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1
AmericanKulak
2024 Jan 5, 11:43am
AmericanKulak
2024 Jan 5, 11:43am
In our IPO, we invited the smaller banks into the deal from the beginning of the process so they could add real value. As a result, the Tontine IPO was one of the largest and most successful IPOs in history with $12 billion of demand for a $4 billion deal by the second day of the IPO, when we closed the books. The small banks earned their 20% share of the fees for delivering real and substantive value and for selling their share of the stock.
Compare this approach to the traditional one where the small banks do effectively nothing to earn their fees – they aren’t given that opportunity – yet, they get a cut of the deal, albeit a tiny one. The traditional approach does not create value for anyone. It only creates resentment, and an uncomfortable feeling from the small banks who get a tiny piece of the deal in a particularly bad form of affirmative action.
While I don’t think our approach to working with the smaller banks has yet achieved the significant traction it deserves, it will hopefully happen eventually as the smaller banks build their competencies and continue to earn their fees, and other issuers see the merit of this approach. We are going to need assistance with a large IPO soon so we are looking forward to working with our favored smaller banks.
I have always believed in giving disadvantaged groups a helping hand. I signed the Giving Pledge for this reason. My life plan by the time I was 18 was to be successful and then return the favor to those less fortunate. This always seemed to the right thing to do, in particular, for someone as fortunate as I am.
All of the above said, it is one thing to give disadvantaged people the opportunities and resources so that they can help themselves. It is another to select a candidate for admission or for a leadership role when they are not qualified to serve in that role.
This appears to have been the case with former President Gay’s selection. She did not possess the leadership skills to serve as Harvard’s president, putting aside any questions about her academic credentials. This became apparent shortly after October 7th, but there were many signs before then when she was Dean of the faculty.
The result was a disaster for Harvard and for Claudine Gay.
The Harvard board should not have run a search process which had a predetermined objective of only hiring a DEI-approved candidate. In any case, there are many incredibly talented black men and women who could have been selected by Harvard to serve as its president so why did the Harvard Corporation board choose Gay?
One can only speculate without knowing all of the facts, but it appears Gay’s leadership in the creation of Harvard’s Office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging and the penetration of the DEI ideology into the Corporation board room perhaps made Gay the favored candidate. The search was also done at a time when many other top universities had similar DEI-favored candidate searches underway for their presidents, reducing the number of potential candidates available in light of the increased competition for talent.
Unrelated to the DEI issue, as a side note, I would suggest that universities should broaden their searches to include capable business people for the role of president, as a university president requires more business skills than can be gleaned from even the most successful academic career with its hundreds of peer reviewed papers and many books. Universities have a Dean of the Faculty and a bureaucracy to oversee the faculty and academic environment of the university. It therefore does not make sense that the university president has to come through the ranks of academia, with a skill set unprepared for university management.
The president’s job – managing thousands of employees, overseeing a $50 billion endowment, raising money, managing expenses, capital allocation, real estate acquisition, disposition, and construction, and reputation management – are responsibilities that few career academics are capable of executing. Broadening the recruitment of candidates to include top business executives would also create more opportunities for diverse talent for the office of the university president.
Furthermore, Harvard is a massive business that has been mismanaged for a long time. The cost structure of the University is out of control due in large part to the fact that the administration has grown without bounds. Revenues are below what they should be because the endowment has generated a 4.5% annualized return for the last decade in one of the greatest bull markets in history, and that low return is not due to the endowment taking lower risks as the substantial majority of its assets are invested in illiquid and other high-risk assets.
The price of the product, a Harvard education, has risen at a rate well in excess of inflation for decades, (I believe it has grown about 7-8% per annum) and it is now about $320,000 for four years of a liberal arts education at Harvard College. As a result, the only students who can now afford Harvard come from rich families and poor ones. The middle class can’t get enough financial aid other than by borrowing a lot of money, and it is hard to make the economics work in life after college when you graduate with large loan balances, particularly if you also attend graduate school.
The best companies in the world grow at high rates over many decades. Harvard has grown at a de minimis rate. Since I graduated 35 years ago, the number of students in the Harvard class has grown by less than 20%. What other successful business do you know that has grown the number of customers it serves by less than 20% in 35 years, and where nearly all revenue growth has come from raising prices?
In summary, there is a lot more work to be done to fix Harvard than just replacing its president. That said, the selection of Harvard’s next president is a critically important task, and the individuals principally responsible for that decision do not have a good track record for doing so based on their recent history, nor have they done a good job managing the other problems which I have identified above.
The Corporation board led by Penny Pritzker selected the wrong president and did inadequate due diligence about her academic record despite Gay being in leadership roles at the University since 2015 when she became dean of the Social Studies department.
The Board failed to create a discrimination-free environment on campus exposing the University to tremendous reputational damage, to large legal and financial liabilities, Congressional investigations and scrutiny, and to the potential loss of Federal funding, all while damaging the learning environment for all students.
And when concerns were raised about plagiarism in Gay’s research, the Board said these claims were “demonstrably false” and it threatened the NY Post with “immense” liability if it published a story raising these issues.
It was only after getting the story cancelled that the Board secretly launched a cursory, short-form investigation outside of the proper process for evaluating a member of the faculty’s potential plagiarism. When the Board finally publicly acknowledged some of Gay’s plagiarism, it characterized the plagiarism as “unintentional” and invented new euphemisms, i.e., “duplicative language” to describe plagiarism, a belittling of academic integrity that has caused grave damage to Harvard’s academic standards and credibility.
The Board’s three-person panel of “political scientist experts” that to this day remain unnamed who evaluated Gay’s work failed to identify many examples of her plagiarism, leading to even greater reputational damage to the University and its reputation for academic integrity as the whistleblower and the media continued to identify additional problems with Gay’s work in the days and weeks thereafter.
According to the NY Post, the Board also apparently sought to identify the whistleblower and seek retribution against him or her in contravention to the University’s whistleblower protection policies.
Despite all of the above, the Board “unanimously” gave its full support for Gay during this nearly four-month crisis, until eventually being forced to accept her resignation earlier today, a grave and continuing reputational disaster to Harvard and to the Board.
In a normal corporate context with the above set of facts, the full board would resign immediately to be replaced by a group nominated by shareholders. In the case of Harvard, however, the Board nominates itself and its new members. There is no shareholder vote mechanism to replace them.
So what should happen?
The Corporation Board should not remain in their seats protected by the unusual governance structure which enabled them to obtain their seats.
The Board Chair, Penny Pritzker, should resign along with the other members of the board who led the campaign to keep Claudine Gay, orchestrated the strategy to threaten the media, bypassed the process for evaluating plagiarism, and otherwise greatly contributed to the damage that has been done. Then new Corporation board members should be identified who bring true diversity, viewpoint and otherwise, to the board.
The Board should not be principally comprised of individuals who share the same politics and views about DEI. The new board members should be chosen in a transparent process with the assistance of the 30-person Board of Overseers. There is no reason the Harvard board of 12 independent trustees cannot be comprised of the most impressive, high integrity, intellectually and politically diverse members of our country and globe. We have plenty of remarkable people to choose from, and the job of being a director just got much more interesting and important. It is no longer, nor should it ever have been, an honorary and highly political sinecure.
The ODEIB should be shut down, and the staff should be terminated. The ODEIB has already taken down much of the ideology and strategies that were on its website when I and others raised concerns about how the office operates and who it does and does not represent. Taking down portions of the website does not address the fundamentally flawed and racist ideology of this office, and calls into further question the ODEIB’s legitimacy.
Why would the ODEIB take down portions of its website when an alum questioned its legitimacy unless the office was doing something fundamentally wrong or indefensible?
Harvard must once again become a meritocratic institution which does not discriminate for or against faculty or students based on their skin color, and where diversity is understood in its broadest form so that students can learn in an environment which welcomes diverse viewpoints from faculty and students from truly diverse backgrounds and experiences.
Harvard must create an academic environment with real academic freedom and free speech, where self-censoring, speech codes, and cancel culture are forever banished from campus.
Harvard should become an environment where all students of all persuasions feel comfortable expressing their views and being themselves. In the business world, we call this creating a great corporate culture, which begins with new leadership and the right tone at the top. It does not require the creation of a massive administrative bureaucracy.
These are the minimum changes necessary to begin to repair the damage that has been done.
A number of faculty at the University of Pennsylvania have proposed a new constitution which can be found at http://pennforward.com,/ which has been signed by more than 1,200 faculty from Penn, Harvard, and other universities. Harvard would do well to adopt Penn’s proposed new constitution or a similar one before seeking to hire its next president.
A condition of employment of the new Harvard president should be the requirement that the new president agrees to strictly abide by the new constitution. He or she should take an oath to that effect.
Today was an important step forward for the University. It is time we restore Veritas to Harvard and again be an exemplar that graduates well-informed, highly-educated leaders of exemplary moral standing and good judgment who can help bring our country together, advance our democracy, and identify the important new discoveries that will help save us from ourselves.
We have a lot more work to do. Let’s get at it.
https://x.com/BillAckman/status/1742441534627184760?s=20
Compare this approach to the traditional one where the small banks do effectively nothing to earn their fees – they aren’t given that opportunity – yet, they get a cut of the deal, albeit a tiny one. The traditional approach does not create value for anyone. It only creates resentment, and an uncomfortable feeling from the small banks who get a tiny piece of the deal in a particularly bad form of affirmative action.
While I don’t think our approach to working with the smaller banks has yet achieved the significant traction it deserves, it will hopefully happen eventually as the smaller banks build their competencies and continue to earn their fees, and other issuers see the merit of this approach. We are going to need assistance with a large IPO soon so we are looking forward to working with our favored smaller banks.
I have always believed in giving disadvantaged groups a helping hand. I signed the Giving Pledge for this reason. My life plan by the time I was 18 was to be successful and then return the favor to those less fortunate. This always seemed to the right thing to do, in particular, for someone as fortunate as I am.
All of the above said, it is one thing to give disadvantaged people the opportunities and resources so that they can help themselves. It is another to select a candidate for admission or for a leadership role when they are not qualified to serve in that role.
This appears to have been the case with former President Gay’s selection. She did not possess the leadership skills to serve as Harvard’s president, putting aside any questions about her academic credentials. This became apparent shortly after October 7th, but there were many signs before then when she was Dean of the faculty.
The result was a disaster for Harvard and for Claudine Gay.
The Harvard board should not have run a search process which had a predetermined objective of only hiring a DEI-approved candidate. In any case, there are many incredibly talented black men and women who could have been selected by Harvard to serve as its president so why did the Harvard Corporation board choose Gay?
One can only speculate without knowing all of the facts, but it appears Gay’s leadership in the creation of Harvard’s Office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging and the penetration of the DEI ideology into the Corporation board room perhaps made Gay the favored candidate. The search was also done at a time when many other top universities had similar DEI-favored candidate searches underway for their presidents, reducing the number of potential candidates available in light of the increased competition for talent.
Unrelated to the DEI issue, as a side note, I would suggest that universities should broaden their searches to include capable business people for the role of president, as a university president requires more business skills than can be gleaned from even the most successful academic career with its hundreds of peer reviewed papers and many books. Universities have a Dean of the Faculty and a bureaucracy to oversee the faculty and academic environment of the university. It therefore does not make sense that the university president has to come through the ranks of academia, with a skill set unprepared for university management.
The president’s job – managing thousands of employees, overseeing a $50 billion endowment, raising money, managing expenses, capital allocation, real estate acquisition, disposition, and construction, and reputation management – are responsibilities that few career academics are capable of executing. Broadening the recruitment of candidates to include top business executives would also create more opportunities for diverse talent for the office of the university president.
Furthermore, Harvard is a massive business that has been mismanaged for a long time. The cost structure of the University is out of control due in large part to the fact that the administration has grown without bounds. Revenues are below what they should be because the endowment has generated a 4.5% annualized return for the last decade in one of the greatest bull markets in history, and that low return is not due to the endowment taking lower risks as the substantial majority of its assets are invested in illiquid and other high-risk assets.
The price of the product, a Harvard education, has risen at a rate well in excess of inflation for decades, (I believe it has grown about 7-8% per annum) and it is now about $320,000 for four years of a liberal arts education at Harvard College. As a result, the only students who can now afford Harvard come from rich families and poor ones. The middle class can’t get enough financial aid other than by borrowing a lot of money, and it is hard to make the economics work in life after college when you graduate with large loan balances, particularly if you also attend graduate school.
The best companies in the world grow at high rates over many decades. Harvard has grown at a de minimis rate. Since I graduated 35 years ago, the number of students in the Harvard class has grown by less than 20%. What other successful business do you know that has grown the number of customers it serves by less than 20% in 35 years, and where nearly all revenue growth has come from raising prices?
In summary, there is a lot more work to be done to fix Harvard than just replacing its president. That said, the selection of Harvard’s next president is a critically important task, and the individuals principally responsible for that decision do not have a good track record for doing so based on their recent history, nor have they done a good job managing the other problems which I have identified above.
The Corporation board led by Penny Pritzker selected the wrong president and did inadequate due diligence about her academic record despite Gay being in leadership roles at the University since 2015 when she became dean of the Social Studies department.
The Board failed to create a discrimination-free environment on campus exposing the University to tremendous reputational damage, to large legal and financial liabilities, Congressional investigations and scrutiny, and to the potential loss of Federal funding, all while damaging the learning environment for all students.
And when concerns were raised about plagiarism in Gay’s research, the Board said these claims were “demonstrably false” and it threatened the NY Post with “immense” liability if it published a story raising these issues.
It was only after getting the story cancelled that the Board secretly launched a cursory, short-form investigation outside of the proper process for evaluating a member of the faculty’s potential plagiarism. When the Board finally publicly acknowledged some of Gay’s plagiarism, it characterized the plagiarism as “unintentional” and invented new euphemisms, i.e., “duplicative language” to describe plagiarism, a belittling of academic integrity that has caused grave damage to Harvard’s academic standards and credibility.
The Board’s three-person panel of “political scientist experts” that to this day remain unnamed who evaluated Gay’s work failed to identify many examples of her plagiarism, leading to even greater reputational damage to the University and its reputation for academic integrity as the whistleblower and the media continued to identify additional problems with Gay’s work in the days and weeks thereafter.
According to the NY Post, the Board also apparently sought to identify the whistleblower and seek retribution against him or her in contravention to the University’s whistleblower protection policies.
Despite all of the above, the Board “unanimously” gave its full support for Gay during this nearly four-month crisis, until eventually being forced to accept her resignation earlier today, a grave and continuing reputational disaster to Harvard and to the Board.
In a normal corporate context with the above set of facts, the full board would resign immediately to be replaced by a group nominated by shareholders. In the case of Harvard, however, the Board nominates itself and its new members. There is no shareholder vote mechanism to replace them.
So what should happen?
The Corporation Board should not remain in their seats protected by the unusual governance structure which enabled them to obtain their seats.
The Board Chair, Penny Pritzker, should resign along with the other members of the board who led the campaign to keep Claudine Gay, orchestrated the strategy to threaten the media, bypassed the process for evaluating plagiarism, and otherwise greatly contributed to the damage that has been done. Then new Corporation board members should be identified who bring true diversity, viewpoint and otherwise, to the board.
The Board should not be principally comprised of individuals who share the same politics and views about DEI. The new board members should be chosen in a transparent process with the assistance of the 30-person Board of Overseers. There is no reason the Harvard board of 12 independent trustees cannot be comprised of the most impressive, high integrity, intellectually and politically diverse members of our country and globe. We have plenty of remarkable people to choose from, and the job of being a director just got much more interesting and important. It is no longer, nor should it ever have been, an honorary and highly political sinecure.
The ODEIB should be shut down, and the staff should be terminated. The ODEIB has already taken down much of the ideology and strategies that were on its website when I and others raised concerns about how the office operates and who it does and does not represent. Taking down portions of the website does not address the fundamentally flawed and racist ideology of this office, and calls into further question the ODEIB’s legitimacy.
Why would the ODEIB take down portions of its website when an alum questioned its legitimacy unless the office was doing something fundamentally wrong or indefensible?
Harvard must once again become a meritocratic institution which does not discriminate for or against faculty or students based on their skin color, and where diversity is understood in its broadest form so that students can learn in an environment which welcomes diverse viewpoints from faculty and students from truly diverse backgrounds and experiences.
Harvard must create an academic environment with real academic freedom and free speech, where self-censoring, speech codes, and cancel culture are forever banished from campus.
Harvard should become an environment where all students of all persuasions feel comfortable expressing their views and being themselves. In the business world, we call this creating a great corporate culture, which begins with new leadership and the right tone at the top. It does not require the creation of a massive administrative bureaucracy.
These are the minimum changes necessary to begin to repair the damage that has been done.
A number of faculty at the University of Pennsylvania have proposed a new constitution which can be found at http://pennforward.com,/ which has been signed by more than 1,200 faculty from Penn, Harvard, and other universities. Harvard would do well to adopt Penn’s proposed new constitution or a similar one before seeking to hire its next president.
A condition of employment of the new Harvard president should be the requirement that the new president agrees to strictly abide by the new constitution. He or she should take an oath to that effect.
Today was an important step forward for the University. It is time we restore Veritas to Harvard and again be an exemplar that graduates well-informed, highly-educated leaders of exemplary moral standing and good judgment who can help bring our country together, advance our democracy, and identify the important new discoveries that will help save us from ourselves.
We have a lot more work to do. Let’s get at it.
https://x.com/BillAckman/status/1742441534627184760?s=20
2
AmericanKulak
2024 Jan 5, 12:27pm
AmericanKulak
2024 Jan 5, 12:27pm
AmericanKulak says
Right off the bat, that's kind of interesting. Student Organizations, within 24 hours of the story, before any reprisals began, were united in issuing a statement condemning the victim of the terror attack. That's some great organization for campus groups.
when 34 Harvard student organizations, early on the morning of October 8th before Israel had taken any military actions in Gaza, came out publicly in support of Hamas, a globally recognized terrorist organization, holding Israel ‘solely responsible’ for Hamas’ barbaric and heinous acts.
Right off the bat, that's kind of interesting. Student Organizations, within 24 hours of the story, before any reprisals began, were united in issuing a statement condemning the victim of the terror attack. That's some great organization for campus groups.
3
Ceffer
2024 Jan 5, 1:55pm
Ceffer
2024 Jan 5, 1:55pm
LOL! DEI is a societal subversive struggle session gone rogue and off the reservation. KommieKuntism hasn't advanced enough to openly put the useful idiots in front of firing squads like they used to, so the only alternative is to try to put the lid back on.
I am shocked and amazed that 70 years of lumpish press thugism dehumanizing and demonizing Palestinians didn't have more success. Whouda thought. Do they give refunds?
I am shocked and amazed that 70 years of lumpish press thugism dehumanizing and demonizing Palestinians didn't have more success. Whouda thought. Do they give refunds?
4
AmericanKulak
2024 Jan 6, 8:58pm
AmericanKulak
2024 Jan 6, 8:58pm
@Patrick
https://twitter.com/BillAckman/status/1743792224020619450
Last night, no one at
@MIT had a good night’s sleep.
Yesterday evening, shortly after I posted that we were launching a plagiarism review of all current MIT faculty, President Kornbluth, members of MIT’s administration, and its board, I am sure that an audible collective gasp could be heard around the campus.
Why? Well, every faculty member knows that once their work is targeted by AI, they will be outed. No body of written work in academia can survive the power of AI searching for missing quotation marks, failures to paraphrase appropriately, and/or the failure to properly credit the work of others.
But it wasn’t just the MIT faculty that did not sleep last night. The @Harvard faculty, its governing board members, and its administrative leadership did not sleep either. Because why would we stop at MIT?
Don’t we have to do a deep dive into academic integrity at Harvard as well?
What about Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Penn, Dartmouth? You get the point.
While we are going to do a detailed review of plagiarism at MIT, we are not going to be the only ones who do so.
Every college and university in the world is going to have to do the same for themselves. They will do so because they will need to validate all plagiarism accusations, or someone else will do it for them.
The best approach, however, is probably to launch an AI startup to do this job (I would be interested in investing in one) as there is plenty of work to do, and many institutions won’t have the resources to do it on their own. Perhaps more importantly, the donors are going to demand that the review is done by an independent third party.
For who today is going to trust higher education to review itself?
Consider the inherently irreconcilable conflicts of interest. Would you trust today’s university president to do an examination of their faculty? What are the chances that the reviews would be weaponized to go after faculty members whose politics were not favored by leadership?
We have seen this before with other tools used by university presidents and their deans. Consider the weaponization of MeToo accusations, speech codes, and the other tactics of cancellation that have destroyed free speech on campus, and many faculty members’ reputations, careers, and their families.
By analogy, who would trust even our most credible corporations with auditing their own financial statements? There is a reason why all public companies have independent auditors who are carefully examined by regulators to ensure they maintain quality, standards, accuracy, and independence.
And what if a plagiarism review turned into an incredible embarrassment for the entire university? It could lead to wholesale firings of faculty. Donors terminating their donations. Federal funding being withdrawn, and a massive litigious conflagration where faculty members and universities sue one another about what is plagiarism, and what is not. Think about the inevitable destruction of the reputations of thousands of faculty members as it rolls out around the country, and perhaps the world.
And maybe that’s a good thing.
The Impact of Higher Education on Society and Our Country
When I woke up on the morning of October 7th, my first thought was not that I was going to launch an effort to save higher education from itself. I had other more pressing concerns about the world, and I still have these concerns. But as we all know, our higher education system (HES) is critically important as it can affect and influence the minds of our younger generations, thereby profoundly impacting the lives of all of us.
The HES can affect what’s taught to toddlers and what is taught in elementary and high schools, as ed schools train the next generation of teachers and superintendents, and design the curricula they teach.
The HES can convince a generation that some of us are oppressors, and others are the oppressed, and provide justifications for what kinds and what degree of violence and terrorism are appropriate tools to address this perceived oppression.
The HES can affect our medical establishments and the ethics of medicine, e.g., some of our most controversial procedures and medicines, and the advisability of their use on children, and so on. You get the point, I am sure.
The HES affects our legal system, our ethics, and our basic understanding of right and wrong.
It affects how we think about capitalism and our economic system, and how we address wealth inequality, taxation, monetary and fiscal policy, and consider universal basic income and other alternatives.
It also affects religion and how it is practiced and no longer practiced around the country.
It can advance a monetary theory which states that the U.S. as a sovereign nation has effectively no limit to its spending because it can just print new money without any consequences or loss of solvency.
And then, of course, the graduates of our education system over time become the judges, the Supreme Court justices, the politicians, the members of the media, and the other people that influence and determine our way of life, and help us understand the truth, but whose truth? you might ask.
The HES influences how our national voting system should be administered; the standards for eligibility to run for office; how the primary system works, and what it takes to qualify to be on a ballot in a state.
I could continue, but I am sure that you already understand the power of the HES. You don’t need me to tell you how important it is.
In light of the power of HES, those interested in power would of course desire to take control of our most prestigious and influential universities so that they could ultimately take control of our education system, our government, and then the country at large.
https://twitter.com/BillAckman/status/1743792224020619450
5
AmericanKulak
2024 Jan 6, 9:03pm
AmericanKulak
2024 Jan 6, 9:03pm
(the same reason we must do away with Lawyer's Guilds and Law Schools, or build walls between them, to prevent the academic redefinition of terms)
6
Ceffer
2024 Jan 6, 10:17pm
Ceffer
2024 Jan 6, 10:17pm
There's a difference between 'appearances' and 'practices'. Universities are riddled with as much fraud, politics and preferential treatment as they are with merit or intellectual integrity. They are also purposeful formaldehydes of disinformation in their actual educational programs. Status is sacrosanct, not "Veritas".
Gay's problem is they could not preserve the sanctimonious 'appearances' with her, not that she isn't a somewhat typical gold plated university phony, albeit of the Netflix DEI variety. She probably didn't do shit, anyway, and somebody else was running the U.
Gay's problem is they could not preserve the sanctimonious 'appearances' with her, not that she isn't a somewhat typical gold plated university phony, albeit of the Netflix DEI variety. She probably didn't do shit, anyway, and somebody else was running the U.
7
HeadSet
2024 Jan 7, 6:24am
HeadSet
2024 Jan 7, 6:24am
Ceffer says
Nobody cared about any of that. The plagiarism was just a tool to remove someone who supported Hamas.
Gay's problem is they could not preserve the sanctimonious 'appearances' with her, not that she isn't a somewhat typical gold plated university phony, albeit of the Netflix DEI variety. She probably didn't do shit, anyway, and somebody else was running the U.
Nobody cared about any of that. The plagiarism was just a tool to remove someone who supported Hamas.
9
Patrick
2024 Jan 8, 11:02am
Patrick
2024 Jan 8, 11:02am
HeadSet says
@HeadSet I think you are correct.
Still, it's extremely entertaining to see a bit of justice arrive at Harvard, the center of wokeness, even if it is in such a roundabout way.
Nobody cared about any of that. The plagiarism was just a tool to remove someone who supported Hamas.
@HeadSet I think you are correct.
Still, it's extremely entertaining to see a bit of justice arrive at Harvard, the center of wokeness, even if it is in such a roundabout way.
10
Patrick
2024 Jan 8, 11:06am
Patrick
2024 Jan 8, 11:06am
https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/auditing-academia
a fun and perhaps less considered aspect of the impending rummage through academic publication:
plagiarism is going to be the least of it.
this has been an incredibly isolated and unaccountable ivory tower.
small groups of hyper-politicized and fetishistically tribal hyper-partisans took over entire fields of endeavor. they took over the journals. they took over the grant giving. all of it.
this has made a lysenko level mess out of entire fields for decades. it has turned peer review into an ideological commissariat whose primary purpose has been to speak power to truth and to prevent truth from being spoken at all.
and now, suddenly, these obscure journals and dissertations, previously read only by other like minded members of "the club" who cared about nothing save ideological purity are going to be read widely.
propensity for plagiarism will be the least of the revelations.
the content is going to horrify.
have you ever actually read any of these papers about gender as social construct but race as immutable signifier of oppression or the whole intersectional aggrievement matrix of post modern pabulum?
it’s SO much worse than people suspect. ...
have you ever seen how bad the science and the data behind whole fields like "climate science" or increasingly “medicine” is or what passes for ethics or even law? ...
have you seen how awful the study design in social (and hard) science has become and how laughably unable to replicate it is? ...
and when the world gets a look at what has been passing for academia, it's going to get very, very interesting for the academics because these people are so corrupt, so self-absorbed, so out of step, and so detached from reality that they have not only destroyed but actually inverted the whole system of “higher education” and turned the university into a self-serving fallacy factory for deranged doctrine.
and enough is enough.
occult academia has thrived and festered in obscurity.
it's going to be amazing what a little sunshine can disinfect.
11
Patrick
2024 Jun 20, 11:49am
Patrick
2024 Jun 20, 11:49am
https://x.com/BillAckman/status/1803757668781191182?t=5XWssAoVDpJqHUgMzSU2uw&s=09
@BillAckman
When my last child was born, on the first day of her life we were told that she needed a HepB vaccine. It was not presented as a choice and I foolishly did nothing to stop the nurse. My older three daughters did not receive the vaccine at birth.
Those that question the growing, now 72-shot regimen for children are considered by some to be wackos and anti-vaxxers.
I think the skepticism is appropriate and prudent as we are obligated as parents to make sure that we are not causing harm to our children who are not capable of providing informed consent.
Our society needs to complete a careful review of vaccine protocols including the risks associated with the cumulative effect of all of the vaccines we are giving children.
We have been working for more than a year to find a credible and independent group to do such an investigation but so far have not been able to do so. If you can help us do this important work, please contact us at info@persq.org
12
AmericanKulak
2024 Jun 20, 1:54pm
AmericanKulak
2024 Jun 20, 1:54pm
The number of vaccines is staggering. A quite a number of them are pointless.
I'll bring up Diptheria again. The last major outbreak in the developed world was IJA soldiers packed in like sardines when shipped to the South Pacific on Cargo Ships and were basically travelling like Blackbirders. A situation almost nobody will see IRL. Diptheria is takes weeks to be fatal and is knocked out cold by the earliest, generic antibiotics, so why bother? Anybody planning to visit Wau and wallow in some water buffalo manure?
Pertussis (Whooping Cough) is another easily whacked out by common and generic antibiotics disease that is also seldom fatal and easily detectible by visual cues. Even if misdiagnosed, the usual dose of antibiotics assigned to high risk with respiratory infections would knock it out. Only 60k people died on the entire planet from it, almost all of them in the 4th World and almost none in the Developed or Developing countries Only 1 in 200 infants who get it die, again mostly in the 4th World like the highlands of Laos or among Amazonian uncontacted tribes. Unless you're sending your kid to live with the Yanomano, why bother?
TL;DR At the minimum, there's no point in vaccinating against bacterial diseases unless they are extrenuating circumstances like genetic immunity disorders.
I'll bring up Diptheria again. The last major outbreak in the developed world was IJA soldiers packed in like sardines when shipped to the South Pacific on Cargo Ships and were basically travelling like Blackbirders. A situation almost nobody will see IRL. Diptheria is takes weeks to be fatal and is knocked out cold by the earliest, generic antibiotics, so why bother? Anybody planning to visit Wau and wallow in some water buffalo manure?
Pertussis (Whooping Cough) is another easily whacked out by common and generic antibiotics disease that is also seldom fatal and easily detectible by visual cues. Even if misdiagnosed, the usual dose of antibiotics assigned to high risk with respiratory infections would knock it out. Only 60k people died on the entire planet from it, almost all of them in the 4th World and almost none in the Developed or Developing countries Only 1 in 200 infants who get it die, again mostly in the 4th World like the highlands of Laos or among Amazonian uncontacted tribes. Unless you're sending your kid to live with the Yanomano, why bother?
TL;DR At the minimum, there's no point in vaccinating against bacterial diseases unless they are extrenuating circumstances like genetic immunity disorders.
13
Ceffer
2024 Jun 20, 4:24pm
Ceffer
2024 Jun 20, 4:24pm
Patrick says
If you always wondered why academia was so toxically assaultive and hostile, they are apparatchik formaldehyde of fakery and Savonarolas pitched against inconvenient truths to keep the tarps on the sets painted with ersatz information and fake history.
The Smithsonian usually only arrives on a site to confiscate, hide and destroy any 'evidence' that goes against the mainstream and to keep alive the false narratives.
Google earth has done more to awaken genuine inquiry concerning natural history and hidden civilizations than any raft of university fly in amber 'academicians'.
When WWII revealed to the Allies that the Germans were really on to some incredibly advanced technology, Rockefellers (who else) commissioned 'official' fake versions of WWII history that were to be toadied by the scholars without question, to hide all suggestion to students or the public that these advanced technologies existed (and to keep them secret in black ops). Of course, the rewrites were also to exonerate the 'winners' and shift blame.
They couldn't resist their itchy trigger fingers, so now, we have the manifestation of space weapons and weather weapons, EMP scalar weapons, DEW and HAARP, maybe soon in our backyards as they seek easy ways to redevelop and destroy. This is probably why alleged aliens always wind up underground. They had been there, done that, or were already done by that. Since the Wright Brothers, the 'surface' has become a much more dangerous place.
small groups of hyper-politicized and fetishistically tribal hyper-partisans took over entire fields of endeavor. they took over the journals. they took over the grant giving. all of it.
this has made a lysenko level mess out of entire fields for decades. it has turned peer review into an ideological commissariat whose primary purpose has been to speak power to truth and to prevent truth from being spoken at all.
If you always wondered why academia was so toxically assaultive and hostile, they are apparatchik formaldehyde of fakery and Savonarolas pitched against inconvenient truths to keep the tarps on the sets painted with ersatz information and fake history.
The Smithsonian usually only arrives on a site to confiscate, hide and destroy any 'evidence' that goes against the mainstream and to keep alive the false narratives.
Google earth has done more to awaken genuine inquiry concerning natural history and hidden civilizations than any raft of university fly in amber 'academicians'.
When WWII revealed to the Allies that the Germans were really on to some incredibly advanced technology, Rockefellers (who else) commissioned 'official' fake versions of WWII history that were to be toadied by the scholars without question, to hide all suggestion to students or the public that these advanced technologies existed (and to keep them secret in black ops). Of course, the rewrites were also to exonerate the 'winners' and shift blame.
They couldn't resist their itchy trigger fingers, so now, we have the manifestation of space weapons and weather weapons, EMP scalar weapons, DEW and HAARP, maybe soon in our backyards as they seek easy ways to redevelop and destroy. This is probably why alleged aliens always wind up underground. They had been there, done that, or were already done by that. Since the Wright Brothers, the 'surface' has become a much more dangerous place.
I first became concerned about
@Harvard
when 34 Harvard student organizations, early on the morning of October 8th before Israel had taken any military actions in Gaza, came out publicly in support of Hamas, a globally recognized terrorist organization, holding Israel ‘solely responsible’ for Hamas’ barbaric and heinous acts.
How could this be? I wondered.
When I saw President Gay’s initial statement about the massacre, it provided more context (!) for the student groups’ statement of support for terrorism. The protests began as pro-Palestine and then became anti-Israel. Shortly, thereafter, antisemitism exploded on campus as protesters who violated Harvard’s own codes of conduct were emboldened by the lack of enforcement of Harvard’s rules, and kept testing the limits on how aggressive, intimidating, and disruptive they could be to Jewish and Israeli students, and the student body at large. Sadly, antisemitism remains a simmering source of hate even at our best universities among a subset of students.
A few weeks later, I went up to campus to see things with my own eyes, and listen and learn from students and faculty. I met with 15 or so members of the faculty and a few hundred students in small and large settings, and a clearer picture began to emerge.
I ultimately concluded that antisemitism was not the core of the problem, it was simply a troubling warning sign – it was the “canary in the coal mine” – despite how destructive it was in impacting student life and learning on campus.
I came to learn that the root cause of antisemitism at Harvard was an ideology that had been promulgated on campus, an oppressor/oppressed framework, that provided the intellectual bulwark behind the protests, helping to generate anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hate speech and harassment.
Then I did more research. The more I learned, the more concerned I became, and the more ignorant I realized I had been about DEI, a powerful movement that has not only pervaded Harvard, but the educational system at large. I came to understand that Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion was not what I had naively thought these words meant.
I have always believed that diversity is an important feature of a successful organization, but by diversity I mean diversity in its broadest form: diversity of viewpoints, politics, ethnicity, race, age, religion, experience, socioeconomic background, sexual identity, gender, one’s upbringing, and more.
What I learned, however, was that DEI was not about diversity in its purest form, but rather DEI was a political advocacy movement on behalf of certain groups that are deemed oppressed under DEI’s own methodology.
Under DEI, one’s degree of oppression is determined based upon where one resides on a so-called intersectional pyramid of oppression where whites, Jews, and Asians are deemed oppressors, and a subset of people of color, LGBTQ people, and/or women are deemed to be oppressed. Under this ideology which is the philosophical underpinning of DEI as advanced by Ibram X. Kendi and others, one is either an anti-racist or a racist. There is no such thing as being “not racist.”
Under DEI’s ideology, any policy, program, educational system, economic system, grading system, admission policy, (and even climate change due its disparate impact on geographies and the people that live there), etc. that leads to unequal outcomes among people of different skin colors is deemed racist.
As a result, according to DEI, capitalism is racist, Advanced Placement exams are racist, IQ tests are racist, corporations are racist, or in other words, any merit-based program, system, or organization which has or generates outcomes for different races that are at variance with the proportion these different races represent in the population at large is by definition racist under DEI’s ideology.
In order to be deemed anti-racist, one must personally take action to reverse any unequal outcomes in society. The DEI movement, which has permeated many universities, corporations, and state, local and federal governments, is designed to be the anti-racist engine to transform society from its currently structurally racist state to an anti-racist one.
After the death of George Floyd, the already burgeoning DEI movement took off without any real challenge to its problematic ideology. Why, you might ask, was there so little pushback? The answer is that anyone who dared to raise a question which challenged DEI was deemed a racist, a label which could severely impact one’s employment, social status, reputation and more. Being called a racist got people cancelled, so those concerned about DEI and its societal and legal implications had no choice but to keep quiet in this new climate of fear.
The techniques that DEI has used to squelch the opposition are found in the Red Scares and McCarthyism of decades past. If you challenge DEI, “justice” will be swift, and you may find yourself unemployed, shunned by colleagues, cancelled, and/or you will otherwise put your career and acceptance in society at risk.
The DEI movement has also taken control of speech. Certain speech is no longer permitted. So-called “microaggressions” are treated like hate speech. “Trigger warnings” are required to protect students. “Safe spaces” are necessary to protect students from the trauma inflicted by words that are challenging to the students’ newly-acquired world views. Campus speakers and faculty with unapproved views are shouted down, shunned, and cancelled.
These speech codes have led to self-censorship by students and faculty of views privately held, but no longer shared. There is no commitment to free expression at Harvard other than for DEI-approved views. This has led to the quashing of conservative and other viewpoints from the Harvard campus and faculty, and contributed to Harvard’s having the lowest free speech ranking of 248 universities assessed by the Foundation of Individual Rights and Expression.
When one examines DEI and its ideological heritage, it does not take long to understand that the movement is inherently inconsistent with basic American values. Our country since its founding has been about creating and building a democracy with equality of opportunity for all. Millions of people have left behind socialism and communism to come to America to start again, as they have seen the destruction leveled by an equality of outcome society.
The E for “equity” in DEI is about equality of outcome, not equality of opportunity.
DEI is racist because reverse racism is racism, even if it is against white people (and it is remarkable that I even need to point this out). Racism against white people has become considered acceptable by many not to be racism, or alternatively, it is deemed acceptable racism. While this is, of course, absurd, it has become the prevailing view in many universities around the country.
You can say things about white people today in universities, in business or otherwise, that if you switched the word ‘white’ to ‘black,’ the consequences to you would be costly and severe.
To state what should otherwise be self-evident, whether or not a statement is racist should not depend upon whether the target of the racism is a group who currently represents a majority or minority of the country or those who have a lighter or darker skin color. Racism against whites is as reprehensible as it is against groups with darker skin colors.
Martin Luther King’s most famous words are instructive:
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
But here we are in 2024, being asked and in some cases required to use skin color to effect outcomes in admissions (recently deemed illegal by the Supreme Court), in business (likely illegal yet it happens nonetheless) and in government (also I believe in most cases to be illegal, except apparently in government contracting), rather than the content of one’s character. As such, a meritocracy is an anathema to the DEI movement. DEI is inherently a racist and illegal movement in its implementation even if it purports to work on behalf of the so-called oppressed.
And DEI’s definition of oppressed is fundamentally flawed.
I have always believed that the most fortunate should help the least fortunate, and that our system should be designed in such a way as to maximize the size of the overall pie so that it will enable us to provide an economic system which can offer quality of life, education, housing, and healthcare for all.
America is a rich country and we have made massive progress over the decades toward achieving this goal, but we obviously have much more work to do. Steps taken on the path to socialism – another word for an equality of outcome system – will reverse this progress and ultimately impoverish us all. We have seen this movie many times.
Having a darker skin color, a less common sexual identity, and/or being a woman doesn’t make one necessarily oppressed or even disadvantaged. While slavery remains a permanent stain on our country’s history – a fact which is used by DEI to label white people as oppressors – it doesn’t therefore hold that all white people generations after the abolishment of slavery should be held responsible for its evils. Similarly, the fact that Columbus discovered America doesn’t make all modern-day Italians colonialists.
An ideology that portrays a bicameral world of oppressors and the oppressed based principally on race or sexual identity is a fundamentally racist ideology that will likely lead to more racism rather than less. A system where one obtains advantages by virtue of one’s skin color is a racist system, and one that will generate resentment and anger among the un-advantaged who will direct their anger at the favored groups.
The country has seen burgeoning resentment and anger grow materially over the last few years, and the DEI movement is an important contributor to our growing divisiveness. Resentment is one of the most important drivers of racism. And it is the lack of equity, i.e, fairness, in how DEI operates, that contributes to this resentment.
I was accused of being a racist from the President of the NAACP among others when I posted on
@X
that I had learned that the Harvard President search process excluded candidates that did not meet the DEI criteria. I didn’t say that former President Gay was hired because she was a black woman. I simply said that I had heard that the search process by its design excluded a large percentage of potential candidates due to the DEI limitations. My statement was not a racist one. It was simply the empirical truth about the Harvard search process that led to Gay’s hiring.
When former President Gay was hired, I knew little about her, but I was instinctually happy for Harvard and the black community. Every minority community likes to see their representatives recognized in important leadership positions, and it is therefore an important moment for celebration. I too celebrated this achievement. I am inspired and moved by others’ success, and I thought of Gay’s hiring at the pinnacle leadership position at perhaps our most important and iconic university as an important and significant milestone for the black community.
I have spent the majority of my life advocating on behalf of and supporting members of disadvantaged communities including by investing several hundreds of millions of dollars of philanthropic assets to help communities in need with economic development, sensible criminal justice reform, poverty reduction, healthcare, education, workforce housing, charter schools, and more.
I have done the same at Pershing Square Capital Management when, for example, we completed one of the largest IPOs ever with the substantive assistance of a number of minority-owned, women-owned, and Veteran-owned investment banks. Prior to the Pershing Square Tontine, Ltd. IPO, it was standard practice for big corporations occasionally to name a few minority-owned banks in their equity and bond offerings, have these banks do no work and sell only a de minimis amount of stock or bonds, and allocate to them only 1% or less of the underwriting fees so that the issuers could virtue signal that they were helping minority communities.