Category: academics

Why academic freedom is more important than free speech in finding the truth

May 21, 2025 • 10:30 am

In my first post of this series of two I maintained that First-Amendment-style freedom of speech, or something close to it, is necessary for the functioning of a democracy. But free speech is also touted not just as a prerequisite for having democracy, but a necessity for producing the “clash of ideas” that will give rise to the truth.  My contention in the first post is that while free speech is politically vital, it cannot by itself lead to finding the truth. For that you need what I call “expanded academic freedom”:  the right of individuals (usually academics or scholars) to think, write, and speak whatever they want. For this second endeavor is, unlike free speech, the one that allows people to look at the universe and see what is empirically true. (As I said earlier, the “truth” in my view, and that of the OED, is “something that conforms to fact or reality”, and knowledge, defined as “justified true belief”, is simply widely accepted truth.)

These are the two linchpins for finding and disseminating truth. Academic freedom guarantees the right to investigate reality and find out what is (provisionally) true, while freedom of speech guarantees the right to promulgate what you’ve found out. They work together to find the truth and (also important) make it publicly visible and publicly acknowledged: that is, they work together to produce knowledge.

I have construed academic freedom broadly and not limited it to academics. However, even on campus, academic freedom, just like freedom of speech, has its limits.  It is not true that I can teach creationism in an evolution class, or rail about Trump in a class about British history.  Academic freedom allows you to stay within the parameters of accepted knowledge and discourse within a field and, if you’re broaching new and heterodox ideas, they must be relevant to the class topic. If you violate this repeatedly, you’re likely to lose your academic job, and can have tenure revoked.

Similarly, academics are free to research anything they want, but that is no guarantee that their research will meet the standards of their field. If I was hired as a geneticist but spend my time studying the behavior of crickets, and not doing a good job of it, then yes, I could be disciplined or let go. You are free to do what you want within the parameters of your job, but that doesn’t guarantee career success.

(I won’t go into the the issue here of whether there is free speech in the classroom, though there clearly isn’t: again, professors can say what they want in class, but will be deep-sixed if it’s not relevant to the subject being taught. And classes also have is compelled speech: students are compelled to answer questions verbally or on exams, and are not free to give any answer they want.)

The separation of free speech and academic freedom is not a clean one. For example, a professor might say something in a didactic capacity that some students might consider harassment, like the professor at Hamline College who got into trouble for showing a picture of Muahmmad as a person, which offended some students. (The prof, who left, was ultimately vindicated.) However, there is a difference between freedom of speech adjudicated by the government, and freedom of thought, research, and teaching that is regulated by a professor’s field of work or department.

While freedom of speech assures professors at public universities of the right to promulgate their ideas, it is academic freedom, not freedom of speech, that allows them the latitude to study what they want and teach not only the gist of a subject, but promote a students’ ability to think.  It is academic freedom—the freedom of inquiry—that has:

  • Made the American university system a huge draw for students and researchers throughout the world (the US has 80% of the world’s top 50 universities).
  •  Led to 71% of all Nobel Prizes awarded having gone to Americans (29% of immigrants to America).  55% of the total are in science.
  • Prompted many revolutionary discoveries, including polio and other vaccines, gene editing technology, MRI, lasers, and GPS. (note that academic freedom obtains in many other countries, where it’s also promoted discoveries, including the structure of DNA and, in part CRISPR editing).
  • Led to the preeminence of American industry in creating scientific innovations, including microchip technology, vaccines for mumps, rubella, chickenpox, pneumonia, meningitis, hepatitis B, and hepatitis A, and various drugs.

While industry doesn’t have “academic freedom” in the sense that universities do, remember that most of the researchers in industry who create these innovations were trained in universities and absorbed their research ethos. But of course companies don’t have freedom of speech in the way that universities do; for example, they have the right to keep the technique behind their discoveries confidential for a time without publishing all the details.

You’ll notice that I have stayed away from humanities fields like literature, art, music, philosophy and law.  Why? Because, in my view, while these fields may produce interpretations or analyses of things like novels and paintings, they do not yield empirical truths. Literature, music, and painting, for example, are not “ways of knowing” but “ways of feeling or thinking”. (I discuss this in Chapter 4 of Faith Versus Fact).

This of course does not mean that such fields are without worth or merit; every reader here knows of my admiration for much of the humanities, particularly literature, art, and philosophy. It is simply that it’s not clear what we mean in such fields by the “pursuit of truth”.  What, for example is the “truth” in a Jackson Pollack painting or in Joyce’s Ulysses?  What is the (empirical) truth in John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice? The latter gives us a provocative way to look at and construct morality, but of course there are a gazillion other suggestions about how to do that. Which one is the “true” path to morality?

Granted, fields like sociology and economics do traffic in truth, but truth that can be ascertained only by using the scientific method construed broadly, which I see as confluent with academic freedom.  It is the toolkit of science, which developed under academic freedom, that allows us to reach real truths, and that toolkit includes implements like falsifiability, quantitative methods, pervasive doubt and criticality (a feature of academic freedom itself), replication and quality control, parsimony, collectivity, double-blind testing, and peer review. These are laid out in Chapter 2 of Faith Versus Fact.  And in that book I also define “science construed broadly” as any endeavor that uses some of these tools to ascertain what’s true. So, for example, plumbers, car mechanics, and others who solve empirical problems using a version of the scientific method can be considered practicing “science construed broadly”. Steve Gould realized this in his essay Genesis vs. Geology, recounting his testimony in the creationism trial of McLean v. Arkansas:

As I prepared to leave Little Rock last December, I went to my hotel room to gather my belongings and found a man sitting backward on my commode, pulling it apart with a plumber’s wrench. He explained to me that a leak in the room below had caused part of the ceiling to collapse and he was seeking the source of the water. My commode, located just above, was the obvious candidate, but his hypothesis had failed, for my equipment was working perfectly. The plumber then proceeded to give me a fascinating disquisition on how a professional traces the pathways of water through hotel pipes and walls. The account was perfectly logical and mechanistic: it can come only from here, here, or there, flow this way or that way, and end up there, there, or here. I then asked him what he thought of the trial across the street, and he confessed his staunch creationism, including his firm belief in the miracle of Noah’s flood.As a professional, this man never doubted that water has a physical source and a mechanically constrained path of motion — and that he could use the principles of his trade to identify causes. It would be a poor (and unemployed) plumber indeed who suspected that the laws of engineering had been suspended whenever a puddle and cracked plaster bewildered him. Why should we approach the physical history of our earth any differently?

I see I’ve digressed a bit, so let me summarize. What is this sweating professor trying to say? (And remember, this is simply a first draft of some nascent ideas.) My claim is that freedom of speech does not by itself lead to truth via the much-vaunted “clash of ideas”.  That clash is necessary to find the truth, but not sufficient. Atop it one must place academic freedom: the freedom of scholars to teach, think, and research what they want.

I also claim that much of the humanities, whatever they claims, is not capable of finding truth, since it doesn’t turn on empirical facts but on critical analyses, competing theories, and competing interpretations. That doesn’t make humanities lesser than science—unless scholars in fields like art, music, and literature claim that they are practicing “another way of knowing.” Some disciplines, notably philosophy are good at of pointing out errors of thinking and guiding rational thinking, but again (in my view) do not and cannot find truths about the universe in which we dwell.

Finally, academic freedom is separate but still intertwined with freedom of speech, but they differ in important ways. The practice of academic freedom does not assume that all ideas are equal or all people are equal in merit: academia is hierarchical and meritocratic, while the First Amendment assumes that all views when expressed are equal and nobody gets an extra say because of their merit. Freedom of speech promotes the emergence of competing truths, while academic freedom emphasizes the ascertainment of the “truest” of these competitors.

A paper beyond belief

March 16, 2025 • 11:17 am

I’ve dissected many crazy papers over the years—just to show what passes for “scholarship” in some of the humanities. Yes, of course there’s good scholarship there, too, but I have a feeling that in STEM you won’t find anything as inconclusive or incoherently written as this paper (h/t: Luana for finding it). And nearly all science papers at least reveal a tentative fact or two about nature. In contrast, many “studies” papers like this one seem like wheel spinning, and are baffling. They seem to be vehicles not for finding knowledge, but getting tenure and promotions. If there is a contribution to human knowledge from this effort, I can’t find it. This one was published in the Journal of Lesbian Studies.

You can read the paper by clicking on the title below, or find the pdf here.

I scanned it once and then read it more carefully a second time, and I swear I still can’t figure out what it’s trying to say. Some AI analysis given below didn’t help much.. Not only is the paper’s thesis obscure, but it is written so poorly, and with the use of so many jargon words (“attending to,” “becomings,” “intersectional ecoqueer feminist perspective,” “disrupt normative ideas,” etc), that it would kill George Orwell if he wasn’t already dead.

The paper notes that Dr. Diamond-Lenow “(she/they) is an Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at SUNY Oneonta,” but on the list of faculty in that department I cannot find her.

Knock yourself out (and you will):

Below is the abstract, and I hope you can get something out of it. All I can remember is that lesbians seem to have a special relationship with dogs (and machines like iPhones), and this tells us something about the “the rich complexity of dyke culture and its processes of continually processing and becoming.” (“Becoming” is a favorite word in the paper, and “dyke” is a word used by Diamond-Lenow). And the author decries the misuse of dogs as tools of racism, white supremacy, and militarism.

Abstract:

This article offers a queer lesbian feminist analysis attuned to lesbian-queer-trans-canine relationalities. Specifically, the article places queer and lesbian ecofeminism in conversation with Donna Haraway’s work on the cyborg and companion species to theorize the interconnected queer becomings of people, nature, animals, and machines amidst ecologies of love and violence in the 2020s. It takes two key case studies as the focus for analysis: first, the state instrumentalization of dogs and robot dogs for racialized and imperial violence, and second, quotidian queer and lesbian-dog relationalities and becomings. In the first, the article traces how dogs are weaponized as tools of state violence and proposes a queer lesbian feminist critique of white supremacy and militarization that can also extend to a critique of the violence committed through and toward the dogs. In the second, the article analyzes how, within lesbian, non-binary, and trans-dog intimacies, dogs help articulate queer gender, sexuality, and kinship formations, and as such, queer worlds for gender, sexual, and kin becomings. The entanglements of violence and love in these queer dog relationalities provide insights into the complexities of queer and lesbian feminist worldbuilding. Lesbian and queer feminist cyborg politics can help theorize the potentials and challenges of these interspecies entanglements.

Some dog-dissing from the paper, giving a flavor of its content:

As companion species, dogs have been deeply entwined with the gendered and sexual formations of white supremacy and heteronormative domesticity. They play a foundational role in symbolizing the white bourgeois heteronormative nuclear family and the U.S. home. At the same time, dogs are often used to stigmatize and police “improper” homes and communities. For instance, breed-specific bans in the U.S. disproportionately target Black and Brown dog owners, functioning as a form of racialized criminalization (Weaver, Citation 2021).

Historically, dogs have been tools of settler colonialism and enslavement mediating racialized naturecultures (Johnson, Citation 2009, Boisseron, Citation 2018). They are also instrumentalized for racialized securitization in policing, border patrol, and carceral systems—they are in this sense, part of the violent cyborg offspring Haraway discusses. Police have long used dogs to intimidate and attack marginalized communities, as seen in numerous documented incidents: during civil rights protests in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963; against anti-police violence protests in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014 (Wall, Citation 2016); against Indigenous activists opposing the Dakota Access Pipeline in North Dakota in 2016 (Democracy Now!, Citation 2016); during Black Lives Matter protests in Baltimore and elsewhere (The Marshall Project, Citation 2020); and most recently, in 2024, against student protests over the genocide in Gaza on college and university campuses (Most, Citation 2024).

Look! Dogs are also vehicles for racial criminalization!

. . . . As companion species, dogs have been deeply entwined with the gendered and sexual formations of white supremacy and heteronormative domesticity. They play a foundational role in symbolizing the white bourgeois heteronormative nuclear family and the U.S. home. At the same time, dogs are often used to stigmatize and police “improper” homes and communities. For instance, breed-specific bans in the U.S. disproportionately target Black and Brown dog owners, functioning as a form of racialized criminalization (Weaver, Citation 2021).

And military dogs are tools of sexualized colonization and dehumanization!:

In the military, dogs are used as cyborg weapons, used to detect Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), patrol bases, police detainees, and target enemies. They played key roles in U.S. interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, including the killings of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in 2011 (Bumiller, Citation2011) and ISIS leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi in Syria in 2019 (Rogers, Citation2019). Dogs were also involved in abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad in 2004 (Schmitt, Citation2006). These deployments reflect a logic of heteronormative nationalism and sexualized colonization, dehumanizing Arab, Muslim, and Middle Eastern men within necropolitical formations of war (Diamond-Lenow, Citation2020).

There are lots of neologisms like “natureculture”. But here is the paper’s conclusion:

The article thus contributes a queer trans feminist perspective on human-dog becomings to queer ecological critique, highlighting the significance of lesbian queer feminism in analyzing more-than-human relationalities, particularly with dogs.

For some reason the last three words make me laugh out loud.

At any rate, Luana found a site where you can enter the URL of an article like this one, and it will give you both an AI summary and a podcast. I haven’t tried it, but you can if you wish. At any rate, when she put in the URL of this paper, here’s what AI spit out. I must say that it merely reiterates the paper’s language in a way that a cheating student might copy, but doesn’t shed much further  light on this black hole of scholarship:

  1. What is the central focus of this article?

This article centers on the interconnectedness of queer (specifically lesbian, non-binary, and trans) identities, human-animal (primarily canine) relationships, and technology (drawing on cyborg theory) within contexts of both affection and oppression. It aims to analyze how these entanglements contribute to the formation of queer worlds and how they are shaped by and respond to societal structures of power, particularly white supremacy and militarization.

  1. How does the article connect queer ecofeminism with cyborg and companion species theories?

The article brings queer and lesbian ecofeminist perspectives into dialogue with Donna Haraway’s concepts of the cyborg (as a hybrid of machine and organism challenging traditional boundaries) and companion species (highlighting the co-evolution and interdependence of humans and domesticated animals). By doing so, it seeks to understand how the relationships between queer individuals and their dogs, in their technologically mediated and ecologically situated contexts, challenge and redefine categories of nature, culture, human, and animal.

  1. What are the two main case studies used in the article’s analysis?

The article examines two primary case studies: firstly, the ways in which dogs, including robotic dogs, are utilized and instrumentalized by the state for purposes of racialized and imperial violence. Secondly, it analyzes the everyday intimacies and relational experiences between queer (lesbian, non-binary, and trans) individuals and their dogs, focusing on how these relationships contribute to the articulation of queer gender, sexuality, and kinship.

  1. How does the article critique the state’s use of dogs and robot dogs?

The article offers a queer lesbian feminist critique of the state’s deployment of dogs and robot dogs, particularly in the context of racialized and imperial violence. It argues that this instrumentalization of canines as tools of militarization and control is intertwined with white supremacist ideologies and inflicts violence not only on targeted human populations but also through and toward the dogs themselves. The critique aims to expose the underlying power structures and ethical implications of such practices.

  1. In what ways do dogs contribute to the lives and identities of queer individuals, according to the article?

The article suggests that dogs play a significant role in the lives of lesbian, non-binary, and trans individuals, contributing to the formation of queer gender, sexuality, and kinship structures. Through intimate relationships with dogs, queer individuals can articulate and experience their identities in ways that challenge normative understandings of these categories. These interspecies bonds help in the creation of queer social worlds and facilitate unique forms of becoming.

  1. What does the article mean by “queer canine becomings”?

“Queer canine becomings” refers to the ongoing and mutual shaping of identities and ways of being that occur within the relationships between queer individuals and their dogs. It emphasizes that these relationships are not static but rather involve processes of co-creation and transformation. The “queer” aspect highlights how these becomings often challenge and expand conventional understandings of gender, sexuality, and species boundaries.

  1. How do love and violence intertwine in the queer dog relationalities discussed in the article?

The article posits that queer-dog relationships exist within “ecologies of love and violence.” This means that these intimate bonds are not immune to broader societal forces of oppression and violence. The article explores how the potential for both deep affection and the awareness of systemic violence against both queer individuals and animals shape these interspecies connections, offering insights into the complexities of queer feminist worldbuilding in a non-ideal world.

  1. What is the significance of lesbian and queer feminist cyborg politics in understanding these interspecies entanglements?

Lesbian and queer feminist cyborg politics, as proposed in the article, provide a theoretical framework for analyzing the potentials and challenges inherent in the entanglements of queer identities, dogs, and technology. This perspective allows for a nuanced understanding of how power operates within these relationships, how boundaries are blurred and renegotiated, and how new forms of resistance and world-making can emerge from these complex interspecies intimacies in the face of both love and violence.

This may be the wackiest paper I’ve ever covered here, though it has had some tough competition.

UPDATE: The right-wing College Fix also found this paper, and proffers its own summary:

Basically, the professor’s argument seems to boil down to this: Dogs provide a positive relational experience for many LGBTQ people. However, the government also uses dogs and robo-dogs, or cyborgs, to commit unjust violence against marginalized people. Therefore, the relationships between dogs and humans are complex.

LOL! But although that seems satirical, it also seems accurate.

The AAUP goes all in for DEI

October 9, 2024 • 12:00 pm

You know what DEI is, and in case you don’t know AAUP, it’s the American Association of University Professors, the most powerful association of faculty in the country. After dropping their longstanding opposition to academic boycotts, presumably so schools and people could boycott Israel at will, they’ve now pulled another woke-ish and academically harmful move: they’ve issued a statement called “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Criteria for Faculty Evaluation” (pdf here).  It’s more or less what you think: a statement that diversity, equity, and inclusion should be an important basis for hiring and promoting faculty. Some excerpts:

The Association’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure views the use of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) criteria in faculty recruitment, promotion, and retention within this broader vision of higher education for the public good. Since the 1990s, many universities and colleges have instituted policies that use DEI criteria in faculty evaluation for appointment, reappointment, tenure, and promotion, including the use of statements that invite or require faculty members to address their skills, competencies, and achievements regarding DEI in teaching, research, and service. Such criteria are one instrument among many that may contribute to evaluating the full range of faculty skills and achievements within a diverse community of students and scholars.

Some critics contend that such policies run afoul of the principles of academic freedom. Specifically, they have characterized DEI statements as “ideological screening tools” and “political litmus tests.” From this perspective, DEI statements are sometimes thought to constitute unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination and a threat to faculty members’ academic freedom because they allegedly require candidates to adopt or act upon a set of moral and political views. This committee rejects the notion that the use of DEI criteria for faculty evaluation is categorically incompatible with academic freedom. To the contrary, when implemented appropriately in accordance with sound standards of faculty governance, DEI criteria—including DEI statements—can be a valuable component in the efforts to recruit, hire, and retain a diverse faculty with a breadth of skills needed for excellence in teaching, research, and service.

But objections to DEI by myself and others aren’t based on whether it impinges on “academic freedom”—the freedom of faculty already hired to work on or teach pretty much what they want without interference. Or, as Wikipedia puts it:

Academic freedom is the right of a teacher to instruct and the right of a student to learn in an academic setting unhampered by outside interference. It may also include the right of academics to engage in social and political criticism.

DEI, in contrast, at least as the AAUP construes it, is a program to hire people with the aim of achieving equity (equal representation of all groups).  DEI programs in place aren’t much concerned with viewpoint equity, despite what the statement says, but rather with the AAUP’s undescribed elephant in the room: ethnicity (race) and sex.  When they speak of a “diverse faculty,” they mean racially diverse, not diverse in viewpoint. (One could argue that viewpoint diversity is the most important thing to emphasize, but I’ll leave that aside.) And DEI is certainly an “ideological litmus test”. What else do you think required or invited DEI statements are when used for hiring or promotion? If you don’t write something in line with the progressive view of DEI, you will sleep with the academic fishes.  We know this from seeing how those statements are actually used in academia.

Ergo, DEI initiatives are indeed a political litmus test, requiring fealty to the view that characteristics like ethnic background or sex can outweigh merit in hiring, promotion, or tenure.  Of course nobody wants bigotry in these processes, but it’s strongly disputed about whether one should preferentially hire people to increase the diversity of race or sex. Indeed, the Supreme Court has just outlawed race-based admissions to college, and if that is illegal, so will be race- (or sex-) based and promotion.

If DEI programs were just there to ensure that there was no bigotry that held people back in universities, that would be fine. But it’s not: it’s a program that puts background above merit, is based on dubious premises like “implicit bias,” and is divisive, setting up a hierarchy of people based on their immutable characteristics. And, by placing merit lower than background, it leads to the decline of academic standards (see here for more arguments). In general, DEI programs haven’t worked, and are being dismantled throughout America.

The AAUP keeps issuing these weaselly statements that give their imprimatur to things they won’t say explicitly: it’s okay to boycott Israel, and we should have hiring in which race and sex can outweigh merit.

As one sign of how DEI is ruled out in my school for hiring and promotion, we have the Shils Report, whose summary is this:

On 15 July 1970, the Committee on the Criteria of Academic Appointment was appointed by President Edward H. Levi. This Committee was charged with writing a report that would become the basis for evaluating faculty up for promotion. The Shils report dictates that faculty at the University of Chicago must display distinguished performance in each of the following criteria when being considered for promotion:
  • Research
  • Teaching and Training, including the supervision of graduate students
  • Contribution to intellectual community
  • Service
This Committee understood that unless such high standards existed and were used, the University would – indeed – become a pantheon for dead or dying gods incapable of attracting the best minds from around the world.

There is nothing in here about viewpoint diversity, much less equity and the use of sex and ethnicity as criteria for promotion (these same criteria apply to hiring).

The reason for the AAUP’s new statement may be seen in the its insistence that one of the reasons for issuing it is to counteract Republican legislation (they don’t say that explicitly, of course):

Debates about the appropriateness of DEI criteria cannot be understood in isolation from the current political context of higher education in the United States. Wholesale opposition to the use of DEI statements has often gone hand in hand with partisan legislative and other efforts to restrict or ban certain subjects of research and teaching—especially in fields and disciplines that expressly address histories of inequity.5 A recent AAUP joint report with the AFT analyzes more than ninety-nine bills representing direct political interference in higher education that have been introduced in more than thirty state legislatures. The report notes four trends: (1) limiting teaching about race, gender, and sexuality (so-called divisive concepts bills); (2) requiring intellectual and viewpoint diversity statements and surveys; (3) cutting funding for diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts; and (4) eliminating tenure for faculty members.6 Thus, attacks on DEI have played an integral part in the partisan political playbook to turn back the clock on advances that have been made toward the goal of diversity in the faculty, student body, and areas of study. Furthermore, it is crucial to consider how such attacks can easily reinforce and indeed fuel portrayals of entire fields and disciplines—including ethnic studies, critical race theory, and gender studies—as “political” and “ideological” projects and not serious subjects or research disciplines. When entire fields and subjects related to the study of race and gender, for example, are not considered “intellectual” pursuits, both academic freedom and DEI as social and institutional values are compromised, and the charge of orthodoxy gains purchase. This not only affects the fields and subjects traditionally tarred as ideological but also compromises the progress of knowledge by thwarting interdisciplinary exchange and endangering the very mission of higher education.

But forget about politics. The authors of this statement, probably comprising social scientists and people in the humanities, don’t seem to realize that yes, entire fields of study (the “studies” areas) have indeed been compromised and made into vehicles to push progressive propaganda on students. If you think that a department of race, diaspora, and indigeneity won’t be teaching students what ideological views are acceptable, I have some land in Florida to sell you.

The AAUP statement is “progressive,” but it’s too late. DEI is already crumbling, both in academia and the corporate world.

In Science, fifteen New Zealand researchers criticize the initiative to teach indigenous “ways of knowing” as science

July 12, 2024 • 9:30 am

Two letters have just been published in Science signed by a total of 15 scientists, all criticizing the first article below (published in Science last February), a piece arguing for teaching indigenous knowledge (including N.Z.’s version, Mātauranga Māori) alongside science in the science classroom. (Click to read.)  Now the authors, after being criticized, denied that they really meant what they argued in this paper:

I also published a post in February criticizing Black and Tylianakis’s paper, and was pretty hard on their claims, which deserved such criticism. Science clearly published their article as part of the performative wokeness infecting major science journals, and it was full of assertions and short on facts. It was, in reality, an attempt to sacralize indigenous knowledge—a dangerous gambit.  Some quotes from my critique:

In the end, this article appears to me to be a DEI-ish contribution: something published to advance “the authority of the sacred victim” by arguing that indigenous knowledge and ways to attain it is just as good as modern (sometimes called “Western” ) science, and that teaching it will empower the oppressed. Here’s one line from the paper supporting my hypothesis:

In addition to a suite of known benefits to Indigenous students, we see the potential for all students to benefit from exposure to Indigenous knowledge, alongside a science curriculum, as a way of fostering sustainability and environmental integrity.

In other words, the argument here is really meant to buttress the self image of indigenous people, not to buttress science. You can see this because there are hardly any examples given to support their thesis. Instead, there is a lot of palaver and evidence-free argument, as well as both tedious and tendentious writing.

The publication of this paper is somewhat of a travesty, for it shows that the AAAS is becoming as woke as New Zealand, where the claim that you should NOT teach MM in the science classroom can get you fired!  If this kind of stuff continues, the authoritarians will eventually shut down anybody who makes counterarguments, as is happening in New Zealand, where counterspeech against the “scientific” nature of MM is demonized and punishable.  Did the AAAS[ The American Association for the Advancement of Science] even get critical reviewers for this piece?

But it’s especially important for Kiwis themselves to push back on this paper, for authors Black and Tylianakis are both from New Zealand, and their paper could be seen as supporting the widespread but misleading idea that indigenous knowledge, at least in New Zealand but probably everywhere else, is coequal to modern science.

The first paper pushing back, which you can access by clicking the screenshot below, has fourteen authors, including all but one of the Auckland University researchers who signed the Listener Letter on science—the letter that ignited this conflagration. In fact, that letter, which argued that indigenous knowledge in NZ had a place in the classroom, but not the science classroom, is quite similar to what you’ll read below (click headline to read). But you can’t attack this stuff too often, for the postmodern-derived claim that “all ways of knowing are equal” must be debunked before it destroys New Zealand science (it’s already done a job on social science and the humanities).

Here’s Ahdar et al.’s argument against what Kiwis, in their drive to sacralize Māori language, call mana ōrite, defined below. An excerpt (I’ve highlighted the money quote):

We agree with A. Black and J. M. Tylianakis (“Teach Indigenous knowledge alongside science,” Policy Forum, 9 February, p. 592) that the arguments of those supporting the “mana ōrite” policy (translated as “equal status” or “equal value”) between Indigenous knowledge and science are largely based on ethics and morals; that science is typically considered discrete from nonscience academic disciplines, whereas Indigenous knowledge lacks such divisions; and that science and Indigenous knowledge systems are distinct in “methodologies, philosophies, worldview, and modes of transmission.” However, such distinctions (1, 2) are precisely why Indigenous knowledge—although it contains empirical and cultural knowledge of great value—should be taught as a distinct subject or as aspects of other subjects, not “alongside” science in science classes, as Black and Tylianakis suggest.

Black and Tylianakis fail to consider how to resolve conflicts between science and Indigenous knowledge in empirical content or methodology in the classroom. In Indigenous knowledge, empirical observations generally merge seamlessly with, and gain an authority not to be challenged from, spiritual and religious beliefs (3–5). Therefore, incorporating such observations into science curricula has led to, and will continue to lead to, the use of spiritual concepts in science classrooms (6).

Placing science and Indigenous knowledge alongside each other does disservice to the coherence and understanding of both, and leading Māori scholars have cautioned against such comparisons (7, 8). Black and Tylianakis do not explain how science students might reconcile content from these two very distinct systems when taught as being of “equal value,” nor do they acknowledge that teaching Indigenous knowledge alongside science greatly limits the delivery of science curricula that meet international academic disciplinary standards.

 

Note how the authors use the Dennett-ian strategy of first showing where they agree with the paper they’re criticizing before they start hurling the brickbats.

And indeed, as I’ve written before, attempts to equate MM with science has lead to confusing lessons incorporating Māori myths and the concept of “mauri”, or vitalism, into the science classroom (see here, here, and the many posts here). What’s new in this letter is the authors’ digging for the roots of mana ōrite, which, they say, lie in social constructivism (my bolding):

The mana ōrite policy (9) states that Indigenous knowledge and science should be given equal status, but equating such vastly different systems is meaningless and based on the relativist concept of social constructivism. This ideology posits that all knowledge depends entirely on its cultural context, which it cannot transcend, and therefore epistemic claims from one culture cannot challenge claims from another. This is inherently antiscience; science is open to all to pursue and critique, and it depends on every claim being open to challenge. Framing the mana ōrite policy in terms of “relative value” or “relative status” is the problem, not the solution, because it tips the discussion into an emotive moral judgment that purports to say something about the merit of cultural differences. Under this view, the contest of ideas becomes a battle of cultural and political power rather than a matter of empirical evidence and theoretical coherence.

Their letter goes on to say that because science is based on testing factual claims, but indigenous knowledge, in contrast, comes with a heavy dose of spirituality and other nonfactual stuff, it shouldn’t be taught in the science class, or construed as a form of “knowledge”.  This parallels the Listener letter, but this and Matzke’s letter are more important because they are peer-reviewed letters in one of the world’s most prestigious science journals. It goes without saying that the letter could not have been publishe in New Zealand, and that’s very sad.

There’s another critique as well: a single-authored paper written by American Nick Matzke, now working at Auckland Uni. Nick may be familiar to you as a prolific author on The Panda’s Thumb website, and as a fighter against creationism as a member of the National Center for Science Education. Nick is now battling the Kiwi version of creationism: the spiritual/religious aspects of MM.  He’s argued against the vitalism of MM (“mauri“) in a video (see here), but in this letter, again peer reviewed, he criticizes the vitalism of New Zealand’s indigenous “ways of knowing”. Letters in Science have considerable clout, though of course Nick and the other 14 authors are up against powerful ideological and political forces in their own country and university. (Click to read.)

Nick points out several examples where vitalism (“mauri“), a supernatural concept, remains in the Kiwi science curriculum—at the behest of NZ’s Ministry of Education:

A. Black and J. M. Tylianakis (“Teach Indigenous knowledge alongside science,” Policy Forum, 9 February, p. 592) give an overly rosy picture of New Zealand’s policy of “mana ōrite,” or equal status for mātauranga Māori, in science education, which they say teaches Indigenous knowledge “alongside” science rather than “as” science. They suggest that this policy avoids problems such as teaching creationist myths in science class. However, the New Zealand Ministry of Education placed supernatural content directly into science and math curricula with no clarification that it was nonscientific material.

The chemistry curriculum required students to “recognise that mauri is present in all matter which exists as particles held together by attractive forces” (1), with a glossary that defined mauri as “[t]he vital essence, life force of everything.” This concept, known as vitalism, has long been debunked (2). Teaching concepts that directly conflict with empirical evidence undermines the goals of science education. Dozens of science teachers opposed the inclusion of mauri in the chemistry curriculum, but the Ministry steamrolled their objections, citing “the requirement for mana ōrite” (1). The objective was only removed after 18 months of controversy, at a time when the 2023 election was looming. The Ministry, ignoring vitalism’s evidentiary flaws, claimed the reversal occurred because inserting concepts such as mauri into science curricula ran the “risk of recolonisation” (3), despite the fact that mana ōrite’s entire rationale was decolonization.

Problems remain in 2024. Despite its removal from exam objectives, mauri remains in the chemistry curriculum, in which students are told, “Revisit the concept of mauri” (4). This learning can sit beside learnings in atomic theory” (5), and the Gulf Innovation Fund Together website (4) says that mauri is “the force that interpenetrates all things to bind and knit them together.” A math qualification on practical problems of “life in… the Pacific” asks trigonometry students to calculate how much flaxen rope the demigod Maui made to lasso the Sun, slowing it to lengthen the day (6). The text of the exercise is studiously agnostic about the literal truth of this story, describing it as a “narrative.” Black and Tylianakis might categorize this as teaching Indigenous knowledge alongside math, but teachers face the prospect of strife among students over whether it is appropriate to call it knowledge or myth and if students of various backgrounds are expected to defend or disclaim its verity.

The letter (limited to about 300 words) goes on to emphasize that the Ministry’s current policy puts supernatural content in the science classroom, and suggests, as is only sensible, that MM, if it’s to be taught as a whole, has to be in a “nonscience class or unit” that discusses the content and diversity of Māori beliefs.  Nick also wrote a brief backstory about this on The Panda’s Thumb website and makes two minor corrections of his letter.

Now of course the original authors, Amanda Black and Jason Tylianakis, got to respond, and they were given more words than the critics.  Click below to see their reply:

I’m biased, of course, but I consider this response very weak, as it continues to defend the nonscientific aspects of MM, including mauri, as forms of “knowledge”.  In fact, I don’t think that they realize that all verifications of truths about the world, whether they come from science or sociology, are examples of what I call “science construed broadly”.  Here are some statements that weaken their response (my own comments are flush left):

Indigenous knowledge must retain its integrity as a separate, parallel knowledge system. Analogous to philosophy, Indigenous knowledge should be taught alongside science as a separate form of knowledge, not within the science curriculum.

Indigenous “ways of knowing” such as MM are not “parallel knowledge systems”. In fact, MM is not a “knowledge system” at all, for, although it does contain some empirical knowledge, it’s also laden with religion, tradition, superstition, ethics, social strictures, legend, vitalism, and so on.  This gemisch cannot be a knowledge system, though later on the authors try to argue that, for example, vitalism is also “knowledge.” Further, philosophy, a useful discipline when applied to real issues, is not a “way of knowing” but a “way of thinking”.  Philosophers can verify what’s true about the world only in the same way scientists do: via observation, replication, hypothesis testing, pervasive doubt, experiments, and so on, And that’s part of science, not philosophy. But wait! There’s more!

Matzke demotes Indigenous knowledge to a “belief system” rather than knowledge, and Ahdar et al. dispute the idea that “epistemic claims from one culture cannot challenge claims from another.” Philosophy, arts, and other social sciences and humanities are all valuable forms of knowledge that sit alongside science in the curriculum without positivist science proofs of their “verity,” as Matzke requires of Indigenous knowledge. We thus agree with scholars who have cautioned against using science to test nonscience concepts from other knowledge systems (2). (Ahdar et al. claim to agree with such scholars as well but contradict themselves.)

No, philosophy, art and much of the humanities are “ways of seeing,” not “ways of knowing”. Knowledge or empirical truth, defined as “justified true belief” accepted by most rational people, cannot be attained without using the methods of science. If you make a claim about what’s true in the world, then yes, you need science construed broadly to test that claim.  These authors are so immersed in their “all knowledge systems are true in their own way” mantra that they don’t seem to even know what science is.

Here they try to shoehorn mauri, indisputably a form of vitalism and supernaturalism, into science:

 The concept of mauri, a key feature in the Māori worldview, has been frequently explored within the peer-reviewed scientific literature as a measure of ecological resilience (2) without being absorbed by or undermining science. Similar to the concept of health (4, 5), mauri is not directly measurable, but both health and mauri can be operationalized through quantifiable indicators, and both concepts are useful for communicating societal and environmental well-being to the public. Nonscience concepts (assuming that they are not presented as science) can have value for connecting with communities.

I’m not sure what the sweating authors are trying to say here. What do they mean by “operationalizing vitalism through quantifiable indicators”? If they mean that, then yes, the concept of mauri is testable in the same way that intercessory prayer as a way to cure disease is testable (and of course it’s failed: prayer doesn’t work). I’d put up many dollars if they could find a way to test whether vitalism was operating in nature. The authors’ last statement, that supernaturalism can be valuable in “connecting with communities”, is undoubtedly true, but irrelevant to the argument of these letters.

Here’s another example of their relative ignorance about indigenous knowledge. If they mean what they say below, let them give just ONE EXAMPLE:

Matzke’s concern about “whether it is appropriate to call it knowledge or myth” fails to acknowledge that Indigenous knowledge systems can encode knowledge within apparent myth (2), so neither English term may fit perfectly. Education on Indigenous knowledge would avert such misunderstandings.

Yes, true. Separate the empirical wheat from the supernatural chaff, and then plant the wheat alongside science.  But teaching myths that mix both empirical knowledge and superstition can only confuse students. Are the authors suggesting that teachers tell students that part of MM isn’t really true?  If so, they should admit that (this would get them into big-time trouble), but they should also clarify what they mean by this:

We believe that harm arises when nonscience is presented as science, and we remain unconvinced that the intent of the mana ōrite initiative (8) is to present Indigenous knowledge and culture as science or to compete with scientific concepts in science classes.

Well, ante up, Drs. Black and Tilianakis! MM is in fact being funded and taught as science, and there are personal penalties levied on those who criticize it.  In the end, Black and Tilianakis admit that MM, which is largely nonscience, should not be “presented as science”. So far, so good. But it’s clear that the mana ōrite initiative is indeed presenting myth and tradition as science and is pitting MM and other forms of indigenous “knowledge” against science.

Kiwis really need to debate this issue: in fact, this is the most important of aspect of science that needs discussing in New Zealand right now.  What a pity it is that this discussion has effectively been banned. Remember Auckland Vice-Chancellor Dawn Freshwater’s promise to hold such a debate three years ago—a promise she never kept?

Academic boycotts against Israel spread

July 10, 2024 • 11:30 am

This new article from the Wall Street Journal describes in some detail the way the world is boycotting Israel since October 7, both because it’s defending itself and because it’s a Jewish state.

Such boycotts aren’t new, of course, as the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) movement has been in swing since about 2001, but the boycotts, and calls for them, have intensified since the war in Gaza.  I’m most concerned with the call for academic boycotts, in which non-Israeli universities swear that they won’t exchange scholars or knowledge with Israeli universities. Such boycotts violate the free exchange of ideas that is the lifeblood of academia. But there are also material boycotts as well: BDS was, I believe, mainly meant to impede the exchange of goods. The academic part began around 2014, and was very quiet—until recently. And that’s what this article documents:

Click below to read the article, though it’s not archived (pdf available with judicious inquiry). I’ll give some quotes (indented):

Some examples of boycotts or calls for them:

When an ethics committee at Ghent University in Belgium recommended terminating all research collaborations with Israeli institutions in late May, Israeli computational biologist Eran Segal didn’t see it coming.

The sciences had seen little impact from global boycott movements, even months into the war, and Segal’s work had nothing to do with the Israeli military effort. The university’s research collaborations, the Ghent committee noted, include research on autism, Alzheimer’s disease, water purification and sustainable agriculture.

. . . Israelis are finding they are no longer welcome at many European universities, including participating in scientific collaborations. Their participation in cultural institutions and defense trade shows is increasingly becoming taboo.

Ghent University is, of course, where my philosopher colleague Maarten Boudry works. He’s vehemently opposed to such boycotts, and has decried them in Belgian and Dutch magazines and newspapers.

Below is an example of Israel being booted out of international meetings, though this one has little to do with academia:

Lidor Madmoni, chief executive of a small Israeli defense startup, prepared for months for a June international weapons show in Paris. The conference, Eurosatory, would be a rare opportunity for his small staff to expand their business, he said. Then came an email informing him that, because of a French court decision, his company was prohibited from attending.

“We have the obligation to block your access to the exhibition starting tomorrow,” the organizers said on the eve of the event, citing court orders that followed a French defense ministry ban issued in response to Israeli military operations in Rafah, the Gaza city where more than one million people had sought refuge.

The French decisions “shocked the entire community” of Israeli defense technology companies, said Noemie Alliel, managing director in Israel for Starburst Aerospace, an international consulting firm that develops and invests in startups in aerospace and defense. Conference organizers said they had appealed to overturn the court decision and told Israeli companies in an email that they were doing all that they could to enable them to attend.

. . . The Israeli defense-exports sector—flourishing before the war, with a record $13 billion in sales in 2023—got wind in March that it could be a target, when Chile barred Israeli companies from taking part in Latin America’s biggest aerospace fair. The French ban followed in June.

Back to academics (my bolding):

When the war began, new boycotts began to trickle in, mainly from humanities and social-science departments, said Netta Barak-Corren, a law professor who heads an antiboycott task force formed during the war at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

The boycotts began to widen around two months ago, spreading to the hard sciences and to the university level—“universitywide movements and more importantly decisions to cut all ties with Israeli universities and Israeli academics,” she said.

More than 20 universities in Europe and Canada have adopted such bans, she said.

O Canada!  And from Europe:

An Israeli student who was preparing to study at the University of Helsinki said she was already looking for housing in Finland—until the school told her in May that it had suspended its exchange agreements with Israeli universities.

The University of Helsinki stopped sending students to Israel after Oct. 7 and decided to suspend exchanges in May to express its concern about the conflict, said Minna Koutaniemi, the head of the school’s international exchange services. The university doesn’t intend to restrict its researchers from collaborating with Israelis, she said.

From the U.S. (this “ban” may be rescinded):

Boycotts are gaining traction across the academic spectrum. Cultural Critique, a journal published by the University of Minnesota Press, told an Israeli sociologist in May that his essay was barred from consideration because, they believed, he was affiliated with an Israeli institution.

The journal told the scholar that it follows BDS guidelines, “which include ‘withdrawing support from Israel’s…cultural and academic institutions’.”

Cultural Critique subsequently apologized for excluding the article on the basis of the scholar’s academic affiliation and amended its website to say that submissions would be evaluated “without regard to the identity and affiliation of the author.” It invited the scholar to resubmit.

Authors participate as well:

. . . some creative artists abroad are cutting themselves off from Israel. Since the start of the war, a few dozen authors, most of them American, have refused to have their books translated into Hebrew and sold in Israel, said Efrat Lev, the foreign-rights director at the Deborah Harris Agency in Israel, a literary agency.

One author who had worked with the agency and wrote a young-adult book focusing on queer acceptance refused to publish a second book in Israel, although a contract had already been signed and a translation to Hebrew was under way, said Lev.

“I felt that it was an important book for Israeli kids who are experiencing similar experiences,” she said. “This broke my heart.”

Better to demonize Israel than to help gay Israeli kids!

Academic boycotts seem to me worthless; indeed, they’re counterproductive because they divide a worldwide academic community and impede the dissemination of knowledge.  The University of Chicago issued this statement when Bob Zimmer was President:

On December 22, 2013, the University of Chicago released the following statement on the subject of academic boycotts:

“The University of Chicago has from its founding held as its highest value the free and open pursuit of inquiry. Faculty and students must be free to pursue their research and education around the world and to form collaborations both inside and outside of the academy, encouraging engagement with the widest spectrum of views. For this reason, we oppose boycotts of academic institutions or scholars in any region of the world, and oppose recent actions by academic societies to boycott Israeli institutions.”

It’s not rocket science!  But people, including academics who should know better, are hell-bent on punishing Israel and, of course, those uppity Jews who defended themselves against Hamas.  As Dorian Abbot also pointed out, such boycotts violate the Mertonian Academic Norms:

You can see those norms here, which were given by sociologist Thomas Merton as “the four norms of good scientific research. . . . These norms are communism, universalism, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism.”  The one Dorian refers to is the second:

  • “universalism: scientific validity is independent of the sociopolitical status/personal attributes of its participants.”

Ergo the status of “being Israeli” has no bearing on whether science should be exchanged or impeded.  Academic boycotts are, to use the argot, stupid.

Business Insider keeps bashing Neri Oxman for plagiarism. This time they’ve got her.

January 8, 2024 • 9:30 am

Two days ago I called attention to the crusade by the site Business Insider, of all places, against Neri Oxman, the wife of gazillionaire and Harvard-basher Bill Ackman. Ackman, you’l recall, was instrumental in the resignation of Harvard President Claudine Gay.  He had called attention to her lame performance before the House committee, and also said he would no longer donate to Harvard until it got rid of its antisemitic climate. Bit was Ackman’s repeated emphasis on Gay’s academic plagiarism that finally helped bring her down.

For some reason, Business Insider (BI) decided to examine the plagiarism not by Ackman, but by his wife, apparently as a way to get back at Ackman for attacking Gay (at least, that’s my theory, which is mine).  In two hit pieces (here and here), BI had found four instances in Oxman’s MIT Ph.D. thesis in which, while citing sources properly, she didn’t put quotation marks around the copied material. That is a technical violation of MIT’s code of conduct, and so, according to their lights, she plagiarized. Oxman admitted she erred, apologized, and asked MIT to correct the four excerpts lacking quotation marks.

Although Oxman was a professor at MIT, she left for good in 2021, so this doesn’t affect her career at all.  While it is grounds for criticism, it’s hardly relevant any more, and is surely not as important as Gay’s plagiarism, which was more widespread, arrant, and occurred in her published papers, which is more serious. Further, Gay was President of Harvard, and must be held to the highest standards, so her resignation for plagiarism was appropriate.

However, BI has kept digging, for they’re relentless. (The glee with which they revealed Oxman’s plagiarism was palpable, and they brought up other irrelevant stuff, like a present she gave to Jeffrey Epstein, to smear her in a way that seemed inappropriate.)

But this time BI struck pay dirt. As the article below shows (click on screenshot, or find it archived here), Oxman did something less palatable this time: she plagiarized at least 15 times in her thesis from Wikipedia, without any citation or attribution, as well as from two other sources. In addition, two of her published papers appear to have lifted material as well, also without either an inline citation or quotation marks. These are more serious matters:

Quotes from BI are indented, and I’ll give two examples of the Wikipedia plagiarism.

Neri Oxman, a former MIT professor and celebrity within the world of academia, stole sentences and whole paragraphs from Wikipedia, other scholars, and technical documents in her academic writing, Business Insider has found.

. . .But a thorough review of her published work revealed that Oxman’s failure to cite sources went beyond that — and included multiple instances of plagiarism in which she passed off writing from other sources as her own without citing the original in any way. At least 15 passages from her 2010 MIT doctoral dissertation were lifted without any citation from Wikipedia entries.

The instances of plagiarism BI found on Friday are closer to a more common definition of plagiarism — the use of someone else’s words without any indication that you are passing them off as your own.

Here are two examples, and the copying is almost word for word. WHY would anyone plagiarize from Wikipedia? And it’s hard to see this as just an error, since there are neither citations to the site nor quotation marks.

Others are shown, but the point is made. There are fifteen in toto, and that’s not good.

She also lifted an illustration:

But Oxman never acknowledged having pulled from Wikipedia. She didn’t just lift text, either: She also took an illustration from the article for “Heat flux” without citing a source, despite requirements in the image’s Creative Commons license to credit where the picture came from.

I’ve sometimes used Wikipedia illustrations without citing the Creative Commons License, but found out about the need for that only recently and will cite that unless the photo info says you don’t have to cite the source of the picture licensed by CC.

Some plagiarism from other papers in her thesis, without attribution or quotation marks:

Wikipedia wasn’t the only resource she cited without attribution in the paper that earned her a doctorate. In a footnote, she used 54 consecutive words without attribution from the website of the design-software maker Rhino to explain what a “Non-Uniform Rational B-Spline” is. She also used technical language about tessellations that matched language from the website Wolfram MathWorld — which, again, she didn’t cite.

And plagiarism in Oxman’s published papers, again without attribution, at least in some cases.

She plagiarized both before and after she received her Ph.D. in 2010. Of three peer-reviewed papers reviewed by BI, two — 2007’s “Get Real: Towards Performance Driven Computational Geometry” and 2011’s “Variable Property Rapid Prototyping” — also contained plagiarism.

The 2011 paper included more than 100 words exactly as they appeared in the 2005 book “Rapid Manufacturing: An Industrial Revolution for the Digital Age,” without quotation marks, citation, or a mention in Oxman’s bibliography. She pulled material from “Path planning of functionally graded material objects for layered manufacturing,” a 2004 paper by M.Y. Zhou, without mentioning it in her bibliography. And she included two verbatim sentences from the 1999 book “Functionally Graded Materials: Design, Processing and Applications” without quotation marks or an in-line citation, though the work is mentioned in her bibliography.

The 2007 “Get Real” paper pulled language describing tensors — an algebraic concept that includes scalars and vectors — from an earlier-published work, the “CRC Concise Encyclopedia of Mathematics.” In a 2010 paper, “Per Formative: Towards a Post Materialist Paradigm in Architecture,” that was not peer-reviewed, BI also found another instance of plagiarism, with Oxman using chunks of language from publisher Da Capo Press’ description of “The Modern Language of Architecture” by Bruno Zevi.

So yes, her plagiarism is now more extensive and more serious in nature than before. But again, it carries no consequences for her since she’s not in academia.  If these cases are substantiated, Oxman should apologize and correct both her thesis again as well as the published paper.

There’s no apology yet, just a couple of tweets from Oxman and Ackman. I have to admit that she has a sense of humor.

But Ackman, who is apparently very angry at BI, is now vowing to examine possible plagiarism in academics not just at MIT, but everywhere in America. Oy!

The upshot: Yes, Neri Oxman plagiarized in her thesis and some published papers. It’s more serious than before, but again, she will suffer no consequences, though her reputation has been a bit sullied.  It’s still not the equivalent of what Gay did, as it’s lesser in extent, mostly in a Ph.D. thesis, and, most important, Gay held an important and symbolic academic position.

I’m not excusing Oxman, for she transgressed. But there’s little more to be done than to extract her apology and corrections of her copying. But as for Ackman, the guy seriously needs to chill!

Bill Ackman’s wife Neri Oxman accused of plagiarism, admits guilt

January 6, 2024 • 11:30 am

Bill Ackman, you’ll recall, is the billionaire who helped bring down Harvard President Claudine Gay. First he chastised her for her performance before the House committee, calling out the antisemitism that occurred at Harvard on Gay’s watch. Then he announced that he would no longer donate to Harvard until they cleaned up their act. Finally, when Gay’s plagiarism in her scholarly papers came to light, he bored down on that, and kept doing it until she resigned as President.  There’s little doubt Ackman’s his stream of tweets about Gay promoted her resignation by calling everyone’s attention to Gay’s missteps and embarrassing the board of Harvard Overseers, which is Gay’s boss.

As I’ve said repeatedly, I think Gay shouldn’t have resigned until the evidence of plagiarism surfaced. Her remarks about antisemitism to the Representatives were wooden and unempathic, but a First-Amendment construal of Harvard’s speech code would indeed have deemed cries for genocide of the Jews as “conditional”. Sometimes it’s legal, and sometimes not. The problem was that Harvard doesn’t have a First-Amendment-based speech code, and it applied its own code unevenly, giving rise to hypocrisy.  However, I would have given her a chance, for if she’d implemented something like Steve Pinker’s “fivefold way”, Harvard would have greatly improved.

In the end, her plagiarism, which also called attention to a rather thin academic resumé, brought her down, and made me agree that she should resign.

Now, however, Ackman is somewhat hoist with his own petard, for his wife, Neri Oxman, a designer and a professor at MIT until 2021, stands accused of plagiarism herself.  It doesn’t seem quite as bad as Gay’s missteps, for Oxman, in her dissertation, did cite the sources of her information. What she failed to do, however, was put quotation marks around phrases and paragraphs she lifted from cited sources, and that’s a violation of MIT’s own plagiarism code.

Business Insider (BI), in the first two articles below, found examples of her plagiarism, and you can see that BI can barely contain its joy of catching an Ackman-adjacent person in the act of plagiarism. It’s almost tabloid journalism.

Click on either to read. The third article is a summary from CNN.  In the end, Oxman admitted guilt and said she’d correct the quotations, but Ackman is pushing back against the charges, vowing reprisal against both MIT and BI while not denying what Oxman did. But since Oxman is no longer at MIT, she has no academic job to lose.

Click below or find this article archived here:

Again, click below or go to the article archived here:

And from CNN, not paywalled.

The accusation (from BI):

The billionaire hedge fund manager and major Harvard donor Bill Ackman seized on revelations that Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, had plagiarized some passages in her academic work to underscore his calls for her removal following what he perceived as her mishandling of large protests against Israel’s bombardment of Gaza on Harvard’s campus.

An analysis by Business Insider found a similar pattern of plagiarism by Ackman’s wife, Neri Oxman, who became a tenured professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2017.

Oxman plagiarized multiple paragraphs of her 2010 doctoral dissertation, Business Insider found, including at least one passage directly lifted from other writers without citation.

. . .An architect and artist who experiments with new ways to synthesize materials found in nature, Oxman has been the subject of profiles in major outlets such as The New York Times and Elle. She has collaborated with Björk, exhibited at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and had paparazzi stake her out after Brad Pitt visited her lab at MIT in 2018.

There are two kinds of accusations. First, that Oxman “self plagiarized”, using her own writing in her dissertation word-for-word in her published papers. That’s okay, and isn’t really plagiarism because a dissertation isn’t published, and in most cases is intended to be turned into papers. Thus, BI’s statement below isn’t incriminating:

She also recycled phrasing she used in her dissertation in subsequent papers. The opening paragraph of her dissertation, for instance, appears almost word-for-word in an article she published in 2013. While re-using material isn’t a formal violation of MIT’s academic-integrity code, a guide to “ethical writing” recommended by the university to its scholars and students warns against it.

Self-plagiarizing isn’t a good habit if you use the same phrases or paragraphs in one paper after another, but “plagiarizing” from a dissertation into a paper is not at all a violation. I suspect MIT’s dictum here refers to using your own words repeatedly in published work. And that’s not what Oxman did.

The evidence:

Then there are the other cases, in which Oxman did cite her original sources but also used big chunks of wording from them—without quotation marks. That’s a no-no, but it’s not as big a no-no as what Gay did, which was lift chunks of prose and then not include her using proper citations.

Here are a couple of examples of how Oxman used wording from previously-published papers in her thesis. Notice that she does cite the sources in parentheses, though:

and one more:

The MIT academic integrity code (below; click to enlarge) says that even though sources are cited, this is a no-no. But remember, this is plagiarism in a dissertation, not in a published paper. I’ve circled the bit that Oxman violated:

Oxman apologized for these errors in a tweet, though she couldn’t verify one of the accusations because the source was online. She’s going to get MIT to correct the citations. BI notes:

Neri Oxman, the wife of billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, admitted to failing to properly credit sources in portions of her doctoral dissertation after Business Insider published an article finding that Oxman engaged in a pattern of plagiarism similar to that of former Harvard president Claudine Gay.

BI identified four instances in Oxman’s dissertation in which she lifted paragraphs from other scholars’ work without including them in quotation marks. In those instances, Oxman wrote in a post on X, using quotation marks would have been “the proper approach for crediting the work. I regret and apologize for these errors.”

. . .Oxman wrote on X that after she has reviewed the original sources, she plans to “request that MIT make any necessary corrections.”

“As I have dedicated my career to advancing science and innovation, I have always recognized the profound importance of the contributions of my peers and those who came before me. I hope that my work is helpful to the generations to come,” she wrote.

Oxman now leads an eponymous company, Oxman, focused on “innovation in product, architectural, and urban design,” she wrote on X. “OXMAN has been in stealth mode. I look forward to sharing more about OXMAN later this year.”

I don’t know how MIT will correct these errors, because I don’t think most Ph.D. theses are online (mine certainly isn’t). If it is they can fix it, but perhaps they’ll just append the corrections in her thesis that reposes in MIT’s library.

If you read the Business Insider articles, they come off as hit jobs, as if somehow they’re joyfully getting back at what Ackman for what he did to Claudine Gay by showing that Ackman’s wife did the same thing. But Oxman didn’t do the same thing: she is guilty of not using quotation marks around quotations taken from an attributed source in a dissertation. Gay, on the other hand, is guilty of not using quotation marks around unattributed quotations, and doing this in published papers, not in a dissertation.  Further, Oxman is no longer a professor at MIT, and was never dean or president of any university, so it’s not such a big deal. Yes, she should have cited sources correctly, but in the end the damage is minor. Her missteps are far more excusable than Gay’s. But they are missteps, and academics need to know what constitutes plagiarism.

Business Insider keeps mentioning Ackman in their two pieces, which of course is what gives this story its legs, but BI also adds superfluous material to make both Ackman and Oxman look bad, like this:

In 2019, emails uncovered by the Boston Globe showed Ackman pressured MIT to keep Oxman’s name out of a brewing scandal over an original sculpture she gave to Jeffrey Epstein in thanks for a $125,000 donation to her lab.

So what? This is irrelevant to the story, and is pretty much of a smear.

As for Ackman, he’s not denying that his wife did what BI accused her of, but is standing by her nonetheless (see the linked tweet below):

Her husband, Ackman, lauded her transparency in his own post on X following the publication of Business Insider’s article.

“​​Part of what makes her human is that she makes mistakes, owns them, and apologizes when appropriate,” he wrote.

However, this empathic stand is weakened by Ackman’s threat to examine the writings of Business Insider staff for plagiarism:

. . . and he’s going after plagiarism at MIT, too!

The guy is combative, that’s for sure! It’s not seemly for him to strike out at everybody, trying to find plagiarizing skeletons in their closets. Gay is gone; Oxman admitted fault and will correct her writing. It’s time to move on!

Here are Oxman and Ackman from NBC News; the caption is from NBC:

h/t: Greg Mayer