Why Some Academics Are Reluctant to Call Claudine Gay a Plagiarist - The New Yorker | Could a Trump Win Put His Running Mate in Office? - The New Yorker | The Biggest Election Year in History - The New Yorker | Joe Biden Makes Saving Democracy the Center of His Campaign

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� � � � � � You Might Like � � � � � � � � � Why Some Academics Are Reluctant to Call Claudine Gay a Plagiarist - The New Yorker (Full Access)    On Tuesday, Claudine Gay resigned as president of Harvard University, just six months into a tenure marked by campus unrest and controversy. After Hamas militants attacked Israel on October 7th, a number of Harvard student groups released a statement blaming Israel for the violence. The administration’s initial response was circumspect; in a statement, the school’s leaders said they were “heartbroken by the death and destruction unleashed by the attack.” After a public outcry, Gay released a follow-up statement explicitly condemning terrorism and distancing Harvard from the student groups. In December, Gay and two other university presidents were hauled before Congress to testify about antisemitism on their campuses. When Representative Elise Stefanik asked Gay whether calling for the genocide of Jews was a violation of Harvard’s policies against bullying and harrassment, Gay replied, “It can be, depending on the context.” Shortly afterward, Gay apologized. But what ultimately brought Gay down wasn’t the furor over her testimony. It was accusations of plagiarism in her scholarly work, which has focussed in part on Black political participation. Rumors about Gay’s record had been circulating among conservative bloggers for months, but, as the national spotlight turned toward Harvard, media outlets such as the New York Post began investigating. In early December, the activist Christopher Rufo published allegations about Gay in his newsletter, including instances of missing citations and verbatim copying of other scholars’ writing without the use of quotation marks or attribution. In the following weeks, more apparent instances of plagiarism piled up. Gay has admitted to making errors, such as duplicating “other scholars’ language, without proper attribution,” but she has denied claiming credit for other people’s research, and has said that she stands by her work. In any case, on January 2nd, she stepped down from her role, saying that doing so was “in the best interests of Harvard” and that it had been “distressing to have doubt cast on my commitments to confronting hate and to upholding scholarly rigor.” (She will remain on the school’s faculty.) I spoke with Voss about what it’s been like to get dragged into Harvard’s drama and why academics have been so divided over how to describe Gay’s actions. Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity. Continued here � � � � � � You Might Like � � � � � � � � � Could a Trump Win Put His Running Mate in Office? - The New Yorker (Full Access)    How have we allowed one man to wreak so much havoc on our democracy? Years after Donald Trump was voted out of office, his destructiveness to our electoral system has become so infectious that those who loathe him are doing the work for him. In the past several months, dozens of legal challenges have sought to bar the former President from appearing on ballots in the 2024 Presidential election, even though—or perhaps because—he is the front-runner for the Republican nomination and the general election. In December, the Colorado Supreme Court and Maine’s secretary of state each declared that the Constitution disqualifies Trump from the ballot. Other states could soon follow. On Wednesday, Trump asked the Supreme Court of the United States to put the kibosh on these efforts. So, the argument goes, having sworn to support the Constitution, Trump engaged in insurrection or rebellion and gave aid and comfort to others who engaged in that conduct by, among other things, pressuring state officials and Vice-President Mike Pence to overturn the results of the 2020 election, summoning his supporters to the Capitol to prevent Congress’s ratification of the election, and inciting violence there on January 6, 2021. The two scholars wrote that Trump “knowingly attempted to execute what, had it succeeded, would have amounted to a political coup d’etat against the Constitution and its system of elections.” They argued that his disqualification under the Fourteenth Amendment is “constitutionally automatic,” just as would be the case if a person didn’t satisfy Article II’s more mundane requirements that the President be a natural-born citizen, be at least thirty-five years old, and have resided in the U.S. for at least fourteen years. It is a solution that many who dread Trump’s reëlection dreamed of without knowing it. On December 19th, in a lawsuit brought by several Republican and unaffiliated voters in Colorado, the state’s Supreme Court prohibited election officials from listing Trump on the state’s Republican primary ballot. A week later, the Colorado Republican Party asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review the decision, stating, “For the first time in American history, a former President has been disqualified from the ballot, a political party has been denied the opportunity to put forward the presidential candidate of its choice, and the voters have been denied the ability to choose their Chief Executive through the electoral process.” (The voters who brought the suit, and Colorado’s secretary of state, agree that the Supreme Court should hear the case.) The next day, in response to several Maine voters’ challenges to Trump’s nomination petition, Maine’s secretary of state ruled that Trump “is not qualified to hold the office of the President” under the disqualification clause. Trump is seeking review of the decision in state court. Continued here � � � � � � You Might Like � � � � � � � � � Don't like ads? Go ad-free with TradeBriefs Premium The Biggest Election Year in History - The New Yorker (Full Access)    Democracy, according to many observers, is now in the hands of a small band of voters in a half-dozen swing states, whose feelings about Donald Trump will determine whether it endures or falls. From that perspective, all the other voting across the country this year, beginning with the Iowa caucuses, next week, is merely a gruelling prelude to the tense wait, on November 5th, for results from Maricopa County and the Philadelphia suburbs. Much does depend on those voters. But democracy’s struggles will play out on a far vaster field. Thanks to an alignment of calendars, 2024 will set a record for the greatest number of people living in countries that are holding nationwide elections: more than four billion, or just over half of humanity. Even more depends on them. This year is about voting, in all its hazardous glory. There are different ways of counting, but The Economist has tallied seventy-six countries where the whole eligible population has the chance to vote, even if, as in Brazil, it’s only for local offices. (That election, in October, should serve as a midterm assessment of President Luis Inácio Lula da Silva.) The countries involved—from Algeria to Iceland, Indonesia, and Venezuela—are startlingly varied, including in their commitment to actual democracy. The Economist rated forty-three of the elections as free and fair, with flaws even in the freest, ours among them. One of The Economist’s tests is whether an election has the capacity to bring about real change, in terms of policy and who is in power. Put another way, the stability of democracies depends on the capacity of elections to be destabilizing. An election that doesn’t involve some risk, to someone, is hardly any good. Those risks should be about outcomes and not, of course, about the dangers of voting or of running in the first place. Bangladesh gets the election year started on January 7th, after a bitter campaign in which the opposition complained of politicized arrests and called for a boycott of the vote. But democracy is, in a number of respects, in an even more perilous state in Russia, where Vladimir Putin will almost certainly be re-anointed in an election in March; the man who might have been his most potent challenger, Alexei Navalny, is currently an inmate at a penal colony in Kharp, in Western Siberia. Still, the turnout of Russian voters, and the mood on the street, will reveal something about Putin’s hold on power. (Iran, where elections are contested among a very limited spectrum of candidates, will face a parallel test that same month, following a year of mass protests.) Meanwhile, Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky, has said that he doesn’t intend for an election scheduled for March to take place, because, given the war, it would be “absolutely irresponsible to throw the topic of elections into society in a lighthearted and playful way.” That choice may be comprehensible. Yet it still feels like a loss, and possibly a tragedy. Continued here � � � � � � You Might Like � � � � � � � � � Joe Biden Makes Saving Democracy the Center of His Campaign - The New Yorker (Full Access)    An election year has begun, and the signs point toward a tight Presidential contest. Of the three national polls published since January 1st, two show Joe Biden trailing Donald Trump by one point in a head-to-head matchup; the third shows the pair tied. In a telephone call with reporters on January 2nd, the top officials in Biden’s reëlection campaign discussed their political strategy. They mentioned supporting abortion rights, mobilizing minority voters, and building an economy that benefits the middle class, but their overriding theme was that a Biden victory is essential to preserve American democracy. “The choice for voters,” Julie Chávez Rodríguez, Biden’s campaign manager, said on the call, “will not simply be between competing philosophies of government.” She continued, “The choice will be about protecting our democracy and every American’s fundamental freedom. . . . We are running our campaign like the fate of our democracy depends on it, because it does.” Quentin Fulks, the deputy campaign manager, added, “Donald Trump tells us point blank—if he wins a second term, he will do everything he can to dismantle American democracy, strip Americans of their hard-fought and fundamental freedoms. . . . We should take him at his word.” In the next few days, Biden will deliver two campaign speeches. On Friday, the day before the third anniversary of the January 6th attack on the Capitol, he will travel to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, where George Washington’s Continental Army encamped in the winter of 1777-78. On Monday, he will speak in Charleston, South Carolina, at Mother Emanuel A.M.E. Church, one of the oldest Black churches in the southern United States, where, in June, 2015, a young white supremacist killed nine members of a Bible-study group. Continued here

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