Hamilton College, like most institutions of higher learning, has their students sign an honor code. It requires that students refrain from academic dishonesty. The code defines plagiarism as “[f]ailure to acknowledge ideas, phrases, data, music, images, or other intellectual property gained from a preexisting body of work.”
In October 2002, the president of Hamilton College resigned in a plagiarism scandal. As it turned out, he did not perpetrate the act once. Like most plagiarists, he committed serial acts of plagiarizing, which was well known at the time. Despite this dishonesty, Hamilton’s board of trustees allowed him to stay on until June 2003, established prizes in his name (including a chair named for him), and on his departure, got him a cushy job at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Hamilton College students convicted of academic dishonesty during his tenure as president did not share his fate.
In “Black Privilege at Harvard” published in the December 13th issue of The American Mind, Alexander Riley Senior Fellow, The Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization, discusses the serial plagiarism of Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard University. Riley, a professor of sociology at Bucknell University, was shown evidence of Gay’s appropriation of the work of others. “. . .Gay did violate Harvard’s own rules for its students on plagiarism, multiple times, in multiple publications over the course of her career.” At Harvard University and Hamilton College, “Plagiarism is defined as the act of intentionally OR unintentionally submitting work that was written by somebody else.”
“Harvard’s response,” observes Dr. Riley, “is utterly inadequate and intellectually dishonest.” It dismissed the evidence, which is egregious. “No reasonable person. . .would define the 17 instances in her two recent articles as ‘a few.’” He suggests that the Harvard Corporation is engaging in a cover-up for President Gay’s sins. The National Association of Scholars is currently poring over her “scholarship” to uncover her misdeeds.
President Gay, by training a political scientist, published zero books. Harvard has apparently determined “that different rules of evaluation of scholarly merit and integrity apply in the DEI [Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion] era.” As David Randall, an executive for the National Association of Scholars quipped, “‘the president has no clothes.’ Harvard is daring everyone to notice.”
The quote defining the acronym DEI as “DEI [Diversity, Equity, and Exclusion]” does not make any sense. First of all, “Exclusion” does not begin with an “I”. Perhaps the “I” is actually meant to represent “Inclusion” – which makes more sense and gives a correct acronym of DEI.
More importantly, it can be argued with mounting evidence that the recent trend towards DEI offices and consultants in the academic, government, and business world results more often in Division, Exclusion, and Inequality rather than the stated intention of encouraging Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. DEI policies ultimately and inevitably result in the opposite effects their most ardent supporters claim to want. I believe this is intentional and dishonest on the part of those pushing the DEI agenda.