23 Comments

Among the more important tragedies here for education are the kids who sacrifice time and sleep and money to get an education because they really do want one, and encounter a puffed-up moron like this and become either discouraged at the mediocrity found in their institutions, or, because of their limited exposure to good teaching, think this guy has something useful to impart.

A really good teacher/mentor can save someone worth saving. A bad one of course...

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Mar 9Liked by Christopher Brunet

" the DEI-industrial complex has evolved into a lucrative venture for intellectual lightweights, exploiting noble ideals for personal gain. "

The only thing I would disagree with is "has evolved into" as opposed to "pretty much always was." Once there stopped being consequences the sky was the limit, and this sort of nonsense has even fewer consequences than most bs companies. You don't even have to produce a product, because the product is "fancy people telling you your ideology is correct."

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Mar 9Liked by Christopher Brunet

I know this is a fairly simplistic comment, but I know there is essential truth to it.

The governance of non-profits is deeply flawed. They sit on a pile of untaxed cash that has no direct owner. The trustees have the ability to make decisions that don’t affect any owner’s wealth, thus they are free to do what is in the collective non-pecuniary interest of the trustees, rarely with consequences. And, we see this behavior over and over again in the non-profit world.

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Mar 9·edited Mar 9Liked by Christopher Brunet

FWIW, I once told off a grad student with whom I worked closely because I felt his PhD thesis plagiarized our collaborative work (not as verbatim copy and paste, but in terms of ideas). A simple citation or acknowledgment would have fixed the problem. This was in the hard sciences.

I was peeved and never followed up on whether a revision was made to the thesis. Oh well.

The fundamental problem of people like Claudine and Terrell is that their academic subject is basically tautological. The field exists to justify itself. I suspect climate science also attracts its share of loud mouths who have trouble thinking and writing deeply. Plagiarism would be the result.

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Mar 9Liked by Christopher Brunet

All of his alleged misdeeds are surely due to systemic racism, or Vladimir Putin.

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Mar 9Liked by Christopher Brunet

It's always endlessly amusing to me that the exact same class of society's "elite" who constantly sneer down their noses at the police or military for cover-ups, both of whom face grave consequences for their actions ranging from serious physical injury to death and jail, themselves engage in the same conduct without any consequences apparently.

And I'm NOT arguing that the corrupt in military or law enforcement shouldn't face appropriate consequences, but it is amazing that the loudest voices calling for accountability and transparency show exactly zero awareness that they do the same thing.

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Mar 9Liked by Christopher Brunet

With this new, highly effective “Roto-Rooter” of academia, I see much more modest CVs becoming the future trend.

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Mar 9Liked by Christopher Brunet

Amyl Nitrate and curriculum vitae drafting don't mix.

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Mar 9Liked by Christopher Brunet

Of course, he's laughing all the way to the bank.

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DEI is a grift and always has been.

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Terrell is a low rent version of Claudine Gay and in a sane world he would be an event organizer for a legitimate business or maybe even own a catering business or something to do with entertainment. He has the ability and the hustle to make it work, but society allows him and encourages him to make his living as a professional liar.

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MLK, Terrel Strayhorn, Claudine gay....

I don't know what it is but i'm beginning to see a pattern here.

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"I spoke to one professor who said he had seen a thesis retroactively corrected before, but he was unable to point to any specific instances."

I suspect that the prof you cited lied to you about not recalling the case where he'd seen a thesis retroactively corrected. If, as he claimed, this only happened once in his entire career, he'd damned well remember the thesis and its "author." Otherwise, he lied about having seen this before, and wanted to make it seem like it wasn't such a big deal. Either way, he was lying.

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I note that even your corrected count (~120 refereed journal articles and book chapters) is almost an order of magnitude more than the productivity of C Gay. I do wonder how many of those 120 are original work and not copypasta-ed plagiarism though

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With a name like "Strayhorn", I'd expect a stream of bastards, not academic fraud. Guess all the bastardry got kept inside, instead.

could be Gay too who knows

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