It’s been a long, long time coming, but the day has finally arrived: My memoir, Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative is complete, and it’s available for preorder.
Would it be wrong to suggest that King, as a Pacifist, and a Christian, may have taken the position that Hamas ought to lay down their arms and return the hostages? That is, a return to the ceasefire predating the barbarism of October 7, and a denunciation of that barbarism?
Claudine Gay lied! plagiarism blah blah blah IT’S LYING! Does it matter how big the lie is? Every lie has a victim a TRUE victim and a consequence. Omitting is lying and stealing is lying. It’s really very simple. THEN the University lied. THEN she claimed victim. The beginning of the end for Claudine happened the day she sat in front of Congress. Harvard will be punished for years and so will Claudine. How narcissistic of her and the university to believe she would never have to answer hahahaha. Every lie will eventually be told.
This is going to sound crazy... but... I know "Gold Diggers of 1936"; I've watched parts of it. Not my cup of tea, and I'm certainly not a big fan of the music. But, I'd love to see John (and Glenn?) perform. Somehow, I'd feel more connected to him, like I was invited into his home (excuse me, "feathered abode"). Just don't make me sit through an hour of songs from the movie ;-)
John reinforced my argument of the vendetta even more at the 13:30 mark. Wallowing in
the King day legacy because you want to settle a score is part of black culture. It’s a certain type of identity that many groups of people within the culture carry. Their purpose is to stick it to whites because of past grievances. These types of black followers exist in politics, business, entertainment, academia and journalism. And within these same groups there are sub groups who saw nothing wrong with Claudine Gay’s plagiarism.
I love what John said about being active with your hobbies. I also have been exhausted from how polarizing this DEI stuff has been. You feel at peace at home doing things that you love because it’s a way to tune everything else out. Nothing else matters except your games, or books that don’t talk back to you with an agenda.
Martin Luther King’s dream has become something so subjective to different groups. My dream is that we will still be listening to these two gentlemen for many years to come. We won’t get tired of them, but their enemies will.
As a recent retiree, I resonated with John's personal introspection and desire for nesting and musical enjoyment not to mention his weariness over people who assume he believes in the same woke rhetoric as them because of his skin color. I get it.
I really look forward to reading Glenn's memoir. Congratulations!
Congratulations on the book Glenn, I loved reading it and was honored to have a blurb on the jacket. I think it's noteworthy that of the six jacket reviews only one (Shelby Steele) comes from a conservative. This speaks to the breadth of your reach. The book will mean different things to different people, there is even something there for game theorists. I'm sure it will be a huge success.
On Claudine Gay, I agree with John that even boilerplate plagiarism is an intoleratable offense for a Harvard president. But I also think that she has been treated with extreme cruelty and contempt. She had single authored papers in each of the top three political science journals at the time of tenure, and her citation record compared favorably to all recent Harvard presidents at the time of appointment, except Summers who was an outlier. Yet people (including you and John) describe her academic record as thin, as if it is somehow unusual among university presidents. What is the empirical basis for this claim? I don't see it. So I do think she has reason to feel aggreived. Just my two cents.
My point, Rajiv, is that the "boilerplate" plagiarism betrays a lack of intellectual heft that is unbecoming in a president of Harvard University... Thanks for kind words about my book. It was written, in part, with you game theorists in mind!
Maybe so Glenn, but consider the possibility that there was no plagiarism in this case. Would her academic record have then been treated as respectable relative to others similarly placed? Or would it still have been characterized as "thin" without any attempt to look at citations or journal rankings?Was Lawrence Bacaw ever described in this way? The records are comparable, at least on standard metrics, and on some dimensions Gay's is superior. I find this troubling.
For some reason I assumed that most presidents at elite universities were towering intellectual giants in terms of their academic output, so I was definitely interested to learn that people like Lawrence Bacow didn't exactly blow away the academic world either.
To be fair though, despite having similar h-indexes, Bacow does have something like 10x the citation count of Gay correct? I know you're comparing their academic outputs at the time of appointment, but an article I read from a while back pointed out that at that point in time at least, Bacow had over 2,500 citations compared to only around 170 for Gay. Likewise Drew Faust has written a number of books while Gay has never authored any from what I understand.
That being said, I do agree that maybe some of the criticism of Gay has been a bit on the harsh side given what I now know about the the academic bona fides of people like Bacow, etc.
Fun fact, according to Google Scholar Glenn Loury has a slightly lower h-index than John McWhorter despite having more than 2x the number of raw citations, so obviously the h-index calculation doesn't correlate perfectly with number of citations, something which I wasn't aware of.
Yan, Gay has well over 2500 citations. Her two most influential papers have over 500 each. This is the point I was trying to make. People should at least make the comparison.
Ah I see. That's helpful to know because it appears that Google Scholar has removed their link to Claudine Gay's body of work, so I was only operating from a previous article I read online that suggested Bacow had amassed over 2,500 citations at that point in time compared to only 170 or so for Gay.
I see that Bacow now has over 2,700 citations so if Gay's lifetime citation count is over 2,500 and their h-indexes are similar then I definitely agree that you have a point there. As a non-academic I sort of assumed that all the elite university presidents were like Larry Summers, but as you point out he was a statistical outlier even among recent Harvard presidents.
Yes Summers was unusual among recent Harvard presidents. Sally Kornbluth at MIT has over 14K, so well ahead of the typical president. This is one reason she will survive the attempts to topple her.
Citations are a very crude measure, just a first step really, but people should at least start there.
Rajiv, you've read these papers, I presume. "Thin" is an appropriate evaluation in my view. Your counter-factual of no plagiarism isn't relevant. We wouldn't be here without the plagiarism. And I'm told she won't provide her data to people who want to replicate some of her findings... Etc.
No of course I haven't read the papers Glenn. I can't vouch for their quality. Same goes for the papers of her predecessors. All I can do is to see if the same standard is being applied. It does not appear to me that it is.
One doesn't have to disparage her scholarship to object to her presidency, there are plenty of other reasons to do so. Hypocrisy around free speech for instance, and the treatment of Fryer and Sullivan. And the plagiarism of course.
I'm not saying that the work is path-breaking or profound, just that it is comparable to many other presidents at time of appointment, including transformational and highly paid presidents such as John Silber at BU. People are arguing that the scholarship did not merit appointment, and doing so without proper empirical backing. Note that appointment was made before the plagiarism issues surfaced so this cannot have been a factor. Hence my hypothetical.
Just pre-ordered your book, and am happy and proud to help out. Godspeed and may it be a HUGE best-seller. Over the years I have heard so much wisdom from you that I have been unable to capture, and I would love it if you had transcripts of your podcasts you could make available. So much of the value I have gotten from your unparalleled mind has been from your off-the-cuff rants and spontaneous discussions with John., and his invaluable responses to you , and his own highly original thoughts. How I wish those discussions were available to us all! Best wishes in the future success of your long-awaited book, I CAN'T WAIT to read it!
A second comment re Claudine Gay is that I was forced out of desperation to get "The Slave's Cause" from the public library because UNC Press was delayed in shipping the books. Manisha Sinha had to cut the book to 600 pages (~700 with footnotes) so there is not much time for brilliance in here because of the sheer number of facts that have to be known but there is plenty of time to display mastery because of the sheer number of primary documents that she was willing to read along with every obvious (to me) relevant secondary source that she was willing to cite. A university president may primarily need mastery in their scholarship because their primary job is to gain the respect of both the faculty and outside communities to whom they represent the university. The NYT story made clear that Claudine Gay could not even protect the individuals on the board from intrusive questions from people that they knew even if the board might have personally liked her.
I may do what I did with Brandon Taylor as far as buying the book at the same time as my annual Hugo nominee trip to the store but that depends crucially on when Glasgow Worldcon announces it. (Glasgow can be trusted much more than Chengdu to have both the nominees and the convention on time but you never know.) But I will preorder if that trip is in April as is standard.
Glenn, I'm so excited that your memoir is finally coming out. Having read Thomas Sowell's memoir a while back, I can't think of another intellectual whose life story I'm more interested to learn about. I'm definitely going to pre-order this.
Wishful thinking on my part, but would you ever consider doing a book signing somewhere? I got a book signed by Francis Fukuyama way back in the day and I still keep a copy of it on my book shelf. Getting a signed copy of Late Admissions would be a dream come true!
I love John's point about the badassness of King's claim of universal human dignity. I think forgetting the badassness of great moments in liberal thought (divine right is not a legitimate source of authority, authority derives from the consent of the governed, etc.) is one of our culture's great weaknesses. We're the inheritors of some seriously badass people's legacy.
Would it be wrong to suggest that King, as a Pacifist, and a Christian, may have taken the position that Hamas ought to lay down their arms and return the hostages? That is, a return to the ceasefire predating the barbarism of October 7, and a denunciation of that barbarism?
Can’t wait to hear John .. that’s fabulous!! And John stop hanging with liberals you won’t have to hear “the shit.”
Claudine Gay lied! plagiarism blah blah blah IT’S LYING! Does it matter how big the lie is? Every lie has a victim a TRUE victim and a consequence. Omitting is lying and stealing is lying. It’s really very simple. THEN the University lied. THEN she claimed victim. The beginning of the end for Claudine happened the day she sat in front of Congress. Harvard will be punished for years and so will Claudine. How narcissistic of her and the university to believe she would never have to answer hahahaha. Every lie will eventually be told.
Ordered!! Can’t wait
This is going to sound crazy... but... I know "Gold Diggers of 1936"; I've watched parts of it. Not my cup of tea, and I'm certainly not a big fan of the music. But, I'd love to see John (and Glenn?) perform. Somehow, I'd feel more connected to him, like I was invited into his home (excuse me, "feathered abode"). Just don't make me sit through an hour of songs from the movie ;-)
John, why not find like-minded friends and get out from your feathered abode more often? Or invite them home?
"Dreams of Nostalgia"
I cannot wait to read Glenn's book.
John reinforced my argument of the vendetta even more at the 13:30 mark. Wallowing in
the King day legacy because you want to settle a score is part of black culture. It’s a certain type of identity that many groups of people within the culture carry. Their purpose is to stick it to whites because of past grievances. These types of black followers exist in politics, business, entertainment, academia and journalism. And within these same groups there are sub groups who saw nothing wrong with Claudine Gay’s plagiarism.
I love what John said about being active with your hobbies. I also have been exhausted from how polarizing this DEI stuff has been. You feel at peace at home doing things that you love because it’s a way to tune everything else out. Nothing else matters except your games, or books that don’t talk back to you with an agenda.
Martin Luther King’s dream has become something so subjective to different groups. My dream is that we will still be listening to these two gentlemen for many years to come. We won’t get tired of them, but their enemies will.
As a recent retiree, I resonated with John's personal introspection and desire for nesting and musical enjoyment not to mention his weariness over people who assume he believes in the same woke rhetoric as them because of his skin color. I get it.
I really look forward to reading Glenn's memoir. Congratulations!
Congratulations on the book Glenn, I loved reading it and was honored to have a blurb on the jacket. I think it's noteworthy that of the six jacket reviews only one (Shelby Steele) comes from a conservative. This speaks to the breadth of your reach. The book will mean different things to different people, there is even something there for game theorists. I'm sure it will be a huge success.
On Claudine Gay, I agree with John that even boilerplate plagiarism is an intoleratable offense for a Harvard president. But I also think that she has been treated with extreme cruelty and contempt. She had single authored papers in each of the top three political science journals at the time of tenure, and her citation record compared favorably to all recent Harvard presidents at the time of appointment, except Summers who was an outlier. Yet people (including you and John) describe her academic record as thin, as if it is somehow unusual among university presidents. What is the empirical basis for this claim? I don't see it. So I do think she has reason to feel aggreived. Just my two cents.
My point, Rajiv, is that the "boilerplate" plagiarism betrays a lack of intellectual heft that is unbecoming in a president of Harvard University... Thanks for kind words about my book. It was written, in part, with you game theorists in mind!
Maybe so Glenn, but consider the possibility that there was no plagiarism in this case. Would her academic record have then been treated as respectable relative to others similarly placed? Or would it still have been characterized as "thin" without any attempt to look at citations or journal rankings?Was Lawrence Bacaw ever described in this way? The records are comparable, at least on standard metrics, and on some dimensions Gay's is superior. I find this troubling.
For some reason I assumed that most presidents at elite universities were towering intellectual giants in terms of their academic output, so I was definitely interested to learn that people like Lawrence Bacow didn't exactly blow away the academic world either.
To be fair though, despite having similar h-indexes, Bacow does have something like 10x the citation count of Gay correct? I know you're comparing their academic outputs at the time of appointment, but an article I read from a while back pointed out that at that point in time at least, Bacow had over 2,500 citations compared to only around 170 for Gay. Likewise Drew Faust has written a number of books while Gay has never authored any from what I understand.
That being said, I do agree that maybe some of the criticism of Gay has been a bit on the harsh side given what I now know about the the academic bona fides of people like Bacow, etc.
Fun fact, according to Google Scholar Glenn Loury has a slightly lower h-index than John McWhorter despite having more than 2x the number of raw citations, so obviously the h-index calculation doesn't correlate perfectly with number of citations, something which I wasn't aware of.
Yan, Gay has well over 2500 citations. Her two most influential papers have over 500 each. This is the point I was trying to make. People should at least make the comparison.
Ah I see. That's helpful to know because it appears that Google Scholar has removed their link to Claudine Gay's body of work, so I was only operating from a previous article I read online that suggested Bacow had amassed over 2,500 citations at that point in time compared to only 170 or so for Gay.
I see that Bacow now has over 2,700 citations so if Gay's lifetime citation count is over 2,500 and their h-indexes are similar then I definitely agree that you have a point there. As a non-academic I sort of assumed that all the elite university presidents were like Larry Summers, but as you point out he was a statistical outlier even among recent Harvard presidents.
Yes Summers was unusual among recent Harvard presidents. Sally Kornbluth at MIT has over 14K, so well ahead of the typical president. This is one reason she will survive the attempts to topple her.
Citations are a very crude measure, just a first step really, but people should at least start there.
Thank you for your comments.
Rajiv, you've read these papers, I presume. "Thin" is an appropriate evaluation in my view. Your counter-factual of no plagiarism isn't relevant. We wouldn't be here without the plagiarism. And I'm told she won't provide her data to people who want to replicate some of her findings... Etc.
No of course I haven't read the papers Glenn. I can't vouch for their quality. Same goes for the papers of her predecessors. All I can do is to see if the same standard is being applied. It does not appear to me that it is.
One doesn't have to disparage her scholarship to object to her presidency, there are plenty of other reasons to do so. Hypocrisy around free speech for instance, and the treatment of Fryer and Sullivan. And the plagiarism of course.
I'm not saying that the work is path-breaking or profound, just that it is comparable to many other presidents at time of appointment, including transformational and highly paid presidents such as John Silber at BU. People are arguing that the scholarship did not merit appointment, and doing so without proper empirical backing. Note that appointment was made before the plagiarism issues surfaced so this cannot have been a factor. Hence my hypothetical.
Just pre-ordered your book, and am happy and proud to help out. Godspeed and may it be a HUGE best-seller. Over the years I have heard so much wisdom from you that I have been unable to capture, and I would love it if you had transcripts of your podcasts you could make available. So much of the value I have gotten from your unparalleled mind has been from your off-the-cuff rants and spontaneous discussions with John., and his invaluable responses to you , and his own highly original thoughts. How I wish those discussions were available to us all! Best wishes in the future success of your long-awaited book, I CAN'T WAIT to read it!
A second comment re Claudine Gay is that I was forced out of desperation to get "The Slave's Cause" from the public library because UNC Press was delayed in shipping the books. Manisha Sinha had to cut the book to 600 pages (~700 with footnotes) so there is not much time for brilliance in here because of the sheer number of facts that have to be known but there is plenty of time to display mastery because of the sheer number of primary documents that she was willing to read along with every obvious (to me) relevant secondary source that she was willing to cite. A university president may primarily need mastery in their scholarship because their primary job is to gain the respect of both the faculty and outside communities to whom they represent the university. The NYT story made clear that Claudine Gay could not even protect the individuals on the board from intrusive questions from people that they knew even if the board might have personally liked her.
(Yes, "Slave's Cause" is Yale UP but UNC Press was delayed in shipping the books that I ordered from them from their end-of-year sale)
I may do what I did with Brandon Taylor as far as buying the book at the same time as my annual Hugo nominee trip to the store but that depends crucially on when Glasgow Worldcon announces it. (Glasgow can be trusted much more than Chengdu to have both the nominees and the convention on time but you never know.) But I will preorder if that trip is in April as is standard.
Glenn, I'm so excited that your memoir is finally coming out. Having read Thomas Sowell's memoir a while back, I can't think of another intellectual whose life story I'm more interested to learn about. I'm definitely going to pre-order this.
Wishful thinking on my part, but would you ever consider doing a book signing somewhere? I got a book signed by Francis Fukuyama way back in the day and I still keep a copy of it on my book shelf. Getting a signed copy of Late Admissions would be a dream come true!
I love John's point about the badassness of King's claim of universal human dignity. I think forgetting the badassness of great moments in liberal thought (divine right is not a legitimate source of authority, authority derives from the consent of the governed, etc.) is one of our culture's great weaknesses. We're the inheritors of some seriously badass people's legacy.
Glenn, hope to see you on your book tour..
And John: You had me at "Bobby Short"!
Ordered the hardcover. Hope Glenn himself is reading the audio book!