Blue City, Jodhpur.
… but UD had had enough climbing, so she sat in a dusty nook and watched this woman lug stones on her head. In seconds, she and two other women put down their work and excitedly gazed at UD and came over and talked to her, though she and the women shared not one word in any language.
Americans are attractive exotics round these parts, and UD was several times at the fort stopped by families who asked if they could take her picture. Whole families crammed into the picture, arms around UD…
Who is UD, she thought, as exuberant, curious people rushed her, that Indians art mindful of her?
To the three ladies’ manifest questionings, UD passed her hand against her forehead: I stopped walking because I am tired. Yes, yes, they signaled, and then talked with me some more. Eventually I closed my eyes and leaned against the pillar, and they went back to work.
A man seeing me with my eyes closed approached. “Are you ok?” “Just waiting for my husband; thank you for asking,” and he smiled the sweetest smile.
The acoustics were good, and one of the ladies was singing; so UD sang. She sang Ella Fitzgerald’s version of Mister Paganini; she sang Sarah Vaughan’s version of Speak Low. She sang – natch – Music For A While. The ladies seemed to like all of this, though it sounded not at all like their songs.
… who look like they’ve stepped out of the pages of Vogue.
An understandable error! Most people cannot comprehend/believe that one university’s endowment is over fifty billion dollars; and Harvard will be at one hundred billion before you know it, which will be that much harder to assimilate as a reality.
Even a New York Times opinion writer (plus, UD assumes, a bunch of editors who reviewed her column) finds herself rendering a reasonably large endowment as an amount in the hundreds of millions, rather than as an amount exceeding the GDP of 120 nations.
Here’s a simple trick to help you remember: Just repeat aloud ten times FIFTY BILL FIFTY BILL with a stress on the b.
… on all of whose surfaces appear the very greatest art the world has ever known.
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La Kid and Mr UD gesticulate down the street from the museum.
… Harvard, which compels its undergraduates to master expository writing in their freshman year, cannot find the language to defend itself [in its letter about Claudine Gray’s resignation]. The corporation does not apologize or explain. Instead, it throws up its hands in prayer: “May our community, with its long history of rising through change and through storm, find new ways to meet those challenges together, and to affirm Harvard’s commitment to generating knowledge, pursuing truth and contributing through scholarship and education to a better world.”
The clouds of mystification gather early. Can a nearly 400-year-old entity that began as a seminary for young Protestant men and grew into a global educational brand with a $50 billion endowment be said in any meaningful sense to constitute a community? The sentence then succumbs to a storm of clattering prose and conceptual incoherence. It’s hard to know just what or how many things Harvard is committed to, or what new ways of affirming that commitment might be found.
Even if one accepts that Gay’s transgressions are relatively trivial in themselves, the sheer number of citation errors is deeply troubling. As of this writing, dozens upon dozens of instances of “improper citation” across her published work indicate a systematic problem with the basics of academic writing. Perhaps this really does not rise to the level of research misconduct, but it constitutes strong evidence that the former president of Harvard struggles to cite properly.
Aleksandar Stević
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Click on this post’s category – PLAGIARISM – to see all of these observations, and more, expanded upon over many years.
She has resigned.
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[T]he important question for Harvard was never whether Gay should step down. It was why she was brought on in the first place, after one of the shortest presidential searches in Harvard’s recent history. How did someone with a scholarly record as thin as hers — she has not written a single book, has published only 11 journal articles in the past 26 years and made no seminal contributions to her field — reach the pinnacle of American academia?
So here’s UD‘s take on that one. Although it sounds unpleasantly snobby and snippy to say things like “has not written a single book,” it’s true that in many fields (not all), books are the currency, and UD too was surprised that one of the world’s preeminent universities chose as president someone with, yes, a “thin” scholarly record.
Yet if Gay hadn’t plagiarized throughout her career, UD would have let the thinness go, mainly because Gay seems to have moved from scholarship to administration pretty early, and if you’re a brilliant administrator (I have no idea whether she was), it’s arguable that you can be expected to ease up on your writing.
And listen — excellent essays can often have greater accessibility and impact than books. Think of ground-breaking essays by S. Huntington, J. Nash, R. Putnam… If one of Gay’s had been – not as staggering as those, but interestingly original, and seriously influential – UD also would have had no problem. A great essay, in any field, can sometimes demonstrate your scholarly quality better than a book. So for me the thinness is not about the lack of a book in particular; it’s about the lack of some form of impactful intellectual work.
