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Comment by gustavus | Hacker News Reader

This fuels my growing distrust of academia. The person who is the president of one of the most prestigious academic institutions in the world it turns out has been consistently violating some of the most basic principles of academic integrity. Beyond that there is questions if this individual was qualified for the position in the first place or if they were selected on account of other factors.

So maybe sometimes it pays to be skeptical of "the experts".

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This is the only logical stance to have until we see some signs of life for merit and achievement as their guiding principles again.

There are two reasons why initially Harvard dug in, putting it's "full support" behind her:

1. They dismissed the plagiarism allegations as partisan (which was sort of true but the copy pasting was pretty egregious)

2. Harvard ontologically can't understand how its reputation could be hurt by this or anything else. Everyone there thinks of themselves as the "best" and in their mind these political squabbles, or even who the president is shouldn't matter.

Plagiarism has always existed in academia. What you’re witnessing is selective enforcement, where a group wanted her out because she was weak on antisemitism, and went digging for the dirt they needed. In this case, they struck plagiarism and stopped early. But it could have easily been some other gotcha sufficient to cancel someone. When you have a thousand eyes scrutinizing someone, all kinds of skeletons reveal themselves.

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