It is essential to grasp the nature of American academia to comprehend why Ivy League Professors and Students might produce research papers that need more logical coherence. The fallacy of Hindu Nationalism and the New Jim Crow serves as an example of this flawed reasoning. Another paper, equally lacking in logic, was recently published in the MIT Sloan Management Review. The authors proposed that managers globally should perform “Proactive Caste Audits” on their employees to distinguish between the “oppressor” and “oppressed” castes. They further suggested using “Caste Markers” like last name, dietary habits, and the names of employees’ native villages to determine their caste.
The recent resignation of Harvard President Claudine Gay due to plagiarism allegations is merely the latest instance of dishonesty in American academia. The decay traces back to the 1950s when Stanford University was accused of discriminating against Jewish applicants despite the university’s consistent denial of biased admission practices. On October 12, 2022, Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne apologized on behalf of the university. He committed to implementing the recommendations of a task force report confirming Stanford’s limitation on admitting Jewish students in the 1950s.
Claudine Gay, Harvard’s president, resigned after evidence of numerous instances of plagiarism was presented. Bill Ackman, a hedge fund manager and significant Harvard donor, played a crucial role in the campaign against Gay. In a Tit for Tat move, Business Insider analyzed the MIT doctoral dissertation of Ackman’s wife and found multiple instances of plagiarism. Sources revealed that Ackman’s wife, Neri Oxman, who obtained a tenured professorship at MIT in 2017, had also extensively plagiarized.
To fathom how such blatant cases of plagiarism are accepted as Ph.D. dissertations and scholarly research papers at esteemed institutions like Harvard and MIT, one must be familiar with the concept of “The Peer Review Cabal.” This cabal comprises academics who, driven by their ideologies and agendas, engage in a reciprocal practice that lends scholarly peer-reviewed legitimacy to subpar illogical research papers involving plagiarism.
In a rare departure within this cabal, Michael Witzel of Harvard University questioned Wendy Doniger’s (from The University of Chicago) proficiency in understanding Vedic Sanskrit. Upon request to substantiate his claim, Witzel posted examples of Doniger’s incorrect Sanskrit translations online. Witzel ended by doubting the reliability of her work, stating, “If ‘that’ much is wrong in just one story (and this is only a small selection!) — what about the rest of this book and her other translations?.. It might have been better to have used the old translations and added her Freudian interpretation to them… In sum: The ‘translation’ simply is UNRELIABLE.”
Witzel was privately reprimanded for his severe critique of the contemporary “Queen of Hinduism” and refrained from further criticism. Seemingly to compensate for violating the “Peer Review Cabal Code of Ethics,” Witzel later collaborated with California Department of Education (CDE) officials and evangelical groups to revise California school textbooks. Witzel’s group proposed that it was not the Roman authorities who arrested Jesus but the Jews. They also asserted that Hindu scriptures endorse the caste system and should be taught as such to California school children. Witzel and CDE officials hid the fact that another group they were collaborating with, the “Dalit Freedom Network,” was based in a church run by White Christians rather than being representative of the “real” Dalits from India.
Eric Stewart, a Criminology Professor at Florida State University, was let go due to “extreme negligence, incompetence, and false results” in his research. His studies, which purported to show systemic racism in America’s police force and society, have been retracted. Stewart’s research was not a fringe academic endeavor theorizing about racism. His work was cited 8500 times by other researchers over several years, and he held numerous influential roles, such as Vice President and Fellow at the American Society of Criminology. He received millions in grants and was a W.E.B DuBois fellow at the National Institute of Justice. His research, which was both divisive and dangerous, suggested that whites perceive blacks as criminals, a problem that was more pronounced among conservatives. Among the studies he was forced to retract were claims that whites favored longer sentences for Blacks and Latinos.
Before Gay resigned from Harvard, University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill, who faced criticism for her stance on antisemitism on campus, voluntarily resigned. The University of Pennsylvania administration had been grappling with a significant backlash from donors. Many of these donors withdrew their financial support and had demanded the institution’s president’s resignation. Their discontent stemmed from a “Palestine Writes Literature Festival” held on the Penn campus in September 2023. Both the donors and the Penn administration claimed that the festival featured speakers known for making antisemitic remarks, a claim disputed by both the event’s organizers and participants. A month before the event, the Anti-Defamation League also expressed concerns about the festival to Penn President Magill.
Two years before hosting the “Palestine Writes Literature Festival,” on September 10, 2021, Penn co-sponsored a three-day virtual conference titled “Dismantling Global Hindutva Conference,” or DGHC. The conference’s apparent goal was to dismantle “Hindutva,” which the organizers defined as a “fascist political movement by Hindus emulating the Nazis.” Hindu organizations sent nearly a million emails in opposition to the conference. These Hindu groups believed that the event was promoting Hinduphobia and inciting hostility towards the Hindu community. Many who found the conference’s discussions offensive voiced concerns that the event was spreading hate and negativity toward Hindu people.
In recent years, according to the Department of Education’s data, Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania have received $19,772,237 in contributions from entities in Qatar and Saudi Arabia, including donations from the governments of both nations. During this period, the Qatari government donated $6,329,283 to Harvard, with a significant donation of $1,104,180 made in May 2023 and another donation of $379,119 in April 2023. During the Israel-Hamas conflict, Qatar faced criticism due to its friendly ties with Hamas terrorist leaders.
The scrutiny was further heightened when it was revealed that the University of Pennsylvania had accepted millions in covert donations from China and other foreign sources. At the same time, its Biden Center for Foreign Policy was entrusted with numerous classified documents. Penn has accumulated over $50 million in foreign donations, including anonymous gifts exceeding $14 million from China and Hong Kong. In 2020, the Department of Education reported that Yale had failed to disclose $375 million in foreign funds and expressed concerns about Harvard’s compliance with reporting requirements.
In addition to plagiarizing others’ ideas, American academics are skilled at appropriating others’ identities. Andrea Smith, a prominent scholar in Native American Studies, has been publicly criticized for her contested claims of Cherokee heritage for at least 15 years. Despite this, she remained employed at the University of California, Riverside. However, she had to come clean after the situation reached a turning point. Following allegations made previously by 13 faculty members at Riverside, accusing her of “fraudulently claiming Native American identity” in violation of the Faculty Code of Conduct provisions concerning academic integrity, she ultimately resigned.
This is not an isolated case. Another professor from the University of California, Berkeley, admitted that she is white, contrary to her prior claims throughout her life that she was Native American. Elizabeth M. Hoover, an associate professor of environmental science, policy, and management, published an extended personal essay on her website acknowledging that faking a Native American identity helped her progress in her career. She received academic fellowships, opportunities, and material benefits that she may not have received had she not been perceived as a Native scholar.”
This duplicity is so widespread in American academia that the term “Pretendian” has been coined to refer to someone who claims distant Indigenous heritage that does not withstand deeper scrutiny. Jacqueline Keeler, a Native American journalist, has been working to expose “Pretendians” since 2015 and has created the “Alleged Pretendians List.” This list needs to be expanded to include academics who write questionable research papers to advance their ideologies and the agenda of their foreign donors.