Is Harvard preparing to concede that President Gay should be let go?

The controversy swirling around Dr. Gay raises questions about what it means for a premier American university when its scholarly leader — who at Harvard has final approval on all tenure decisions — has been accused of failing to adhere to scholarly standards. The allegations against her [have] prompted some to wonder whether Harvard is treating its leader with greater latitude than it would its students.

Says the NYT. Then it takes a trip down memory lane. Devoted UD readers will recall these earlier stunningly hypocritical Harvard plagiarism cases.

In 2005, after two prominent law professors, Charles Ogletree Jr. and Laurence Tribe, were publicly accused of plagiarism, The Harvard Crimson ran an editorial decrying the “disappointing double standard,” noting that “students caught plagiarizing are routinely suspended for semesters or even entire academic years.”

In both cases, the investigations — which were led by Derek Bok, a former Harvard president, and unfolded over months — found that each had in fact committed plagiarism. The professors were publicly chastised by the administration, but Harvard did not say whether there were any sanctions, according to news reports at the time.

In an apology, Mr. Ogletree, who died this year, acknowledged that his 2004 book “All Deliberate Speed” included several paragraphs from another law professor almost verbatim, without any attribution, according to a New York Times report at the time. (He said it was the result of a mix-up by his research assistants.)

In Mr. Tribe’s case, he was deemed by Harvard’s president and the law school dean to have unintentionally included “various brief passages and phrases that echo or overlap with material” in a book by another scholar, who was not credited. Mr. Tribe, who still teaches at Harvard, apologized.

These were ATELIER plagiarism (read about UD’s tripartite scheme here], plagiarism committed by the flunkies who write your books for you because you’re far too busy and important to write them yourself. (See, among other Harvard luminaries, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jill Abramson, and Alan Dershowitz.)

The getting off scot-free bit is a prototypical instance of oligarchic privilege, an outcome no one in any of the world’s many class-based, corrupt from top to bottom, countries would have any trouble recognizing.

So Eli’s in trouble with the law again – an occupational hazard for the very worst of career criminals – and having helped get his buddy Trump to pardon Eli the last time, one assumes Alan Dershowitz is now hard at work on a second pardon.

Eli and his partners in crime hail from Lakewood NJ, a hotbed of theft which you already know about if you read University Diaries.

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What? You say there’s no way Fuckface can be reelected?

Silly. Everyone said there was no way he could be elected the first time.

What a distinction for Harvard, which gets a prominent mention every time Alan Dershowitz steps in another pile of shit, that he’s now been sanctioned for his involvement in Lake’s frivolous, time-wasting, and destructive suit against the integrity of Arizona’s electoral system. Hard to think of a more embarrassing old fart than Harvard’s highest-profile emeritus.

Color UD mildly shocked but pleased to see this quite explicit article. Reading its concern about how best to have a clitoris, and then enjoying the sometimes hilarious comments on the piece (“Yes, yes. But what about inflation?”), UD kept thinking about the simple solution to the problem offered all over the world to more than two hundred million women.

Haha, I mean not offered; imposed. When they’re children.

IF THEIR CLITS OFFEND THEE, CUT THEM OFF.

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As long as we have people like Alan Dershowitz in the United States (and, on the other side, Ilhan Omar), female genital mutilation will continue to be a popular option among some groups even here. England’s got a rampant case of it.

Entire religious groups, like India’s Dawoodi Bohra, make it the centerpiece of their spiritual practice.

It’s nice that the 164.8 million women in the US get to live in a country whose paper of record cares about their sexual pleasure. It’s disgusting that 200 million (and growing) women – children – outside the US endure the forced amputation of sexual pleasure.

[T]he regime should have let go of hijab,… even if we consider nothing but its self-interest in surviving. The younger generation would have persisted in their blissful political inactivity, and the poor horny basijis would have soon learned to acclimate to the new situation, their libido subconsciously adjusting to the new normal.

It’s all so neat and easy. What’s so hard to understand? You remove girls’ clitorises so they don’t sexually excite themselves; you remove their hair, faces, and bodies from the public realm so they don’t excite men. Women happily, proudly wear the hijab, because “it is the duty of women.” Men protect their spiritual well-being by draping cloth over women and numbing women’s capacity to feel anything sexual, thus making them even less threatening to men’s spiritual well-being. A beautiful world any of us would wish to live in.

Or, you know, failing that – a really … interesting, different world we would never think of judging.

… Donald Trump’s attorney, Alan Dershowitz, has announced that his client will be demanding $2.6 trillion from the Democratic Party for pain and suffering consequent to the stolen election.

“In trying to arrive at a reasonable damages figure, we used Poland as a benchmark,” said Dershowitz. “Doubling the dollar amount brings us to a place where we both compensate the president for his ongoing tribulations, and make the penalty significant enough to discourage Democrats, or for that matter any other political organization, from overturning a landslide victory. I look forward to pressing ahead with the Trump Reparations Campaign as soon I finish suing the Chilmark Public Library for not inviting me to speak there.”

“The former president’s current legal team includes a Florida insurance lawyer, a past general counsel for a parking-garage company and a former host at far-right One America News.”

Here’s a thought: Why not bring back Alan Dershowitz?

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The problem with Tribe’s otherwise excellent idea is that Dershowitz is far too taken up lately with his bombshell lawsuit against the Martha’s Vineyard public library for not inviting him to give talks there. He plans to take down Chilmark Library and its elderly volunteers, and the prep work alone is exhausting.

Dershowitz has tried to explain the priority he’s placing on his library litigation in a poem addressed to Trump, who he knows he has disappointed.

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To Doncasta, On Going to War

Tell me not, Don, I am unkind,   
  That from the scumm'ry   
Of thy black breast and insane mind   
  To Chilmark Lib. I fly.   
  
True, a new lawsuit now I chase,
  'Gainst a modest house where simple books they lend;   
For while it once did me embrace   
  It turned against its one-time friend.   
  
Forgive my harsh inconstancy, belov'd client, Don!   
  Once I've destroyed the library, and made it shut its door,
I will return to thee, my One,   
  To defend my Love once more.

The brilliant lawyer who came to the defense of a conspiracy of doctors slicing off the genitalia of many eight year old girls in Michigan cannot understand why people don’t like him.

I don’t get it either. The stories he can tell around the dinner table!

So they like do it under cover of night and lie to the little girls that they’re going for a trip to an amusement park or whatever haha. And then the doctor ties her down because you know she’s gonna bolt when she figures out… Hey why aren’t you guys laughing?

‘Former Amb. Michael McFaul absolutely destroyed a BBC anchor on air for interviewing a Russian official who he said spewed “ridiculous” propaganda about the invasion of Ukraine — and asked if the BBC would have given Nazis airtime during World War II.

‘AMB. MCFAUL: I want to ask a question. The BBC, if it was September 1st, 1939, would you put on the air a member of the Nazi Party to try to explain this ridiculous, absolute falsification of history and information that we just heard from Mr. Milonov? Because this is complete, utter nonsense what he just said, and I’m wondering if we’re doing a service to the world by giving him a voice on the BBC?

‘JAMES MENENDEZ: Do we need to hear, though…? And I don’t speak for the BBC, of course, but do we need to hear what the justification is in those elite circles, in the Kremlin and among parliamentarians, even if it’s not true? Put some of what he said to rest then.

‘AMB. MCFAUL: Well, it’s utter nonsense, and I really want to ask the question, let’s go back and find out was the BBC putting on Nazis on September 1st, 1939? Because I think it’s an ethical question for those that are in the business. You put him on and then you put me on. It’s here’s one view. Here’s another view, and I don’t like that. There are not flowers being thrown in front of tanks riding in Ukraine, the people of Ukraine voted, including in the Donbas, except for the occupied territories where there were no votes. They voted overwhelmingly for President Zelensky. So the gentleman you just had on was speaking under false facts.’

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Between this, and their choosing Alan Dershowitz for objective commentary on the Epstein sex trafficking story, the BBC’s looking really really shitty.

…. By which UD means that almost every actual, non-fictional human being presents with nuance, a sense of unreachable depth, ambiguity, contradiction. Norman Maclean gets at this when thinking about his tragic younger brother: “[I]t is those we live with and should know who elude us.”

Even those to whom we’re closest, that is, ultimately present as mysteries, exhibit the human traits of unreachable depth and contradiction. Everyone, really – or almost everyone – is recognizably human by virtue of their possession of a complex, enigmatic, and vulnerable private self.

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And then there’s Alan Dershowitz. For as long as he’s been in the public eye, Harvard’s finest seems nothing — nothing — but a strutting monomaniac, a staggeringly unidimensional embodiment of the medieval humor “choleric.” Tip him forward in time and find him, post-medieval, on Moliere’s stage, firing up the floor boards with rage, hypocrisy, sense of entitlement, and faux moral indignation. A person who regards himself as a supremely righteous exemplar in a world of villains, his speech consists of rifle-blasts of accusations against his enemies: LIAR LIAR NAZI WHORE LIAR WHORE NAZI.

Moliere’s Dershowitz has gotten rich defending, in courts of law, female genital mutilators, murderers, and many other bad people, but this, he roars, proves his ethical superiority: GIVE ME YOUR TIRED YOUR POOR NO ONE ELSE WILL DEFEND THESE HUDDLED MASSES. And despite evidence of his using that wealth to lead a rather decadent personal life among rather decadent friends (sometimes they are the same people he is defending in courts of law, or in the newspapers, or, reportedly, to President Trump, in search of a pardon for them), he boasts that he belongs to not one, not two, not three, but FOUR synagogues. So there!

Like all flat characters, Dershowitz is as hilarious as he is heinous; it’s always funny in a startling way to find puppetry rather than profundity – Ubu rather than Macbeth – and as he gets close to death and we realize the long-expected moment of self-recognition or shame or at the very least reflection, the moment he becomes a recognizable human being instead of a machine, will never come, our laughter at him becomes more unsettling. It is guilty laughter, laughter at a person trapped in a failure to become a person.

His latest rifle-blast, in the pages of scummy Newsmax, begins with a boyish, wide-eyed, gentle, baffled photograph of his friend Prince Andrew. In this picture, Andrew asks Why is this happening to me? And in the fevered defense that follows, Dershowitz explains that it’s all because of greedy whore Virginia Giuffre, who also plucked Dershowitz himself out of thin air to sue for millions of dollars. It’s a travesty. A TRAVESTY.

In the wake of Ghislaine Maxwell’s resounding guilty verdict, most people have their eye on the fate of sketchy Prince Andrew; but people like UD, who write about universities, are more interested in Jeffrey Epstein’s stable of Harvard girls (see this brief discussion), prominent among whom is the most peculiar Alan Dershowitz, Harvard’s highest profile emeritus, and a man accused of having sex on several occasions with an underage Epstein slave.

A most peculiar man. My headline is a sentence from the beginning of his book The Vanishing American Jew and ya know it makes me wonder what’s goin on what’s goin on…

On the simplest level, given Dershowitz’s lifelong gnawing ambition, you could argue this is a clever thing to say if you want to launch a best-seller that appeals to Jews of all stripes – the sentence squeezes into itself, and allows Dershowitz to identify with, every possible iteration of “Jew.”

You could be less cynical and applaud the man’s ecumenicism or something… But if you’re secular and you make a point of joining a raft of religious congregations it’s …. peculiar. Why does he do that? Does he actually attend (on a revolving basis?) each of them? Is he, at this late date (he’s 83) still at sea, bobbing from one religious practice to another?

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If you look at the ferocity with which he has, in his legal practice, defended female genital mutilators, and, more to the point, in his writing, defended male genital mutilators (he calls people opposed to circumcision Nazis), it’s clear that he’s really not out to sea at all; far from being secular, he fervently defends the most grotesque and fundamentalist of religious practices.

I mean, this isn’t just defense for the sake of money or attention – his heart’s really in it. Religious people who want to nick away at infant clitorises deserve the highest possible representation.

It’s hard to imagine a truly secular person convincing herself that female genital mutilation is a defense-worthy form of religious freedom. And since most decent people find FGM appalling, it’s hard to imagine any respectable attorney taking on the vile Dawoodi Bohra sect and its ways. But Dershowitz calls the millions of decent people opposed to male baby mutilation Nazis, and the millions of decent people opposed to female baby mutilation enemies of religious liberty.

No one with these views – views he forcefully writes about/acts upon – can comfortably be called secular. Not to mention his membership in four Jewish congregations.

***********************

Most peculiar. And not to put too fine a point on it, but – does the fact that he stands accused of child sexual abuse seem not entirely out of line here?

Now that we’re done with Ghislaine Maxwell, we may be able to answer this question… “Harvard lawyer Alan Dershowitz vehemently denies wrongdoing but he has questions to answer. His primary accuser, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, stands by her story that she was required to have sex with him on multiple occasions.” Oh, and plus: I hope someone somewhere at Harvard is beginning to think about damage control.

Everyone’s having a field day [‘BBC: Who Better To Break Down Ghislaine Maxwell Verdict Than… Guy Accused In The Same Matter?‘] now that the BBC has chosen to interview Harvard’s finest, of all people, about his buddy Ghislaine’s guilty verdict. (See post below this one.) Whodathunkit?

To be sure, Dershowitz fully exploited the big fat opportunity the BBC gifted him with to protest once again his own innocence in the child sexual abuse game. Yeah yeah tough titties ’bout Ghislaine but did you notice I’m still out of jail? See what a good boy I am? You wouldn’t put an eminent Harvard professor on trial for child sexual abuse, would you?

A jury found claims against Epstein/Maxwell persuasive. Maxwell will spend a lot of time in jail. Let’s see if things heat up for Alan Dershowitz.

… Alan Dershowitz.

Nobody does it better.

Many university medical school positions come with words like “voluntary” and “courtesy” attached; unlike tenured medical faculty, clinical faculty enjoy little more than the professional use of titles like “professor,” and, if you’re Bandy Lee, affiliations like “Yale.”

Untenured, and needing to be renewed every few years, associated medical faculty positions are fragile. As Lee – famous for having led the “Trump is dangerously insane” charge – has just discovered. Yale has fired her – chosen not to renew her, if you like – because in diagnosing a public figure without ever having met him, let alone analyzed him in a professional setting, she broke the Goldwater Rule. What really tipped Yale over, though, was a letter of complaint it received from rich, well-connected, and incredibly litigious Alan Dershowitz, also branded psychotic by Lee, and not happy about it. Lee is suing Yale.

First, a quick, surgical contrast between tenured and untenured at Yale medical school. Michael Simons, a powerful, tenured presence there, was found guilty of sexual harassment way back in 2013. And then – wow.

Details from Simons’ case date back to 2010, when he sent a romantic letter to a female junior colleague, who subsequently told him that she did not reciprocate his feelings. According to Simons’ complaint, the letter was “a declaration of love and romantic interest of the sort men have sent to women from time immemorial.”

She started up a relationship with another doctor who subsequently faced professional difficulties, which the two alleged was due to Simons’ interference.

In 2013, the junior colleague filed a sexual harassment complaint with the University-Wide Committee on Sexual Misconduct. Former Connecticut Superior Court Judge Beverly Hodgson investigated the claim and found Simons guilty of sexual harassment, and the UWC recommended he be suspended as chief of cardiology for five years. Simons appealed and the suspension was ultimately reduced to 18 months.

But details of the proceedings surfaced in a subsequent New York Times investigation. Later in 2013, Simons resigned as chief of cardiology, and his complaint alleges the University forced his resignation due to the public outcry.

Simons continued to hold the position of the Robert W. Berliner chair of cardiology until Nancy Berliner ’75 MED ’79, the daughter of Robert Berliner and a former professor at the School of Medicine, objected to Simons’ professorship. In July of 2018, the University transferred Simons to the Von Zedtwitz Chair.

The action prompted public backlash, including an open letter from medical school students, alumni and faculty that amassed more than 1,000 signatures. The University then removed Simons from the position.

In October 2019, Simons filed a complaint against the University.

Hey, why not find a third chair! If not the Berliner, then the Von Zedtwitz, and if not the Von Zedtwitz the … something from the middle of the alphabet… Berliner comes early, Von Zedtwitz at the end… maybe Mr Simons would care to see something in a Smith?

And yes, you read that right – it’s been twenty years since Simons purportedly harassed, and he remains in excellent, though non-chaired, status at Yale. He also remains an infuriated, vengeful troublemaker, a scalpel in the side of the school, which first dealt with him by conferring multiple chairs upon him, and now spends its time simultaneously boasting he’s on the faculty and angrily batting down his latest litigation.

Yale’s folie à deux with the hugely compensated, hugely pissed Simons will play on till the cows come home cuz that’s how tenure rolls.

And now back to Bandy Lee. Her fragile condition means that punishment for something maybe a bit less egregious than fucking with the junior staff is rapid dismissal.

UD blows somewhat hot and cold on Lee and her fellow invoke the 25th amendment Trump-diagnosers. No one who watched Trump in his notorious debate with Biden could fail to be grateful to Lee and Co for having, years before, laid out the framework for understanding the obscenity playing out in front of us. In short, they weren’t far off in their clinical appraisal of Trump.

OTOH: It really is a crude, easily corruptible, and unethical sort of thing, using your position as a professional analyst to lend special credibility to a judgment as extreme as mentally unfit for office. UD‘s extended remarks on the matter are here.