimeritocratic ideas. She also demonstrates just how blinding campus ideology is: her first instincts are to parrot local received wisdom about MIT’s being insufficiently “welcoming” to diversity and not yet being a place where “all feel that we belong,” in Kornbluth’s words. Kornbluth is proceeding with initiatives called “Standing Together Against Hate” and “Unity Across Differences”—all invitations for further interventions from diversity ideologues.
Campus reformers need to find leaders, faculty, and boards, like the board of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who explicitly repudiate DEI. Everyone else is a trojan horse.
January 08, 2024, 08:35 AM
chellim1
quote:
VDH on Twitter: Claudine Gay Is Only Digging Deeper
As usual, VDH is clear and to the point.
It's really quite simple. The question to ask these 'academics' and institutions is this: Does your institution have academic standards? Y or N? Do they apply equally to all? Y or N?
2. an idea or thing used as a measure, norm, or model in comparative evaluations.
"Some things are apparent. Where government moves in, community retreats, civil society disintegrates and our ability to control our own destiny atrophies. The result is: families under siege; war in the streets; unapologetic expropriation of property; the precipitous decline of the rule of law; the rapid rise of corruption; the loss of civility and the triumph of deceit. The result is a debased, debauched culture which finds moral depravity entertaining and virtue contemptible." -- Justice Janice Rogers Brown
"The United States government is the largest criminal enterprise on earth." -rduckwor
January 09, 2024, 12:34 PM
PASig
This keeps getting better and better, now the Harvard board is being looked at for covering all this up:
A major Cornell donor says he will no longer donate to the university if it continues to implement diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. The donor is also calling for the resignation of the school’s president over her “shameful recent response to clear acts of terrorism and antisemitism.”
“As a proud Cornell alumnus, donor, Member of the Board of Trustees (Emeritus), and Counselor to the President, it is my opinion that Cornell must abandon its misguided commitment to DEI because it has yielded not excellence but disgrace,” Jon A. Lindseth wrote in an open letter to Chairman Kraig Kayser and the Board of Trustees.
“I am proud to count myself one of several generations of Lindseths who are Cornell alumni and invested donors, but I am alarmed by the diminished quality of education offered lately by my alma mater because of its disastrous involvement with DEI policies that have infiltrated every part of the university,” he added.
Lindseth went on to say that he has “spent years hearing the stories of Cornell and its leadership, participating as a student, and sponsoring and funding some of the University’s exemplary past work including the Library (which I continue to fund).”
“I can no longer make general contributions until the university reformulates its approach to education by replacing DEI groupthink with the original noble intent of Cornell,” he added.
Lindseth, who has been one of Cornell’s largest, most prominent donors for several decades, called out the school’s president, Martha E. Pollack, over her response to the October 7 Hamas terrorist attack against Israel.
“President Pollack’s shameful recent response to clear acts of terrorism and antisemitism compared with her swift and strong response to the George Floyd tragedy demonstrates that Cornell is no longer concerned with discovering and disseminating knowledge, but rather with adhering to DEI groupthink policies and racialization,” he wrote.
“Today the instruction Cornell offers is in DEI groupthink applied to every field of study,” Lindseth added. “The result is a moral decay, some call it ‘rot,’ that falls in line with prevailing ideology and dishonors basic principles of justice and free speech.”
Lindseth went on to assert that Cornell did not become “one of the country’s leading institutions and a proud member of the Ivy League” by putting “more value on DEI’s broad application rather than merit,” which is what has happened under President Pollack’s leadership.
“Under President Pollack’s leadership, antisemitism and general intolerance have increased on campus,” the Cornell alumnus added. “Her lack of leadership in the days following the October 7th massacre is only one of the many examples of poor leadership and failed policies at Cornell.”
Lindseth also pointed to a new campus “bias reporting system,” which he said “fosters a hostile Orwellian environment among neighbors, classmates, and colleagues reporting on one another.”
“The elimination of grades and SATs has created a system in which equal outcomes rather than proven merit has become the objective,” he said. “This is disastrous for a research university that is built upon academic achievement and aims to educate and train some of our country’s leading scientists, architects, and engineers.”
Lindseth has also requested that recent recalls for Pollack’s resignation be added to the agenda of Friday’s emergency board meeting.
“Provost Michael Kotlikoff should also resign for his close involvement in the denigration of Cornell’s academic legacy under DEI,” he added. “I’m sure everyone is familiar with ‘The Peter Principle.’ It being people rise in an organization until they reach their level of incompetence.”
Lindseth concluded, in part, by stating, “No alumnus, student, or faculty member should accept Cornell’s being in this shameful position,” adding, “We need new leadership to correct these intolerable circumstances and to redeem Cornell’s legacy and honor as soon as possible.”