In the pre-dawn hours of March 18, 1990, following a festive St. Patrick’s Day in Boston, two men dressed as police officers walked into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and walked off with an estimated $500 million in art treasures. Despite efforts by the local police, federal agents, amateur sleuths and not a few journalists, […]
Read MoreTag: Harvard University
The Woman Who Tried to Make Porn Safe for Feminism
Harvard’s Schlesinger Library is the nation’s leading repository for women’s history, home to the papers of suffragists and social reformers, poets and politicians, the collective behind “Our Bodies, Ourselves” and iconic figures like Amelia Earhart, Angela Davis and Julia Child. But in its basement vaults, carefully preserved in a box, you can also find a […]
Read MoreHarvard’s Response to Subpoenas Is Called ‘Useless’ by House Committee
Representative Virginia Foxx, who is leading a House investigation of campus antisemitism, blasted Harvard University on Tuesday for handing over “useless” documents in response to subpoenas. “I don’t know if it’s arrogance, ineptness, or indifference that’s guiding Harvard,” Representative Foxx, a North Carolina Republican, said in a statement. “Regardless, its actions to date are shameful.” […]
Read MoreTrump’s Tax Cut Fueled Investment but Did Not Pay for Itself, Study Finds
The corporate tax cuts that President Donald J. Trump signed into law in 2017 have boosted investment in the U.S. economy and delivered a modest pay bump for workers, according to the most rigorous and detailed study yet of the law’s effects. Those benefits are less than Republicans promised, though, and they have come at […]
Read MoreSupreme Court Won’t Hear Virginia High School’s Admissions Case on Race
The Supreme Court cleared the way on Tuesday for the use of admissions criteria intended to diversify the student body at an elite public high school in Virginia, declining to revisit the role race may play in admissions months after it sharply curtailed affirmative action programs in higher education. In turning down a challenge to […]
Read MoreHouse Committee Will Subpoena Harvard for Documents Relating to Antisemitism
A congressional committee said Friday that it would serve subpoenas on Harvard University in a hunt for documentation of whether the university tolerated antisemitism on its campus. The move is part of an expanding Republican effort to investigate elite universities for their response to pro-Palestinian student demonstrations, especially after the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks in […]
Read MoreThe Fight Over Academic Freedom
Academic freedom is a bedrock of the modern American university. And lately, it seems to be coming under fire from all directions. For many scholars, the biggest danger is at public universities in Republican-controlled states like Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis has led the passage of laws that restrict what can be taught and spearheaded […]
Read MoreBrooke Ellison, Prominent Disability Rights Advocate, Is Dead at 45
Brooke Ellison, who after being paralyzed from the neck down by a childhood car accident went on to graduate from Harvard and became a professor and a devoted disability rights advocate, died on Sunday in Stony Brook, N.Y., on Long Island. She was 45. Her death, in a hospital, was caused by complications of quadriplegia, […]
Read MoreInvestigation Opened Into Claims of Discrimination Against Palestinian Students at Harvard
The U.S. Education Department said on Tuesday that it had opened an investigation into Harvard over whether it failed to protect Palestinian, Muslim and Arab students and their supporters from harassment, threats and intimidation. Harvard has been in turmoil for months over its response to the attack on Israel and the ensuing war in Gaza, […]
Read MoreFederal Records Show Increasing Use of Solitary Confinement for Immigrants
The United States government has placed detained immigrants in solitary confinement more than 14,000 times in the last five years, and the average duration is almost twice the 15-day threshold that the United Nations has said may constitute torture, according to a new analysis of federal records by researchers at Harvard and the nonprofit group […]
Read MoreBill Ackman and Mark Zuckerberg Fail to Land Candidates on Harvard’s Board of Overseers
It’s hard to get into Harvard, even if you’ve done it before. Mark Zuckerberg, head of Meta, and Bill Ackman, head of the Pershing Square hedge fund, discovered as much, in their failed push to get dissident candidates onto the Harvard Board of Overseers, one of the university’s two governing bodies. The candidates — a […]
Read MoreAnother Black Woman in Trouble at Harvard. And Surprise, Suprise, She heads Diversity
Sherri Ann CharlestonScreenshot: Facebook Just weeks after former Harvard President Claudine Gay resigned in the face of plagiarism allegations, another Black woman at the Massachusetts-based university is allegedly in the hot seat. What Rev Run Really Thinks About Nicki Minaj, Plus Run DMC Honored In New Docuseries On Monday, an anonymous complaint was reportedly filed […]
Read MoreAnother Black Woman in Trouble at Harvard. And Surprise, Suprise, She’s head of Diversity
Sherri Ann CharlestonScreenshot: Facebook Just weeks after former Harvard President Claudine Gay resigned in the face of plagiarism allegations, another Black woman at the Massachusetts-based university is allegedly in the hot seat. What Rev Run Really Thinks About Nicki Minaj, Plus Run DMC Honored In New Docuseries On Monday, an anonymous complaint was reportedly filed […]
Read MoreIvy League Campus Wars Aren’t About Gender … Are They?
In the first weeks of the war between Israel and Hamas, Nancy Andrews read about American college presidents under fire and something nagged at her. Why, she wondered, did it seem like so many of those presidents were women? Dr. Andrews, who was the first female dean of Duke Medical School and until last year […]
Read MoreWe Need a New Word for ‘Plagiarism’
Leave it to a linguist to say this, but we need another word. In this case, we need a word for the relatively minor, “duplicative language” version of plagiarism. To present someone else’s ideas as one’s own is unquestionably wrong, in academia and elsewhere. However, to cite boilerplate statements — the assumptions basic to a […]
Read MoreAn Atheist Chaplain, and a Death Row Inmate’s Final Hours
“God, that chicken.” Devin Moss has a voice that rumbles, low and slow like distant thunder, but this morning it was softer, more contemplative. His hands gripped the steering wheel of his rental car. He was dressed head to toe in white linen, his body glowing in an almost celestial way, as he drove toward […]
Read MoreHarvard Defends Its Plagiarism Investigation of Its Former President
In a report to a congressional committee, released on Friday, Harvard gave its most detailed account yet of its handling of the plagiarism accusations against Claudine Gay, who resigned this month as the university’s president. The basic outlines of the saga were known, but Harvard had not disclosed many details, which had led to questions […]
Read MoreThe Next Battle in Higher Ed May Strike at Its Soul: Scholarship
Marc Tessier-Lavigne, president of Stanford, resigned in August after an investigation found serious flaws in studies he had supervised going back decades. Claudine Gay, president of Harvard, resigned as the new year dawned, under mounting accusations of plagiarism going back to her graduate student days. Then Neri Oxman, a former star professor at M.I.T., was […]
Read MoreWhy Casey Left Substack, Elon Musk and Drugs, and an A.I. Antibiotic Discovery
Listen and follow ‘Hard Fork’Apple | Spotify | Amazon | YouTube Casey is taking his newsletter Platformer off Substack, as criticism over the company’s handling of pro-Nazi content grows. Then, The Wall Street Journal spoke with witnesses who said that Elon Musk had used LSD, cocaine, ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms, worrying some directors and board […]
Read MoreStudents Sue Harvard, Calling It a ‘Bastion’ of Antisemitism
Six students sued Harvard on Wednesday, claiming that the renowned university had become a “bastion of rampant anti-Jewish hatred and harassment” that was exacerbated by the Hamas attack on Israel last October. The complaint, filed in federal court in Massachusetts, says that Harvard professors have promulgated antisemitism in their courses and intimidated students who object. […]
Read MoreTwo Capitol Riots. Two Very Different Results.
Monday marks one year since thousands of right-wing protesters draped in the colors of the Brazilian flag stormed into Brazil’s Congress, Supreme Court and presidential offices with a violent fury and the goal of overturning an election. Saturday marked three years since thousands of Americans did just about the same thing. They were two shocking […]
Read MoreClaudine Gay Was Not Driven Out Because She Is Black
Since Claudine Gay’s resignation as president of Harvard University on Tuesday, it has become an article of faith among some of her supporters and other observers that she was targeted, criticized and essentially driven from the job largely because of her race. The idea is that the people who questioned her abilities and academic integrity […]
Read MoreCalling All Swifties: A Taylor Swift-Themed Course Is Currently Seeking Teaching Assistants
Taylor Swift’s star power is something to be studied, and thanks to Harvard University, you can. Last year, the Ivy League institution announced that the “Karma” singer would be the central focus of one of their newest course, “Taylor Swift and Her World.” Despite the public’s mixed reviews of the news, students at the university […]
Read MoreWhy Claudine Gay Staying At Harvard After Resigning As President Shouldn’t Be Surprising
NewsOne Featured Video Source: Boston Globe / Getty Harvard University President Claudine Gay resigned on Jan. 2, 2024, less than one month after University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill stepped down. They called it quits amid uproar among conservative lawmakers and several major donors regarding what they saw as Gay’s and Magill’s underwhelming responses to […]
Read MoreClaudine Gay Wasn’t the Only Person Who Had a Really Bad Week
These Are The Black Celebs Who Were Named On Jeffrey Epstein’s List Photo: CNN The Roots’ Black Thought On Befriending Questlove & Classmates Boyz II Men & Others In New Memoir Off English On Wednesday, court documents were unsealed (following a federal judge’s ruling in December) that included more than 100 names allegedly connected to […]
Read MoreHow Harvard’s Board Broke Up With Claudine Gay
Claudine Gay was in Rome on a family vacation on Dec. 27 when Penny Pritzker, the leader of Harvard University’s governing board, called to ask: Did she think there was a path forward with her as the school’s president? Ms. Pritzker sounded weary, and it was posed as an open question, two people with knowledge […]
Read MoreWife of Investor Who Pushed for Harvard President’s Exit Is Accused of Plagiarism
Accusations of plagiarism appear to be the newest weapon in the raging battle over the leadership and direction of elite universities. For weeks, Bill Ackman, the billionaire hedge fund manager, has campaigned on social media against Claudine Gay, who resigned as Harvard’s president amid accusations of plagiarizing other scholars and of not taking a strong […]
Read MoreHouse Republicans to Broaden Higher Education Inquiry Beyond Antisemitism
When Representative Virginia Foxx, Republican of North Carolina and the chairwoman of the Education and Workforce Committee, arranged a hearing about antisemitism on college campuses, she said, her goal was not to force the nation’s top university presidents out of their jobs. But after the presidents of Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania gave […]
Read MoreHow Black And White Allegations Of Plagiarism Were Handled
Cambridge, MA – September 29: Claudine Gay on stage in Harvard Yard. She was formally inaugurated as Harvard University’s 30th president. On right is Drew Gilpin Faust, the 28th president of Harvard. Photo: Suzanne Kreiter/The Boston Globe (Getty Images) Former Harvard President Claudine Gay is obviously the most high profile case involving accusations of plagiarism […]
Read MoreHow An Allegation of Plagiarism Is a Killer of Careers for Black People but Not So Much For White People
Cambridge, MA – September 29: Claudine Gay on stage in Harvard Yard. She was formally inaugurated as Harvard University’s 30th president. On right is Drew Gilpin Faust, the 28th president of Harvard. Photo: Suzanne Kreiter/The Boston Globe (Getty Images) Former Harvard President Claudine Gay is obviously the most high profile case involving accusations of plagiarism […]
Read MoreHow An Allegation of Plagiarism Is a Killer of Careers for Black People but Not So Much For White People
Cambridge, MA – September 29: Claudine Gay on stage in Harvard Yard. She was formally inaugurated as Harvard University’s 30th president. On right is Drew Gilpin Faust, the 28th president of Harvard. Photo: Suzanne Kreiter/The Boston Globe (Getty Images) Former Harvard President Claudine Gay is obviously the most high profile case involving accusations of plagiarism […]
Read More