Alternative Title: Billionaire hypocrite Bill Ackman embarrassed after he fails to do satisfactory due diligence before opening his big mouth, again
Alternative Title: Billionaire hypocrite Bill Ackman embarrassed after he fails to do satisfactory due diligence before opening his big mouth, again
Haven’t read the article but from previous news, the previous Harvard president (the first black female Harvard president) was basically forced to resign because she failed to say that a student calling for genocide would be a violation of school policy during a congressional hearing. One of the main guys trying to get her pushed out claimed she plagiarized parts of her doctoral thesis. Business Insider looked into that guy’s wife’s thesis and found that some of it was plagiarized. He whined that they should not be targeting him or his wife.
Business Insider double checked it and his wife definitely plagiarized parts of her thesis.
Okay, see this actually makes sense of this - it’s a deeply politicised back & forth of people running smear campaigns on one another, and they’re arguing over whether either was a justifiable smear, and this article is so breathlessly relating the latest tidbits that it fails to inform the reader of any of the context in a way that can be followed.
Also as I understand it the issue she was effectively forced to resign over was the plagiarism one, not the antisemitism one.
You said she failed to say it was a “violation of school policy”. After reading into this issue, I can see a number of right wing publications wording it in this exact same way, but that wasn’t the question she was answering.
She wasn’t asked whether it violated school policy in general - if Harvard has a policy against hate speech then surely calling for genocide is against it - but whether it violated the policy against bullying and harrassment in specific. That’s a different question.
The nuance that is left out here, which both women I saw questioned attempted to explain before being shouted down by the Republican asker, is that harrassment is a set of actions, not words. If someone were to approach a specific person and aggressively say “good morning” every morning for a period of time, that could be harrassment. If someone were to call for genocide in the privacy of their own dorm room amongst other people who shared their awful beliefs, that would not be harrassment or bullying of anyone because no person in particular is being targetted by those words in particular. It’s certainly hate speech, but it’s not harrassment. If you said it to someone’s face, particularly a Jewish person, that could easily be bullying and harrassment.
In other words, it very much depends on the situation, which was exactly their answer.
Hence the overly specific question of whether it is against the harrassment policy gets transmuted into the much more general question of whether it violates any policy, and they can use this to claim she said something she didn’t. It sounds like the Republican who was aggressively grilling them on this issue chose her words very carefully to target this ambiguity so that it could be misrepresented. Similar to the plagiarism accusations, it’s not like they give two shits when their side is guilty of it, so they’ll happily confuse the issue in order to weaponise it against their opponents.