#Ph.D. Dissertation Help

[tasteracha]

professor bang

word count: 2.3k

warnings: unprotected sex, power imbalance (grad student x professor), multiple orgasms, chan calling the reader pet/good girl

synopsis: you laid out a perfectly crafted trap to seduce the hot professor - too bad he’s one step ahead of you.

the midday air is unsuspecting as you walk down the creaky hallway, floorboards of the psychology building groaning under your feet. the nerves are close to eating you up whole but you continue walking, too far into your plan to turn back now - you know what you want, and you’re going to get it. no one turns an eye as you walk past open doors, the hem of your dress swishing around your knees. they’re accustomed to seeing you here, being a graduate student in the department means you spend more time here than you do in your own apartment. 

you stop at one door in a series of identical ones, only told apart by a worn out plaque listing a room number and a shinier, newer one reading “christopher bang, ph.d.” underneath it.

the door is cracked just a bit, enough for you to peer inside and there he is, standing in front of his desk, wearing a crisp white shirt under a grayish-blue blazer. his pants are too tight to be suitable for a professor, and they cling to his thighs and stretch across his ass perfectly, making you pause in the doorway with a hungry stare that lasts for too many seconds. 

when you look up you meet his eyes and it makes you jump; you didn’t know that he knew you were there. this doesn’t fit in the plan.

the plan you cooked up when he got a little too cozy with you during the department holiday party last semester. the plan you’ve been making and scrapping and working yourself up to execute, avoiding him at every corner so that he wouldn’t know. you were supposed to surprise him, walk in pretending like you needed help with some assignment, getting closer and closer to him until your breaths were intermingling and then you’d look into his eyes and he would glance at your lips and-

and now he’s caught you checking him out like some kind of creep. 

“oh, hi y/n,” he says, eyes turning crinkly as he looks at you with a shit-eating grin. fuck.  

now that you’ve been found out, you slide inside the gap in the door, shutting it closed behind you and letting the lock click behind your back. if he notices, he doesn’t react, steady eyes trained on you as your feet take you closer and closer to his desk.

“hi professor bang,” you say, surprised by how clear your voice comes out. that’s good, you wouldn’t want him to know how nervous you are just yet, it would add to his smugness and you didn’t know if you could handle his ego being even bigger than it is right now. 

“what can i do for you?” he says, crossing his arms and leaning against the desk. the blazer stretches over his shoulders and the material does nothing to hide his biceps and your mouth waters. he quirks an eyebrow at you when you don’t speak for a moment, and you have to clear your throat before any sound comes out.

“i needed some help with a research project,” you say, moving close enough to him that if anyone were to walk in they would absolutely report the both of you for some kind of ethical violation. good thing you locked the door, then. “i was hoping you could be of service.”

“oh?” he leans further back into the desk, fully relaxed in a way you wish you were. “what kind of project?”

“well, it has to do with human connection,” you trail a finger across the collar of his blazer, further down until it catches on a button, in a show of false confidence. “i was looking to maybe get some hands-on experience? for research, of course.”

you feel a swell of victory when his breath catches in his throat and his arms loosen from where they were crossed to drop at his side. 

“well i certainly am the expert in that domain,” he drawls, eyes flickering down to your lips and back up. “i did write my dissertation on it, after all.”

it’s a lie - you’ve read his dissertation, full of information about cognitive theory and eye movements and other things that honestly went way over your head. not a single mention of human connection was in that document, but the fact that he’s so readily playing along with you means that you didn’t misread anything. either he wants you, or he enjoys toying with you; either way, you were on board.

even more so when he takes his blazer off, throwing it off to the side like it didn’t cost him an aggressive amount of money to buy. you’ve seen the designer labels on him plenty of times enough to know he likes to treat himself to nice things. 

you’re hoping you can be his next nice thing, the next possession that he flaunts and parades around. 

you lean in for a kiss, but he surprises you and flips the both of you around until you’re backed up into the desk. he’s leaning over you, dark eyes looking down at you like you’re his prey. 

“let’s even the playing field a bit, shall we?” his voice has gone down, low and sultry, and you feel your head loll back from how it makes you feel. he makes quick work of removing your dress, letting the material pool to the floor so he could focus on your bra. it’s your favorite one, lacey and red and sexy, the material leaving nothing to the imagination. he takes a second to admire it, fingering at the strap around your shoulder and sliding his thumb into the cup before he reaches behind you and unhooks it in one try. it joins his blazer and your dress on the floor a moment later, and you’re left feeling exposed in front of him. 

“how is this even?” you ask, resisting the urge to cover yourself with your hands. “you’re still wearing all of your clothes.”

“well, sweetheart,” he starts, moving impossibly closer to you. “we’re in my office. that means i get to decide the rules, no?”

he swipes an arm across the table behind you before you can answer. papers flutter in the air, and he’s hiking you up onto the desk before they reach the ground. his hands are under your thighs, spreading them apart so he can fit between them. one of his hands snakes into the band of your underwear, your sensitive skin erupting in goosebumps from his touch.

“so wet,” he says, a smirk painting his face as his fingers part your folds to make slow circles around your clit. it shouldn’t be enough to send shivers up your spine, but it’s him, so it does.

“for you,” you say, looking up at him through your lashes. the amused glint in his eyes turns sharp, dark and possessive. just what you wanted. 

“this is mine?” he asks, cupping you in his hand while his other reaches around the small of your back to hold you close to him.

“yours,” you hum, nodding even though his attention certainly wasn’t on your head.

he dips his fingers inside of you, gliding easily inside from how his fingers are coated with your juices. when he crooks his fingers and thumbs at your clit your head tips back, and you might have lost your balance if he wasn’t holding you so close that you could feel his breath on your skin. 

it’s on your third time stumbling over the word professor that he leans into your ear and tells you to call him chris, his lips kissing your ear as he works you to your high. you’re shaking apart on his desk and yet he doesn’t relent, he continues to move his fingers with fervor until you can’t help but push at his chest to get him to stop. 

“chris,” you stutter out when he latches his lips to your neck, open mouthed and hot as his fingers move to grab at your thighs. his hands are so big, veins bulging as he digs his fingers in. you hope there are bruises there, tomorrow. and the next day. 

“gonna fuck you now, okay?” he says, voice husky. “for research.”

“yeah, research,” you breath out, using both your hands to cradle his face so that you could kiss him, finally. his lips are as soft as you imagined, plushy pillows that you could find yourself lost in for hours. he keeps his lips on yours as he moves your underwear down and off, helping you balance so he could slide it under your thighs until you’re bare in front of him. you’re unbuttoning his shirt with shaky fingers, and he chuckles against you when you can’t get one of them open.

“funny?” you break away from him, eyes trained on the way his lips are red and slick with spit. 

“you’re cute,” condescension lines his voice and a spark of anger runs through you at how he knows he has the upper hand. he gently takes your hands away from his clothes and makes quick work of them himself. in what feels like a split second, he’s stripped of his shirt and pants and he’s pulling down his boxers, revealing smooth planes of muscle and strong thighs and bulging arms that you’ve fantasized about for months. you don’t know if you want to cover them in bites or let him crush you with them more - there will be time for that, the next time. 

you know there’s going to be a next time if it’s already this good and he’s barely even done anything to you yet. 

he spreads your thighs apart further, and you don’t miss how he licks his lips at the view of your dripping cunt in front of him before he lines himself up at your entrance. you barely got a glimpse of his cock, but your mouth waters at the idea of it being inside of you. he glides his cock through your folds a few time, slicking himself up before pressing his head inside of you. 

when he bottoms out you can’t help but tighten your walls around him, helpless to the desires of your own body, and the groan he lets out makes you clench down even harder. 

“relax, pet,” he says, panting a bit. his thumb strokes at the sensitive flesh of your inner thigh. “i’m going to take good care of you okay? but you need to relax for me.”

he leans down to kiss you again, and it must be a good enough distraction because he begins moving in time with the swipes of his tongue on your teeth. every time he rocks into you the air punches out of your lungs, you’re so full. he moves his face to the crook of your neck to hide his own labored breaths when he increases his pace, thrusting into you faster than you can keep up with. 

he’s pressing you into the desk with each movement of his hips, the sharp corner against your legs sending pricks of pain up to your head. the game is over, the research bit is done, now it’s just chris taking what he wants from you. you love it. his arms wrap around you, keeping you upright, and you latch onto him like a lifeline. you’re completely at his mercy, entirely submissive to the way he’s keeping you still so he can use you. 

you can tell he’s close when he pushes his head even further into your skin, fingers gripping your back and his movements becoming sharp and purposeful. he spills into you a second later with a bite to your neck, and you can’t help yourself from following him as your head tips back in pleasure. 

when he pulls out you wince, the emptiness that he’s left you with feeling worse than you’ve ever felt with anyone else. he lowers you onto the desk slowly, letting your head rest on his mousepad as he runs his hands up and down your sides in comforting sweeps. you’re utterly spent, two orgasms hitting your limit, even more intense coming from him. 

“one more,” he drawls out, not showing compassion at all for the way you’re panting and drooling onto his desk. “you can do one more for me, can’t you?”

“no, no, no,” your voice comes out thready and light, barely a sound. his hand returns to your core either way, slow circles of his fingers around your clit making your body twitch with each pass. the oversensitivity is too much, but you’re too weak to pull away from him. you don’t even know if you want to, anymore. 

“there’s my good girl,” he grins when you whine and rut down onto his hand. you didn’t know it was possible, but the coils in your lower belly start to tighten faster than before. you’re coming before you even realize it’s happening, pleasure seeping from your core to your fingertips, an all encompassing sensation that you can’t put words to. it lasts for what feels like forever, waves and waves of ecstasy rocking through your body until your vision blacks out for a moment. 

“you did so good,” he finally stops and you press your legs together to stop him from returning. he’s pressing kisses to your body, your thighs and your stomach up to your neck and cheeks as he mumbles praises into your skin. his hand runs through your hair, pushing the sweaty locks that were stuck to your forehead out of the way so he could press a final, sweet kiss to your forehead. “so good for me. so pretty, my precious pet.”

and even as he takes care of you, cleans you up and helps you back into your clothes and feeds you water, you’re holding back a smirk. because he thinks he has the upper hand, he thinks he won, but you can guarantee that he’ll be knocking at your door before the week is over.

[lboogie1906]

Dr. Cheikh Anta Diop (December 29, 1933 - February 1, 1986) was born in Diourbel, Senegal to a Muslim Wolof family. His family belonged to the African Mouride Islamic sect. Diop grew up in both Koranic and French colonial schools. Upon completing his BA in Senegal, he began his graduate studies at the Sorbonne in physics.

He became involved in the African students’ anticolonial movement. He helped organize the first Pan-African Student Congress in Paris and participated in the First World Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Paris.

His Ph.D. dissertation looked into ancient Egyptian history and the influence it had on European culture. He proclaimed that African civilizations were the inspiration and origin of European accomplishments. The Sorbonne rejected his dissertation, yet his work received worldwide attention. His work was published as Nations Negres et culture, a publication that would make him one of the most known and controversial historians of his era. He was awarded his doctorate by the Sorbonne. Senegal gained its independence and he returned home.

He was appointed a research fellow at Institut Fondamental d’Afrique Noire at Dakar University, where he set up a radiocarbon dating laboratory. He created political opposition parties: Bloc des Masses Sénégalaises and the Front National du Sénégal. The Bloc des Masses was banned. He founded the Rassemblement National Democratique. The RND published the Wolof-language journal, Siggi, of which he was the editor.

He was appointed professor of ancient history at Dakar University. He published several books including seven which were translated into English. His most famous works were The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality; The Cultural Unity of Black Africa, and Towards the African Renaissance: Essays in African Culture and Development, 1946-1960. He received the highest award for scientific research from the Institut Cultural Africain. He was invited to Atlanta, where Mayor Andrew Young proclaimed April 4th “Dr. Cheikh Anta Diop Day.” He had two sons with his wife, Louise Marie Diop Maes. #africanhistory365 #africanexcellence

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this story from The Revelator:

Researchers in Indonesia recently captured a surprising event on video: A wild orangutan named Rakus, with a deep gash on his cheek, harvested liana leaves, chewed them up, and rubbed them on his wound. His cheek healed without infection. As it turns out the plants have anti-inflammatory, antibacterial, antifungal, and other chemical properties that help heal wounds.

The great ape saw the plant, recognized the plant, and valued the plant because he knew something about a subject that few humans do anymore: botany.

At a time when our net knowledge about plants keeps growing, our individual understanding of plants is in decline. This is unsurprising, because while we still depend on plants for life, few of us need to know much about them in our daily lives — as long as someone else does. We rely on botanists to identify plants, keep them alive, and in so doing help keep us alive as well.

It’s a lot of responsibility for a group of scientists that isn’t getting any bigger. And that has some people in the field worried.

The National Center for Education Statistics triggered the first alarm about the future of botany in 2015. According to data released that year, the number of annual undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral degrees awarded in botany or plant biology in the United States had dropped below 400 for the fifth time since 2007. In 1988 the number of degrees was 545.

The number soon rose again and so far has stayed above 400. In fact it rose to 489 in 2023 — the highest in decades. (By comparison, American universities gave out more than 45,000 marketing degrees last year.)

The definitive downward trend, though, remains in the number of U.S. institutions offering botany or plant biology degrees — from 76 in 2002 to 59 in 2023.

“Botany Ph.D.’s are disappearing,” says Kathryn Parsley, who got her Ph.D. in biology, not botany, even though her dissertation focused on plants. “The number of botanists is declining rapidly and the people filling those spaces are not botanists.” When a biology department has a job vacancy, she says, they tend to hire a professor who has “nothing to do with plants. The department will have all kinds of scientists in it, with only one or maybe two botanists, sometimes only one or two plant scientists at all.” Because she attended one such school, “a botany degree was out of the question,” Parsley says.

While nobody has tracked the average age of botanists in the United States, students of “pure botany” do seem to be waning, according to Kristine Callis-Duehl, the executive director of education research and outreach at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis. “Skills are shifting away from old-school botany. A lot of that’s being driven by funding sources,” she says. “More and more, just being a botanist is not enough in academia.”

Experts agree that in recent years, most botany professors aren’t being replaced once they retire. But why?

Money is one reason. The National Science Foundation, for instance, has shifted its funding away from natural history at herbariums and other museums, Callis-Duehl says. “It’s harder to convince Congress that that work — pure botany — contributes to the economy. They prefer basic science that can lead into more applied science, where they can make a case that it fuels the U.S. economy.”

Applied plant science has more NSF options than botany. For example, agriculture is more likely to be funded by USDA, Callis-Duehl says.

[plethoraworldatlas]

As U.S. conservationists continue to fight for federal protections that would cover gray wolves in the northern Rocky Mountains, research released Wednesday highlights just how important the apex predators are to the western United States.

The study was published in the journal BioScience and led by William Ripple, a scientist at Oregon State University (OSU) and the Conservation Biology Institute known for his work on trophic cascades and carnivores as well as his demands for climate action.

The paper uses gray wolves to show the trouble with "shifting baselines," which, "in ecology encapsulate the gradual and often unnoticed alterations in ecosystems over time, leading to a redefinition of what is considered normal or baseline conditions."

As the study details:

Gray wolves (Canis lupus) in North America have experienced a substantial contraction of their historical range, at one point almost disappearing from the contiguous 48 United States. However, their conservation is important in part because of the potential cascading effects wolves can have on lower trophic levels. Namely, the proliferation and changes to behavior and density of large herbivores following the extirpation or displacement of wolves can have major effects on various aspects of vegetation structure, succession, productivity, species composition, and diversity, which, in turn, can have implications for overall biodiversity and the quality of habitat for other wildlife.

"By the 1930s, wolves were largely absent from the American West, including its national parks," Ripple said in a statement. "Most published ecological research from this region occurred after the extirpation of wolves."

"This situation underscores the potential impact of shifting baselines on our understanding of plant community succession, animal community dynamics, and ecosystem functions," he continued.

The researchers examined journal articles, master's theses, and Ph.D. dissertations from 1955 to 2021 that involved field work in national parks in the northwestern United States for whether they included information on the removal of gray wolves.

They found that "in total, approximately 41% (39 of 96) of the publications mentioned or discussed the historical presence of wolves or large carnivores, but most (approximately 59%) did not. The results for the theses and journal articles were similar."

While the researchers focused on wolves, Robert Beschta, co-author and emeritus professor at OSU, noted that "in addition to the loss or displacement of large predators, there may be other potential anthropogenic legacies within national parks that should be considered, including fire suppression, invasion by exotic plants and animals, and overgrazing by livestock."

Ripple stressed that "studying altered ecosystems without recognizing how or why the system has changed over time since the absence of a large predator could have serious implications for wildlife management, biodiversity conservation, and ecosystem restoration."

"We hope our study will be of use to both conservation organizations and government agencies in identifying ecosystem management goals," he added.

Amaroq Weiss, senior wolf advocate at the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD), welcomed the study, tellingInside Climate News that "I think this is a really important paper, because sometimes science advances at a certain rate without a self-introspection."

"Nature is a really complex tapestry," she said. "It's woven together by threads that hold it together and keep it strong. When you start to pull threads out like you remove apex predators, the whole thing begins to unravel."

The paper comes amid a wolf conservation battle that involves Weiss' group. In February, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) determined that Endangered Species Act protections for the wolves in the northern Rocky Mountains were "not warranted."

Two coalitions of conservation organizations, including CBD, swiftly filed notices of their intent to sue over the decision if FWS didn't change course. After the legally required 60-day notice period passed, they filed the lawsuits in April.

Earlier this week, "the cases were voluntarily dismissed and immediately refiled to avoid any potential arguments from the defendants that the plaintiffs failed to give the secretary of the interior proper 60-days' notice under the Endangered Species Act," Collette Adkins, an attorney who leads CBD's Carnivore Conservation program, told Common Dreams in an email Thursday.

"Plaintiffs believe that their case was properly noticed," she said, "but we refiled to avoid any further disruption of the proceedings."

[myrebelancestorsdiedforme]

Brett Ball 🫡 Salute😍✊🏿🙏🏿

It was very early in Brett Ball’s experience as a student-athlete with the women’s basketball team that things did not go her way. She came to South Carolina in the summer of 2011 as a scholarship athlete. But before the season began, she was diagnosed with myocardial non-compaction in the left ventricle— a rare genetic heart condition that made it impossible for her to play basketball.

photos of brett ball as a team member and as a Ph.D. candidate

Years: 2011-15

Position: Team vlogger

Key stats: Ball was diagnosed with a heart condition and never got to play for the Gamecocks, but she stayed on scholarship all four years and helped fans get an inside look at the team through her behind-the-scenes videos.

Degrees: Bachelor’s in criminal justice, UofSC; master’s in integrated communications, University of Mississippi

Current position: Ph.D. student in health communication, University of Florida

“I totally could have just said, ‘I’m leaving, this is not going to work out for me,’ ” says Ball, a Ph.D. student in health communication at the University of Florida. “But Coach Staley honored my scholarship. I was still part of the team. When we would travel, I was there; when we had film, I was there; I still attended practices. I did pretty much everything the team did, except work out and play.

“She still coached me as if I was on the court, but in a different way,” Ball says of Staley. “I had to be on time for practice. I had to be on time for class. She didn’t let me just go about in my own way.

“At first I didn’t like it because I was just so frustrated with not being able to play. I thought, ‘I’m not playing so why do I need to do these things.’ But it still made me feel part of the team because I was held to the same standards.

“I don’t know if she had ever had a player under her wing who didn’t play. What are you going to say to make them feel better? She would say there was nothing she could do to help me play, and the only thing she can do is be a guide and I totally respect that. The best thing she could do was be a support system.”

Staley and the basketball media team came up with an idea that Ball would do videos with her teammates to highlight their many off-the-court talents and build up excitement among fans. The show was called Ballin’ with Brett.

“Our team was pretty dynamic,” says Ball, who graduated from UofSC with a degree in criminal justice. “We could have had our own TV show. We had rappers, comedians, drama queens. We definitely had a team full of personalities.”

Producing and hosting the videos got Ball interested in journalism and communications — an interest she has pursued since her time at South Carolina, earning a master’s in integrated communications from the University of Mississippi in her home state.

“It was as good an experience as I could have had without being able to play ball.”

She expects to complete her dissertation and Ph.D. in May. Her research focus is on mental health among African American female athletes, a subject she knows much about.

“Being nine hours away from home, if you’re not somewhere with resources — and USC had resources from A-to-Z — it can be difficult,” she says. “The school had people there who helped with the stress. We had two Black psychologists in the athletic department and that was really helpful for me. That’s how I got started looking into the mental health of athletes.”

Ball says she talked with her advisers and mentors at UofSC before each major life decision she has made. She says she is uncertain where her Ph.D. will take her, but lessons learned from her time with Staley and the Gamecocks women’s basketball program will never leave her.

“I am really interested in ways to improve the mental health of student-athletes. I want to figure out ways to destigmatize mental health and mental illnesses within the athletic and sports space.

“I want to use my experience with mental health, my experience not being able to play and experience with cases of depression and anxiety and I want to be able to help athletes, even if it is from an academic standpoint, about what Black female student athletes have to go through."

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Aaron Sibarium

Published: Dec 11, 2023

Harvard University president Claudine Gay plagiarized numerous academics over the course of her academic career, at times airlifting entire paragraphs and claiming them as her own work, according to reviews by several scholars.

In four papers published between 1993 and 2017, including her doctoral dissertation, Gay, a political scientist, paraphrased or quoted nearly 20 authors—including two of her colleagues in Harvard University’s department of government—without proper attribution, according to a Washington Free Beacon analysis. Other examples of possible plagiarism, all from Gay’s dissertation, were publicized Sunday by the Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo and Karlstack’s Chris Brunet.

The Free Beacon worked with nearly a dozen scholars to analyze 29 potential cases of plagiarism. Most of them said that Gay had violated a core principle of academic integrity as well as Harvard’s own anti-plagiarism policies, which state that "it's not enough to change a few words here and there."

Rather, scholars are expected to cite the sources of their work, including when paraphrasing, and to use quotation marks when quoting directly from others. But in at least 10 instances, Gay lifted full sentences—even entire paragraphs—with just a word or two tweaked.

In her 1997 thesis, for example, she borrowed a full paragraph from a paper by the scholars Bradley Palmquist, then a political science professor at Harvard, and Stephen Voss, one of Gay’s classmates in her Ph.D. program at Harvard, while making only a couple alterations, including changing their "decrease" to "increase" because she was studying a different set of data.

The four papers that include plagiarized material comprise a sizable portion of Gay’s academic work. Gay, who is Harvard's 30th president, has authored just 11 peer-reviewed articles.

"If this were a stand-alone instance, it would be reprehensible but perhaps excused as the blunder of someone working hastily," said Peter Wood, a former associate provost of Boston University, where he helped investigate several cases of suspected plagiarism. "But that excuse vanishes as the examples multiply," said Wood, who now serves as the director of the National Association of Scholars.

Some of the most clear-cut cases come in Gay’s 1997 dissertation, "Taking Charge: Black Electoral Success and the Redefinition of American Politics," which copied two paragraphs almost verbatim from Palmquist and Voss.

The paragraphs—from a paper Palmquist and Voss had presented a year earlier, in 1996—do not appear in quotation marks. One is unmodified but for a handful of words, and Gay does not cite Palmquist or Voss anywhere in her dissertation.

"This is definitely plagiarism," said Lee Jussim, a social psychologist at Rutgers University, who reviewed 10 side-by-side comparisons provided by the Free Beacon, including the paragraphs from Gay’s dissertation, which received a prize from Harvard for "exceptional merit."

"The longer passages are the most egregious," he added.

Academics say the pattern raises serious questions about Gay’s scholarly integrity and her fitness to lead the nation’s oldest university, which has been at the center of a political firestorm under her watch, particularly since Oct. 7. Student activists have blamed Israel for the Hamas terrorist attack and Gay herself offered equivocal testimony before Congress about whether calls for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s code of conduct.

Donors, alumni, and over 70 congressmen have called on Gay to resign. University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill, who testified alongside Gay, tendered her resignation on Saturday.

"The question here is whether the president of an elite institution such as Harvard can feasibly have an academic record this marred by obvious plagiarism," said Alexander Riley, a sociologist at Bucknell University. "I do not see how Harvard could possibly justify keeping her in that position in light of this evidence."

Neither Gay nor Harvard responded to a request for comment.

Other cases of near-verbatim quotation occur in two peer-reviewed journal articles from 2017 and 2012, when Gay was a tenured professor at Harvard, as well as in an essay she published one year out of college, in 1993. Along with her dissertation, the decades-long pattern paints a picture of sloppiness, at best, and willful dishonesty at worst.

"It seems clear that Gay had a habit of using others' words in ways that violated Harvard's policies," a professor at a top research university, who received his Ph.D. from Harvard’s government department, told the Free Beacon. "And several examples would land any student in serious trouble."

Gay’s 1993 essay, "Between Black and White: The Complexity of Brazilian Race Relations," lifts sentences and historical details from two scholars, David Covin and George Reid Andrews, with just a few words dropped or modified. Covin is not cited anywhere in the essay.

In a section called "Suggestions for Further Reading," Gay does include Andrews’s 1991 book, Blacks & Whites in São Paulo, Brazil, 1888-1988, but not his 1992 paper, "Black Political Protest in São Paulo, 1888-1988," from which the offending text was drawn.

The 1993 essay "concerns me less," Riley said, given how early it was in Gay’s career. "However, it shows a quantity of plagiarism so egregious that minimally Dr. Gay should stop putting it on her CV."

The two peer-reviewed papers, by contrast, are "much more serious," Riley said.

In "Moving To Opportunity: the Political Effects of a Housing Mobility Experiment," Gay borrowed language from a 2003 report by eight researchers—three of them Harvard economists—prepared for the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

And in "A Room for One’s Own? The Partisan Allocation of Affordable Housing," Gay borrowed language from a 2010 book by Alex Schwartz, Housing Policy in the United States, and from a 2011 paper by Matthew Freedman and Emily Owens, "Low-Income Housing Development and Urban Crime."

Freedman and Owens are never cited, though Gay thanks them for letting her use their data. Gay does cite Schwartz and the eight researchers elsewhere in "Moving to Opportunity" but not in the sentences where their quotes appear. None of the passages have quotation marks, creating the impression that they are Gay’s own language and ideas.

Some examples are more borderline than others, scholars who reviewed them said, but clearly violate Harvard’s guide on sourcing, which requires citations even when using "ideas that you did not think up yourself," regardless of how much the language has changed. Plagiarism, the guide adds, is "unacceptable in all academic situations, whether you do it intentionally or by accident."

Even crediting a source in the wrong sentence, as Gay did repeatedly, is a serious offense under Harvard’s policies. The school’s sourcing guide includes multiple examples of "mosaic plagiarism," in which placing a citation too late or too early in a passage causes "confusion over where your source's ideas end and your own ideas begin."

Gabriel Rossman, a sociologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, said that several portions of Gay’s work met the definition of "mosaic plagiarism" outlined in Harvard’s guide. So did Steve McGuire, a member of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni and a former professor of political theory at Villanova University, who said the examples "violate the expectations Harvard has for its own students."

"As a professor, I would not have accepted this kind of work from a first semester freshman," McGuire told the Free Beacon. "It’s appalling to see it in the work of Harvard’s president."

Rossman, who specializes in quantitative research, noted that some of the examples involve technical descriptions of statistical methods, which "can require very precise wording" and are often repeated between authors, a potentially mitigating factor. But an editor at one of the five most-cited academic journals in the world pushed back on that notion, arguing that even that sort of duplication in academic prose is difficult to defend.

"The text duplication points to carelessness, sloppiness, and short-cut taking," said the editor, who has edited journals in both the natural and social sciences.

Some of the victims of Gay’s plagiarism were more sanguine. Jeffrey Liebman, one of the Harvard economists who prepared the Department of Housing report, said he and four of his coauthors did "not see any signs of plagiarism." Like Rossman, he argued that it was defensible for scholars to crib technical descriptions from each other.

Gay "had the right to use and adapt this common language," he said.

Voss, who coauthored the 1996 paper with Palmquist, said that although the paragraphs Gay quoted were "technically plagiarism," they were "not terribly important" to her argument.

"If I caught a student doing that, I would tell them it was inappropriate," Voss said. "But I would never consider taking action against the student."

But Wood, the former Boston University associate provost, said the feelings of the plagiarized are irrelevant.

The "willingness of the actual author to go along with the copying (whether before the fact or afterwards) doesn't change the deceptive nature of the act of plagiarism," he said. "The plagiarist is breaking the trust of the community of readers. In the case of scholarship, the whole university community is the victim."

It is common for plagiarized authors to come to the defense of their plagiarizer, Wood said. When Princeton historian Kevin Kruse was accused of plagiarizing Ronald Bayor, a historian at Georgia Tech, for example, Bayor dismissed the accusations as "politically motivated."

Other cases of possible plagiarism—all from Gay’s dissertation—were uncovered Sunday by the Manhattan Institute’s Rufo and Karlstack’s Brunet. Though the revelations are new, rumors of Gay’s plagiarism have been circulating on econjobrumors.com, a popular message board for social scientists, since at least January 2023.

"Most plagiarists turn out to be serial thieves," Wood said. "If the offense is discovered in one publication, typically it will be found in others."

In a statement to the Boston Globe, Gay said she stood by the integrity of her scholarship.

The Harvard Corporation, which held an emergency meeting over the weekend after Gay’s disastrous testimony on Capitol Hill last week, did not respond to a request for comment.

Update 10:10 p.m.: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Gay had not cited Alex Schwartz in the paragraph where his quote appears. She did cite him in that paragraph, but not in the sentence where she quoted him.

==

This is what happens when you hire for DEI, not merit.

In spite of all of this, Claudine Gay should not be fired for plagiarism, any more than Kendi should be rejected for his financial mismanagement. Because this misses the point.

Harvard's own paper, The Harvard Crimson, reports that over 700 staff and faculty are in support of her remaining on. They cite "university independence." Which should reasonably be taken as an agreement to no longer accept public funding, even though that level of integrity is not what they meant.

What the 700 supporters does indicate is how far and how extensively the ideological corruption has set in. That's the reason she should be dismissed. She should be let go because Harvard has decided to abandon intersectional DEI garbage as its primary telos, and to reclaim its academic integrity and rebuild its - perhaps irreparably - damaged reputation.

The problem is that, unsurprisingly, its council have officially chosen the intersectional DEI garbage over any pretence to integrity.

[wetcatspellcaster]

hello! i have a question about finding time to write because i have an idea for an astarion fic but it's my first year in my ph.d. program and i am DROWNING IN WORK AND READINGS. how did you do this AND work on your dissertation? (also congrats on that!!! that's massive!!!)

hello, anon, congratulations to YOU on your phd programme!! many felicitations on the continuing of your education.

I took a while to reply to this, bc I'm not sure if I'm the best person to ask this question. my personal answer is 'hyperfixate on the dopamine source so, so hard until you burnout, and then feel guilty bc you haven't updated in ages (I'm currently one week since an update), and then let that guilt become your new motivator! :D'

...which doesn't seem very healthy. and definitely impacts my ability to answer the question in a way that is actually helpful.

so i don't have an answer, but my honest pieces of advice are below the cut.

idk what kinda PhD you are doing, but if it's a humanities, in my experience, there are dips and lulls. first year is always a bit hectic bc the imposter syndrome is high and you feel like you're treading water to stay afloat. but things will get so much easier, and will in fact go through peaks and troughs! in 2nd and 3rd year, i had months without any work at all. wait for a trough to do some drafting. if you're currently really struggling, then just sketch as detailed an outline as you can in a document when the idea is fresh, and then you can return to it in dribs and drabs when you have a spare moment. [if you're a scientist, apologies in advance, you have a much harder life than me!] .

this one isn't very burnout friendly, but i am introverted and treat writing fic like a hobby for when i have no social battery. then my fic battery runs out, i go be social. yes, this kinda just spreads the burnout around. yes, i also know writing is still work! but it doesn't feel like it, to me. so I guess make your fic idea as much about fun, and as least about work, as possible. make it into the catnip that will make you come back to it. treat it as an escape rather than another magnum opus, or god forbid, a second dissertation. .

this also applies to PhD work - again, if you are a humanities student, you'll inevitably hit a writing block in your thesis. these are normal, and though they feel like the worst thing at the time, they will inevitably shift. thesis writing block when i was often very productive with fic, bc my thesis wasn't taking up my brain power and/or taking time away from my thesis was exactly what i needed. If you're burned out on the thesis, maybe spend some time just playing around in your brain for a bit. my friend told me about how she used fic as a way to build 'mastery' - when she was depressed or feeling down about her thesis, she would do something she knew she was good at (fic), and this would lift her mood. in the self critical world of academia, sometimes a little fic positivity goes a long way (at least for me, but that's bc both my supervisors are very very harsh, the exact opposite of the AO3 comment box). .

find an update schedule that works for you. i used to write a whole fic before i published any of it, but that's become more untenable as my wordcounts get bigger and i need motivation. now, comments fuel me when i'm drafting. so honestly, if you think posting will add pressure, don't post. write it just for you. if you think posting is the only thing that will keep the idea alive, do it and then don't feel guilt if there's a large gap in updates. people will still read it when it eventually goes up! :)

Honestly, I don't really have an answer. I wrote a lot these last few months bc I was feeling very depressed with the endgame of my thesis, and writing distracted me and made me feel better. I try to keep two nights a week free for fic, but that works for me bc I'm an introvert who lives alone. I don't think you can force it, but what I can tell you is that the PhD does get much, much easier (and that first year is also a perfectly legit time to faff around a bit and commit some time theft if you want - at least in the humanities, bc you'll still have so much time in your project).

I'm sorry I don't have a clear answer! Fic is important to me, so I make time for it, sometimes to my own detriment. If your PhD is what is important to you rn, fic can wait! Similarly, if you want to take some time away from that treading water, maybe microdose an hour or so of fic to start building mastery :) xx

[nathanielaaron]

German Media Realise Their Health Minister is an International Laughingstock

The Covid Inquiry is Insulting the Victims of Lockdown

Boris Johnson is Still in Denial About Lockdowns

Bristol University Axes the National Anthem from Graduation Ceremonies Amid Students’ Claims it is “Old-Fashioned” and “Offensive to Some”

Labour Parliamentarians Back Kemi Badenoch on Stopping Children Changing Gender at School

U.K. Government’s Veto of Scotland’s Gender Reforms Ruled Lawful by Top Court

News Round-Up

German Media Realise Their Health Minister is an International Laughingstock

By Eugyppius

I know that some of you are impatient with my posts about German politics, and particularly my repeated pieces on our retarded Health Minister. I get that this can seem like inside baseball, and that all of you suffer under the very similar idiocies of your own Covid politicians. But, I just can’t help myself. Lauterbach is a special case, a truly monumental idiot who in his boundless incompetence and stupidity vastly exceeds his peers. It is my aim to make him the international symbol of pandemic derangement. I want pictures of this human incarnation of everything that is wrong with masking children and force-vaccinating millions printed next to future dictionary entries on Covidianism. We have seen the enemy, and it is this sad, stupid, Smeagol-looking loser, who thinks Eric Feigl-Ding is an authority and that clip-on bowties are fashionable.

You must understand that Lauterbach is not only the dumbest federal politician Germany has ever had. He also ranks among the least competent, most bafflingly idiotic people ever to have attained prominence of any kind. He is a drunken tweeter who as Cabinet Minister once declared war on Russia. He is a dim salt-phobic eccentric whose own ex-wife declared him unfit for the responsibilities of a Cabinet position. He is a tireless advocate of mask mandates who in May 2021 was photographed totally maskless on a train to Hamburg.

He has written one of the saddest, most derivative and pointless Ph.D. dissertations I have ever read. He poses as an epidemiologist while routinely misinterpreting even the simplest scientific studies. His most memorable science fail was a tweet citing a “new American Mega [sic!] Study” showing that mask efficacy is “very great and uncontested”. His link led to a bizarre pre-print that was so bad, some concluded it had to be a hoax. When a serology study emerged showing that 95% of Germans had Covid antibodies, he denied the results meant the pandemic was over, inadvertently questioning the entire premise of mass vaccination. He spent much of early 2022 demanding that ever more people get fourth doses and even said he himself was quadruple vaccinated. Three months later he announced he had tested positive for Covid, declared his symptoms to be substantial, and then violated Berlin quarantine rules to attend a press conference, where he was stupid enough to flash his digital vaccine pass to the cameras. The QR code revealed that he had only ever received three jabs. His Ministry insisted he’d merely failed to register his second booster with the CoronaWarn app, but the next year he doubled down on his stupidity, allowing the press to photograph his physical vaccine records, showing only three doses were registered there as well.

At one point he proposed to exempt the recently vaccinated from indoor mask rules, saying that he hoped this would encourage further vaccine uptake. After polls showed that disturbingly large numbers of Germans were willing to accept quarterly vaccination for the privilege of mask exemptions, he said he’d withdraw the incentive if too many people took advantage of it. This summer, with the political relevance of Covid fading, he opened a new front against summer weather, announcing an initiative to call old people and remind them to drink water whenever temperatures get too high.

There has been such an unrelenting tidal wave of Lauterbachian moronicity that it has proven impossible to keep track of it all. He is an endless source of comedic content, a political lolcow who stumbles from embarrassing gaffe to embarrassing gaffe without ever seeming to notice. Last year, he appeared on national television and ranted bizarrely about the Stanford epidemiologist John Ioannidis and the Great Barrington Declaration. He seemed to be drunk, or perhaps under the influence of some medication, as he mashed his words about “certain scientists who are shared exponentially on social media”:

So there is exponential growth in viruses, and there is also an exponential growth in false information. You only need a few scientists for this… In the case of Corona, for example, there was a scientists who used to do very good work but has now drifted off course. A Stanford scientist, Ioannidis, made a declaration, the Great Barrington Declaration, which basically said that the virus is not that dangerous, that it’s not killing people, that flu can be more dangerous and so on, a lot of things that just aren’t right. And this has been quoted incredibly often by these people, who are out there, and there are just far too many of them, who would like to hear the relieving message, “it’s not really that bad, we don’t have to do anything”.

The rant escaped notice at the time, but was recently unearthed by my Twitter friend @tomdabassman, who uploaded the clip with English subtitles. He tagged Stanford medical professor and Great Barrington Declaration co-author Jay Bhattacharya, who could hardly believe his eyes. Almost everything in Lauterbach’s rant was wrong, and he said so in a tweet that has now been viewed almost a million times:

Now, for better or worse, Germany looks up to America and prizes American academic culture. When a Stanford professor criticises the German Health Minister, the German press take notice.

First was a modest article in the Berlinzer Zeitung – ‘Harsh criticism from abroad: “Lauterbach seems not have any inkling”‘

Stanford Professor Jay Bhattacharya doesn’t see [Lauterbach’s statements] as a laughing matter. He wrote on Monday that he’s sorry the Germans had such an unqualified health minister during the Covid pandemic.

He countered Lauterbach’s statements with four points: firstly, Professor John Ioannidis is far from being an outmoded scholar and is one of the most frequently published and cited scientists on the subject of Covid. Secondly, he neither wrote nor signed the Great Barrington Declaration. Thirdly, even this declaration did not declare the virus to be harmless …. Fourthly, Bhattacharya says that “Lauterbach seems to have no idea of the damage his lockdown policy has done to the poor, children and the working class. Germany has worse Covid results than neighboring Sweden”.

The original tweet with the Lauterbach video has already been viewed 500,000 times; the tweeting Health Minister has not yet responded publicly to the Stanford professor’s message.

Then came Bild, the largest-circulation newspaper in Germany, with the headline ‘Stanford Professor has harsh criticism for Lauterbach‘:

In his Covid policy, Karl Lauterbach repeatedly talks about science, arguing with studies and articles. But, of all people, a renowned Covid scientist is now sharply criticising the German Health Minister!

Stanford Professor Jayanta Bhattacharya (50), an expert in health economics, has accused Lauterbach on X of being “incredibly misinformed about Covid science”.

The reason for the outrage: an RBB interview with Lauterbach from March 12th 2022.

In an interview excerpt shared by Bhattacharya, Lauterbach complained about an “exponential growth not only in viruses, but also in false reports. … In the case of Corona, for example, there was a scientists who used to do very good work but has now drifted off course: a Stanford scientist, Ioannidis,” Lauterbach says. He is referring to John Ioannidis (58), Professor of Medicine and Professor of Epidemiology and Population Health at Stanford University.

Statements that Bhattacharya won’t let stand!

“Professor John Ioannidis is not ‘worn out’ and is one of the most published/cited scientists on Covid,” he says… Furthermore, Ioannidis neither wrote nor signed the ‘Great Barrington Declaration’. And the Stanford professor clarifies in his counterattack on Lauterbach that the ‘Great Barrington Declaration’ never claimed that the virus was “not dangerous.” … “Lauterbach seems to not have any inkling of the damage his lockdown policies did to the poor, to children, and to the working class,” says Bhattacharya. AND: The Stanford professor even calls Lauterbach “unqualified”.

Major blogs and online magazines like Reitschuster and Tichys Einblick have picked up the story, with headlines about how badly informed Bhattacharya finds Lauterbach to be. News.de calls Bhattacharya’s “public reprimand” a “bitter slap in the face” for the Health Minister; Der Westen says much the same, as does the television broadcaster ProSieben.

We desperately need more of this. I call upon Jay Bhattacharya to continue his attacks on the German Health Minister. He is a moronic pseudointellectual fraud and a menace, and the German people need to hear this from Stanford professors like him. Perhaps the other authors of the Great Barrington Declaration could add their voices too. Surely John Ioannidis would also like to weigh in.

This piece originally appeared on Eugyppius’s Substack newsletter. You can subscribe here.

COMMENTS

The Covid Inquiry is Insulting the Victims of Lockdown

By Will Jones

What gives the relatives of Covid victims the sole right to the moral high ground, asks Allison Pearson in the Telegraph. Lockdowns were devastating, and their victims were often far younger than those of Covid. Yet the Covid Inquiry puts the spotlight on the former while largely ignoring the latter. Here’s an excerpt.

I really must stop watching the Covid Inquiry, it’s bad for the blood pressure. Even the element of drama is lacking because we all know how this story ends: Lady Hallett, shaggy blonde bob shaking sorrowfully, will find that chaotic, ‘shopping-trolley’ Boris locked down too late (even though notably un-chaotic Germany only locked down two days earlier than us). Bad Boris also raised commonsense objections to lockdown and refused to keep the population masked and social distancing in perpetuity, as recommended by Susan ‘Stalin’s Nanny’ Michie of the SAGE scientific advisory group. 

Given the choice between Boris’s hale-fellow magnanimity and Michie’s joyless authoritarianism, I know which I would choose, but that is very much not the preference of this appalling establishment sham. 

Relatives of those who died from Covid are allowed to be present (holding up laminated photos of the deceased) which gives proceedings the feel of a tribunal in Revolutionary France hellbent on personal revenge rather than what they should be; a rational and honest assessment of whether shutting down the country was justified. 

After the former Prime Minister apologised on Wednesday – “I understand the feelings of these victims and their families, and I am deeply sorry for the pain and the loss and the suffering,” said Boris – four protesters stood up, holding signs which said: “The dead can’t hear your apologies.” 

What gives those people the right to sole occupancy of the moral high ground? Of course their losses are terribly sad, but the median age of death from Covid (about 83 years) was not that different to the normal life expectancy for men and women before the pandemic. What about younger people killed or traumatised by lockdown? 

Where are the photos of the formerly happy girl who developed anorexia in 2020 and tragically took her own life (as recounted by the girl’s mother to a rightly upset Julia Hartley-Brewer on her Talk TV show)? How about the one million youngsters currently on a waiting list for mental-health services, a shocking queue that would stretch from London to Manchester? 

Any portraits perchance at the Inquiry of the bereaved at funerals who were not allowed to console each other, not even when they lived in the same house for goodness sake? Or the pregnant women who went through miscarriages alone because, apparently, having the father with them was too much of a Covid risk? 

How about the distraught, self-isolating spouses of confused and lonely care home residents who could not visit while staff trooped in gaily with their Tesco carrier bags? What about the grown men and women who still cry into their pillow at night fretting that their darling mum or dad died thinking they had abandoned them? 

Worth reading in full.

COMMENTS

Boris Johnson is Still in Denial About Lockdowns

By Will Jones

When he appeared at the Covid Inquiry this week, former Prime Minister Boris Johnson had a golden opportunity to get to the heart of the issue and denounce lockdown as unnecessary and harmful. But he blew it, says Dr. Jay Bhattacharya in UnHerd. Here’s an excerpt.

As a vocal Covid dissident and lockdown opponent throughout the pandemic, watching the U.K. Covid Inquiry these past few weeks has been a depressing experience. One gets the sense that both the people leading the inquiry and the vast majority of those questioned — the architects of the U.K.’s disastrously failed Covid policy — have learnt nothing. 

At one point on Wednesday, Boris Johnson had a golden opportunity to get to the heart of the problem. The lead inquiry lawyer, Hugo Keith KC, asked the former Prime Minister whether the late March 2020 order to lock down the country was “absolutely necessary”. This was Johnson’s golden opportunity to confess the cardinal error of the U.K.’s pandemic strategy: that it imposed lockdown in the first place.

Instead, he averred that the U.K. had “no other tool” than lockdown available. Under questioning about his involvement in pandemic decision-making in January and February 2020, the ex-PM’s mea culpa centred on his regret that he had not “twigged” the seriousness of the Covid threat earlier.

One major problem with this reasoning is that by the time February 2020 rolled around, Covid was almost certainly more widespread than anyone realised because it had arrived earlier than anyone realised. In 2019, Chinese authorities delayed reporting the existence of the virus to the world. Studies of antibodies in stored blood and stored wastewater from across the globe — including Italy, the U.S., Brazil and elsewhere — found traces of Covid’s presence in autumn 2019, long before the world knew about it. Even a January 2020 lockdown would have been too late: our fate was sealed once the virus was abroad in the world.

“The inquiry has been marked by a studied lack of curiosity about the great control group of the pandemic: Sweden,” Dr. Bhattacharya continues. “But Sweden did better than nearly every other country on earth in protecting human life. It has among the world’s lowest cumulative age-adjusted all-cause excess deaths since the start of the pandemic. And it accomplished this feat without lockdown.”

Worth reading in full.

For the full story on early Covid spread, see here and here.

COMMENTS

Bristol University Axes the National Anthem from Graduation Ceremonies Amid Students’ Claims it is “Old-Fashioned” and “Offensive to Some”

By Will Jones

Bristol University has axed the National Anthem from its graduation ceremonies with some students claiming it is “old-fashioned” and “offensive to some”. The Mail has the story.

The anthem has not been played since last year’s ceremony with the university saying it regularly updates its graduation ceremonies. 

God Save The King will now only be played when a member of the Royal Family is present. 

Some students at the 147-year-old university have suggested the National Anthem was culled because it is “irrelevant”, “old-fashioned” or might even be “offensive to some”.

It comes just weeks after the university vowed to remove slave trader Edward Colston’s emblem from its logo, after his statue was toppled during a Black Lives Matter protest in the city in June 2020.

Layla Daynes, 21, told the Sun: “The monarchy isn’t really relevant to my generation, so it wouldn’t be missed.”

Free Speech Union director Toby Young asked: “Why are Britain’s most prestigious universities openly contemptuous of the country’s history and heritage?”

Worth reading in full.

If the point of multiculturalism – which many of the university bosses who make these decisions would swear by – is that we are supposed to be united as a nation despite sometimes massive differences in cultural outlook, how is axing the National Anthem – a prominent symbol of our nation as one people that transcends our differences – supposed to help with that? The suspicion must be that decisions like this are motivated primarily by hatred of country and its history than any honourable motive. Sidelining the National Anthem makes little sense even for the adherents of the multicultural creed – unless the point is just to do Britain down for its supposed ‘systemic racism’ and historic ‘colonialism’.

COMMENTS

Labour Parliamentarians Back Kemi Badenoch on Stopping Children Changing Gender at School

By Will Jones

Tony Blair’s former Education Secretary Estelle Morris, who now sits in the Lords as a Labour peer, has backed Kemi Badenoch on trans rights by saying children should not be encouraged to change gender. The Telegraph has more.

Estelle Morris said pupils should be taught in biology lessons that there are only two sexes.

Speaking in a debate in the House of Lords, she warned that if teachers allowed children to “socially transition”, by referring to them by a different pronoun or name, it could cause them “psychological damage”.

She added that parents should always be informed if a child was struggling with their gender identity.

The comments go much further than the official Labour position, which so far has simply called on the Government to publish advice to schools on gender issues.

A group representing lesbian members of the Labour Party backed Equalities Minister Mrs Badenoch after she warned of an “epidemic” of gay children being told they were transgender.

The Lesbian Labour Group said: “How come a Tory minister can be right and Labour is so wrong?”

The Government has still not published long-awaited guidance for schools on how to deal with children who say they want to change gender, such as whether they should be allowed to take part in sports with children from the opposite biological sex.

I shudder to think what a Starmer-led Government will allow in our schools – it’s been bad enough under the Tories, whose ‘war on woke’ has often felt like little more than empty words from an administration powerless against the Blob.

Worth reading in full.

COMMENTS

U.K. Government’s Veto of Scotland’s Gender Reforms Ruled Lawful by Top Court

By Will Jones

Scotland’s highest court has ruled the U.K. Government acted lawfully by vetoing Nicola Sturgeon’s self-ID gender laws in a humiliating defeat for First Minister Humza Yousaf. The Telegraph has more.

The 

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[lboogie1906]

Dr. Edward Franklin Frazier (September 24, 1894 – May 17, 1962) was a sociologist and author, published as E. Franklin Frazier. His 1932 Ph.D. dissertation was published as a book titled The Negro Family in the United States (1939); it analyzed the historical forces that influenced the development of the African American family from the time of slavery to the mid-1930s. The book was awarded the 1940 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. It was among the first sociological works on African Americans researched and written by an African American person.

He was born in Baltimore as one of five children of James H. Frazier, a bank messenger, and Mary (Clark) Frazier, a homemaker. He attended the Baltimore public schools, which were legally segregated in those decades. Upon his graduation in 1912 from the Colored High and Training School, he was awarded the school’s annual scholarship to Howard University

He graduated with honors from Howard in 1916. He was a top scholar, pursuing Latin, Greek, German, and mathematics. He participated in extracurricular activities including drama, political science, the NAACP, and the Intercollegiate Socialist Society. He was elected as class president in both 1915 and 1916.

He attended Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he earned an MA. The topic of his thesis was New Currents of Thought Among the Colored People of America. During his time at Clark, Frazier first began to study sociology, combining his approach with his deep interest in African American history and culture. He spent 1920–1921 as a Russell Sage Foundation fellow at the New York School of Social Work.

In 1948 he was elected as the first African American president of the American Sociological Association. He published numerous other books and articles on African American culture and race relations. In 1950 he helped draft the UNESCO statement The Race Question.

He wrote a dozen books in his lifetime, including The Black Bourgeoisie, a critique of the Black middle class in which he questioned the effectiveness of African American businesses in producing racial equality. #africanhistory365 #africanexcellence #alphaphialpha

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Finding the right assignment expert can significantly enhance a student’s academic experience, helping them achieve better grades and a deeper understanding of their subjects. Whether you need assistance with complex topics, tight deadlines, or high academic standards, professional help is available to support you. With Global assignment help services, students in the UK can receive high-quality, plagiarism-free, and timely assignments, making their academic journey smoother. If you're looking for expert assistance, consider Goto Assignment Expert to meet your academic needs efficiently and professionally.

[michaelgabrill]

Newly Minted Ph.D. Studies Phytoplankton with NASAs FjordPhyto Project

FjordPhyto is a collective effort where travelers on tour expedition vessels in Antarctica help scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Universidad Nacional de La Plata study phytoplankton. Now project leader Dr. Allison Cusick has a Ph.D.! . Dr. Cusick studies how melting glaciers influence phytoplankton in the coastal regions. She wrote her doctoral dissertation […] from NASA https://ift.tt/cJnrwmp

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Christopher F. Rufo

Published: Mar 19, 2024

Harvard professor Christina Cross is a rising star in the field of critical race studies. She earned a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, secured the support of the National Science Foundation, and garnered attention from the New York Times, where she published an influential article title “The Myth of the Two-Parent Home.”

Cross’s 2019 dissertation, “The Color, Class, and Context of Family Structure and Its Association with Children’s Educational Performance,” won a slate of awards, including the American Sociological Association Dissertation Award and the ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award, and helped catapult her onto the Harvard faculty.

According to a new complaint filed with Harvard’s office of research integrity, however, Cross’s work is compromised by multiple instances of plagiarism, including “verbatim plagiarism, mosaic plagiarism, uncited paraphrasing, and uncited quotations from other sources.”

I have obtained a copy of the complaint, which documents a pattern of misappropriation in Cross’s dissertation and one other academic paper. The complaint begins with a dozen allegations of plagiarism related to the dissertation that range in severity from small bits of “duplicative language,” which may not constitute an offense, to multiple passages heavily plagiarized from other sources without proper attribution. (Cross did not respond to a request for comment.)

The most serious allegation is that Cross lifted an entire paragraph nearly verbatim from a paper by Stacey Bosick and Paula Fomby titled “Family Instability in Childhood and Criminal Offending During the Transition Into Adulthood” without citing the source or placing verbatim language in quotations. Here is the paragraph from Bosick and Fomby:

We use data from the PSID and two of its supplemental studies, the Child Development Supplement (CDS) and the Transition into Adulthood Supplement (TAS). PSID began in 1968 as a nationally representative sample of approximately 4,800 households. Original respondents and their descendants have been followed annually until 1997 and biennially since then. To maintain population representativeness, a sample refresher in 1997 added approximately 500 households headed by immigrants who had entered the United States since 1968. At each wave, the household head or the spouse or cohabiting partner of the head reports on family household composition, employment, earned and unearned income, assets, debt, educational attainment, expenditures, housing characteristics, and health and health care in the household. In 2015 (the most recent wave available), the study collected information on almost 25,000 individuals in approximately 9,000 households.

And here is the paragraph from Cross, with identical language italicized:

This study draws on data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (1985-2015) and its two youth-centered supplements, the Child Development Supplement (CDS) (1997-2007) and the Transition into Adulthood Supplement (TAS) (2005-2015). The PSID began in 1968 as a nationally-representative sample of nearly 5,000 U.S. households. Original sample members and their descendants were followed annually until 1997 and have been followed biennially since then. To maintain population representativeness, in 1997, a sample refresher added approximately 500 households headed by immigrants who had entered the United States since 1968. At each wave, the household head or the spouse or cohabiting partner of the head reports on household composition, and household members’ employment, income, educational attainment, and health status. In 2015, the study collected information on nearly 25,000 individuals in approximately 9,000 households.

This was not a one-off error. Later in the paper, Cross lifts another full paragraph from Bosick and Fomby, with minor word substitutions, without placing the copied language in quotation marks or properly citing the authors. Cross cannot plead unfamiliarity with the source: Fomby served on Cross’s dissertation committee, making the offense even more egregious.

Elsewhere in the paper, Cross borrows language from other academic sources, sometimes citing the authors but failing to place the verbatim language in quotations, and other times failing to cite the source at all, creating the false impression that it was her own work. For example, Cross lifts verbatim language from “Examining the Antecedents of U.S. Nonmarital Fatherhood,” by Marcia Carlson, Alicia VanOrman, and Natasha Pilkauskas—the last of whom also served on Cross’s dissertation committee—without the use of direct quotations, as required. Here is the paragraph from Carlson et al.:

To adjust for biennial interviewing starting in 1994, we assign the previous year’s reported values (adjusting earnings for inflation) as the missing year’s values for the time-varying covariates during noninterview (i.e., odd) years in the 1994–2006 period.

Cross directly copies this language, including the idiosyncratic use of parentheticals, with minor word substitutions, suggesting a certain amount of deliberateness. Cross writes, again with identical language italicized:

To adjust for biennial interviewing starting in 1997, I assign the previous year’s reported values (adjusting income for inflation) as the missing year’s values for the time-varying covariates during noninterview (i.e., even) years in the 1998-2012 period.

According to the complaint, Cross repeats this pattern of plagiarism in at least one other paper, “Extended family households among children in the United States: Differences by race/ethnicity and socio-economic status,” published in the academic journal Population Studies in 2018. The complaint alleges that Cross again uses material from others, including the same passages from her dissertation advisors, without proper attribution.

This complaint raises a number of pertinent questions. First, do the allegations rise to the level of “plagiarism”? To answer that question, one might turn to Harvard’s own policy, which states: “If you copy language word for word from another source and use that language in your paper, you are plagiarizing verbatim . . . you must give credit to the author of the source material, either by placing the source material in quotation marks and providing a clear citation, or by paraphrasing the source material and providing a clear citation.”

Second, what is happening at Harvard? We have seen an explosion of plagiarism allegations against prominent scholars and administrators in recent months, all associated with critical race studies and “diversity and inclusion” programs. Former president Claudine Gay, chief diversity officer Sherri Ann Charleston, DEI administrator Shirley Greene, and now star professor Christina Cross have each come under fire for alleged plagiarism.

This raises several additional questions. Did these scholars manage to earn positions at Harvard without a comprehensive review of their work? Why are Gay, Charleston, and Greene, in particular, still employed at Harvard, given the seriousness of the questions raised about their academic integrity? Harvard’s own policy recommends serious consequences for students who have committed plagiarism. Are professors held to a lesser standard?

Finally, given Harvard’s long-standing support for DEI policies and affirmative action programs, it is reasonable to ask whether scholars such as Gay, Charleston, Greene, and Cross rose through the ranks on their merits or, at least in part, on their identity and their politics.

Further investigation is needed. Independent researchers currently looking into plagiarism at Harvard should scrutinize not only these programs but also a control group in other, more substantive disciplines to determine whether plagiarism correlates with left-wing racial disciplines or is widespread throughout the university.

Time will tell. My sources say that more allegations are coming.

==

As it's already well established that the domains these people operate in - anything ending in "Studies"; Gender Studies, Queer Studies, Women's Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Race Studies, Media Studies, etc - are fraudulent, it's safest to assume that anyone with such units on their academic record is a fraud and plagiarist by default, and until proven otherwise.

[wsuuniversity09]

Is a Doctorate in Business Administration (DBA) the Right Choice for Working Professionals?

Introduction

In today’s competitive business world, professionals constantly seek ways to advance their careers, gain expertise, and stand out in leadership roles. One way to achieve this is by pursuing a Doctorate in Business Administration (DBA). Designed for senior executives, entrepreneurs, and industry leaders, a DBA program for working professionals offers an opportunity to develop advanced skills in business strategy, management, and research. But is it the right choice for you? Let’s explore the benefits, challenges, and potential career outcomes of earning a DBA.

What is a Doctorate in Business Administration (DBA)?

A Doctorate in Business Administration (DBA) is a professional doctoral degree designed for experienced business professionals looking to enhance their leadership, strategic decision-making, and research capabilities. Unlike a Ph.D. in Business, which focuses on theoretical research and academic careers, a DBA emphasizes applied research to solve real-world business challenges. The program is structured to allow working professionals to pursue their doctorate without putting their careers on hold.

Why Should Working Professionals Consider a DBA?

A DBA program for working professionals is structured to accommodate the busy schedules of executives and managers. Here are some key reasons why it may be the right choice for you:

1. Career Advancement

A DBA can open doors to higher-level positions, such as CEO, CFO, or Director, by equipping you with advanced knowledge in business strategy, leadership, and decision-making.

2. Enhanced Business Knowledge and Research Skills

The program emphasizes research-driven decision-making, allowing you to develop skills that help solve complex business problems efficiently.

3. Increased Earning Potential

DBA graduates often earn higher salaries compared to those with an MBA or a master’s degree. Employers value the expertise and strategic thinking that come with a doctorate.

4. Flexibility for Working Professionals

Most DBA programs, like the one offered by Western State University, California, are designed with flexibility in mind, allowing professionals to continue working while studying.

5. Networking Opportunities

DBA programs attract experienced professionals from diverse industries, creating valuable networking opportunities that can lead to business collaborations and career growth.

Challenges of Pursuing a DBA

While a DBA program for working professionals offers numerous benefits, it also comes with challenges:

Time Commitment: DBA programs typically take 3-5 years to complete, requiring significant dedication.

Research Requirements: Unlike MBA programs, DBA coursework involves extensive research and dissertation work.

Financial Investment: Doctoral programs can be expensive, but many institutions offer financial aid or employer sponsorship options.

What to Expect from a DBA Program?

A Doctorate in Business Administration program consists of coursework, research, and a dissertation. Some key areas covered in the program include:

Strategic Management – Understanding long-term business planning and execution.

Leadership and Organizational Behavior – Learning advanced leadership techniques and workplace dynamics.

Business Analytics and Decision Making – Using data to drive business success.

Research Methodology – Conducting business research and developing a dissertation.

Global Business Trends – Analyzing international markets and economic shifts.

Who Should Enroll in a DBA Program?

A DBA is ideal for professionals who:

Have several years of managerial or executive experience.

Want to transition into high-level leadership or consulting roles.

Are interested in business research and problem-solving.

Seek to teach in universities or business schools.

Career Opportunities After Earning a DBA

Graduates of a DBA program for working professionals can pursue various career paths, such as:

Corporate Leadership – CEO, CFO, or other C-suite positions.

Consulting – Business strategy consultant or management analyst.

Academia – Teaching business courses at universities.

Entrepreneurship – Applying advanced business skills to start and scale a business.

Why Choose Western State University, California for Your DBA?

Western State University, California offers a top-tier Doctorate in Business Administration designed for working professionals. The program provides:

Flexible Learning Options – Online and hybrid formats for convenience.

Industry-Experienced Faculty – Professors with real-world business expertise.

Research-Oriented Curriculum – Helping students tackle business challenges effectively.

Networking Opportunities – Connecting students with global business leaders.

Conclusion

A Doctorate in Business Administration (DBA) is a valuable investment for working professionals looking to advance their careers, gain expertise, and make impactful contributions to the business world. While it requires commitment and dedication, the long-term benefits—career growth, increased earnings, and professional recognition—make it a worthwhile pursuit. If you’re ready to take your career to the next level, consider enrolling in the DBA program for working professionals at Western State University, California.

Learn more about the program and apply today: Western State University DBA Program.

[educationtech]

M.Tech vs. M.S.- Decoding the Differences and Choosing the Right Path for You

M.Tech vs. MS:- When considering advanced education in technical or scientific fields, students often face the choice between pursuing a Master of Technology (M.Tech) or a Master of Science (MS). Both degrees are designed to enhance knowledge and skills, but they cater to different career goals and educational philosophies. This guide will explore the key differences between M.Tech and MS programs, and their respective benefits, and help you determine which path aligns best with your aspirations.

Overview of M.Tech and MS

M.Tech (Master of Technology):

Primarily offered in engineering and technology disciplines.

Focuses on practical applications, technical skills, and industry relevance.

Typically structured over two years, emphasizing coursework, projects, and internships.

MS (Master of Science):

Available across a broader range of fields, including natural sciences, engineering, and social sciences.

Emphasizes theoretical knowledge, research methodologies, and analytical skills.

Duration can vary from one to two years, often requiring a thesis or substantial research project.

Key Differences

Detailed Comparison

1. Curriculum Focus

M.Tech: Programs are designed to equip students with hands-on skills applicable to the industry. The curriculum includes lab work, projects, and internships that prepare graduates for immediate employment in technical roles. Specializations often align closely with current industry needs, such as software development or telecommunication.

 MS: These programs focus on developing a deep understanding of theoretical concepts and research methodologies. Students engage in rigorous academic training that prepares them for careers in research or academia. The curriculum may include fewer prescribed courses, allowing for more flexibility in selecting electives based on personal interests.

2. Research Opportunities

M.Tech: While there may be a project component, M.Tech programs generally emphasize practical implementation rather than independent research. Students may work on industry-related projects but are less likely to conduct original research.

MS: A hallmark of MS programs is the requirement for students to conduct original research under faculty supervision. This research typically culminates in a thesis or dissertation that contributes new knowledge to the field.

3. Career Paths

M.Tech Graduates: Typically pursue careers in engineering roles within industries such as manufacturing, IT, telecommunications, and project management. They are well-prepared for technical positions that require specialized knowledge and practical skills.

MS Graduates: Often aim for careers in academia, research institutions, or advanced technical roles that require strong analytical skills. The research experience gained during an MS program can be advantageous for those considering a Ph.D. or roles in R&D departments.

Choosing the Right Path

Deciding between an M.Tech and an MS depends largely on your career goals:

Choose M.Tech if you:

Prefer a hands-on approach to learning.

Aim to enter the workforce quickly in technical roles.

Seek specialized knowledge aligned with industry demands.

Choose MS if you:

Are interested in conducting research or pursuing an academic career.

Want to develop strong analytical and problem-solving skills.

Aim to contribute to scientific knowledge through original research.

Career Prospects for MS vs. M.Tech for engineers

Both M.Tech (Master of Technology) and MS (Master of Science) degrees offer diverse career opportunities for engineers, but they cater to different professional paths due to their distinct focuses. Understanding the career prospects for each degree can help you make an informed decision about which path to pursue. M.Tech vs. MS for Indian students are very good career path. Career Opportunities for M.Tech Graduates M.Tech graduates are primarily prepared for technical roles in various industries. Their education emphasizes practical skills and application-oriented knowledge, making them attractive candidates for many engineering and technology-related positions. Common career paths include:

Engineering Roles(Higher studies after engineering): Positions such as software engineer, hardware engineer, and systems analyst are prevalent among M.Tech graduates.

Project Management: Many M.Tech holders advance into project management roles where they oversee engineering projects and teams.

Consultancy: M.Tech graduates often work as consultants, providing expert advice in their specialized fields.

Research and Development: Some may also enter R&D departments in industries like electronics, telecommunications, and manufacturing.

Entrepreneurship: The practical skills gained during an M.Tech program can empower graduates to start their own ventures.

M.Tech graduates are particularly valued in sectors that require immediate application of technical skills, such as IT companies, manufacturing firms, and engineering consultancies.

Conclusion

Both M.Tech at Arya College of Engineering & IT, Jaipur and MS degrees offer valuable opportunities for advanced education but cater to different interests and career trajectories. Understanding the distinctions between these programs will help you make an informed decision based on your professional aspirations. Whether you lean towards the practical applications of technology or the theoretical foundations of science will ultimately guide your choice between these two paths.