Academic Integrity, Claudine Gay

 The entire situation can get fucked, for this reason:

I’m from outside of Princeton NJ-- home of not just the University, but also the Institute for Advanced Study (Einstein spent his latter years there) and a handful other players in the education biz, of various sorts -- and spent the end of the ‘90s in two high schools that took academics seriously, in one of the only places on the planet, probably, where taking academics seriously was even a thing. Among the students being told to take academics seriously I am pretty sure that I was the only one who ever considered it-- which speaks to flaws in my character and intelligence too shameful to dwell on. 

Anyway, informing all this being told to take academics seriously was a story-- told lacking a single proper noun-- about a student who fucked up the citations on an important paper out of laziness and fatigue-driven incompetence. But, because of academic integrity fucking up the citations was actually a FORM OF THEFT and the nameless student was ran out of the academy and all the hard work they had put in up until that point was for naught, since no one institution would ever consider affiliating themselves with a treacherous plagiarist. 

The crucial problem with the story-- the problem with academic papers-- is that it is built on idea that someone will read your paper, which, if it is not false, should be. If the teachers who gave that speech ever read the (correctly cited, to the best of my ability, but all that shit about getting comas in the right place always gave me a headache) papers I turned in with a trembling hand, the joke was on them because, despite (because of?) their originality, those papers were cringingly terrible. And even assuming they read my paper the idea that anyone was checking my citations was looney. If they were, it would have been frankly disturbing.** [they were counting my citations: you had to have a certain number of them, that was what made it a research paper] And- since I was one of at best a handful of students who was trying or even paying attention-- I am reasonably sure that, in the context, I actually wrote a pretty damn good high school academic paper.

Anyway, that dumb story just got a lot better: do the citations right, kids, or some right wing creeps will get you shitcanned from your job as President of Harvard. That has HAPPENED now-- you could look it up. 

Fuckn A’

**once, because it was physically possible, I checked a citation to Das Kapital in an article in a Socialist review. And they were off by a page. But I think me and the socialist both deserve a cookie. (it was only a page, Kapital is long as fuck). 

And, since this is a Yakuza themed blog, here’s a little bit of what you come here for:

Hell yeah, Claudine Gay should have cut off a finger (or two?) and kept the job. That would have been metal as fuck-- really taken the wind out of the ‘liberal snow-flake’ sails for a minute.  It would have made typing a little difficult, which could be a drag for the President of Harvard, but, as established above: fuck papers. 

In all seriousness, in a world where ‘what will Trump do next?!?’ is one of the biggest drivers of a major political movement, getting up on a podium and hacking off a couple fingers has the potential to fracture the MAGA coalition in a way that few other things do. A certain part of the movement is, obviously, pure racial animus. But another part of it is a bizarre, self-destructive, yearning for the extreme. This must be because racial hatred has always existed, but never animated a movement like Trump-isim until it was merged with the post modern crack-fiend yearning for greater stimulation and transgression. 

The racist is always lost, but the crack-fiend, by definition, is up for grabs. The first person to start publicly chopping fingers could take an actual bite out of Trumpisim.