Forgive my snark.
The President of Harvard University, arguably one of the 15 most prestigious Universities in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, has been accused of plagiarism in her thesis.
Give her a break.
She was "guilty" of using stock-phrases that trip easily off the tongue. In the minds of the glitterari, those stock-phrases make them sound highly edumacated to the rubes.
Here comes the snark
When a body of knowledge, like Woke Studies, is a small-and-shallow puddle, then circular logic and the intense recycling of language becomes inevitable. Sort of like the sewage/drinking water issues in Delaware.
Give President Gay (yes, that is her name) a break. She is what she is. And Harvard is what Harvard is.
Of COURSE Harvard did not find any plagiarism. If they did, that would imply that the search committee (Top men, women and fuzzies. Top people) had not exercised due diligence. And that would threaten Harvard's Top-15 ranking and they might get edged out by Holyoke Community College.
As one wag once observed "Harvard is an endowment fund that entertains the minimum number of students required to maintain its tax-free status"
That giant sucking sound you hear is the donations being pulled from their Alumni.
ReplyDeleteI’ve been a hiring manager in technical manufacturing since 2003. A college degree used to be looked upon as a mark of accomplishment, and worthy of the interview and perhaps a higher starting wage.
ReplyDeleteSomewhere in the late 20 teens or certainly by 2020 all of that flipped. We avoid them now. It is seen as an HR liability. Future problems with their behavior are not worth what we would have to pay them.
Give us a young person who knows how to work - and we will teach the technical skills.
My first question right out of the gate in any interview is this: “Tell me about the first dollar you ever earned that did not come from mom or dad. How old were you and what did you do to earn it?”
That one question usually sorts the wheat from the chaff.
If it was just "stock phrases" why is she having to go back and add citations and put whole paragraphs in quotation marks in two or more of her publications?
ReplyDelete