[CLIP] Peter Boghossian on Ivy League Cover-Ups: Harvard Plagiarism Just the Tip of the Iceberg

You've been talking a lot about academic corruption, notably the plagiarism wars, I think is the term that you've been using. So let's start with this plagiarism thing, because basically it's being described as actually a weapon now that's going to be used by the right to attack the establishment. So tell me about this. You're laughing. I'm laughing because, well, first of all, if you didn't plagiarize, you have nothing to worry about. And for the record, I had my dissertation run and it's clean. So the idea that somehow this is a vast right-wing conspiracy to weed out, to weed out what? People who have obtained their credentials fraudulently? Okay, well, what would it matter if it was a right-wing conspiracy, any kind of conspiracy? There are people, a non-trivial number of people who teach in the academy, many of whom have tenure, who have obtained their credentials fraudulently. They have lied. They have cheated on their PhD. And that is an extraordinarily serious problem on multiple levels. It makes perfect sense to me. But somehow, somehow, it doesn't seem to be like people are treating it as seriously as you and I would. That's because they don't understand the depth of the problem. They don't understand the severity of the problem. And they don't understand. I mean, look, Claudine Gay, $900,000 a year, president of Harvard. She got caught for plagiarism in an egregious way. She kept her job for $900,000. She's no longer president, but she kept the $900,000 a year post at Harvard University. That's shocking. That's shocking. Well, because there's other criteria that are more important to these administrations. Yes, and the minimum bar to get in is it's assumed when you have your PhD that you went through a process, a rigorous process to get that, and you did not commit fraud to obtain that credential. If you committed fraud to obtain that credential, then we can have a conversation about what should happen. It's a little bit off topic, you know. Should you lose your PhD? I mean, as a minimum, you should lose any academic appointment you have. That's a minimum. This is at the most, arguably the most elite university in the world. Almost definitely in the top five universities in the world. And you have somebody who has obtained their degree fraudulently still in a position of authority. Well, as you're, I think, suggesting, it undermines the whole system, but the whole system is already undermined. Correct. You're right. It further undermines, it further delegitimizes a system that's already not legitimate. Don't hire college graduates, especially from the elite Ivies. In the, I'll use the term woke, in the woke worldview, okay, everything is politics. Everything is a power play. And the means of getting there seem to be discretionary. Right? So you can kind of imagine how this sort of situation arose. Yeah. Think about the first thing that you said that caused me to laugh, that this is a right wing conspiracy. Can you imagine saying that we need to keep people who have obtained their credentials dishonestly, they've cheated, lied through fraud, that we need to retain those people in service to some other ideology? That in and of itself should completely delegitimize the whole institution. So my viewpoint has developed through many interviews, including some with you in the past. Thank you. Okay. For decades now, in the academy, and then further in industry, and in various institutions, including government, there's been this strong selection process of people who through coded language, and ability to write a certain way and ability to demonstrate their bona fide, and I'll say glibly woke-ism, getting positions of merit, positions of power. And there's a disproportionate number of these people not getting positions of merit, getting positions of authority. Positions of authority. Okay, that's right. That's right. And so here we are, right. So I would expect, based on everything that probably there's a heck of a lot of this cheating going on. That's the question, right? That's the million dollar question. So here are the questions. What percentage of dissertations in the humanities are plagiarized? I don't know, I can take a guess. What percentage of dissertations in certain fields are plagiarized? The best thing that we have now is called turn it in, but there are too many false positives and false negatives. So there are tools being developed to analyze plagiarism. And very soon within eight months is the best prediction that we're going to know in mass how many people have committed fraud. So my guess to you is you're looking at seven to 9% of dissertations in the humanities that are plagiarized. If I'm wrong, it's not because there are fewer, it's because there are far, far more. But the seven to nine is a very conservative estimate. And my next guess to you, educated guess, would be that they would be in fields with the word studies in them, gender studies, anything, any member of the grievance studies. They would be in black studies, anything with the word Chicano studies, indigenous studies. But again, that's a guess. That's my prediction. I don't know. But I want to say something that gets lost in this conversation. Because someone's saying, well, you know, maybe it wasn't intentional or there was a mistake. Okay. People who would say that tend to be younger. And the reason they would say that is because they're working on screens, they're moving text. When Claudine Gates' dissertation, when I wrote my dissertation, you're talking about taking a book, copying from the book onto the computer. That's not merely pasting and copying text. There's a level of intentionality with that. So when I give the figure of seven to nine percent, I mean, could be independently adjudicated. We could bring someone in, they'd be like, wow, that is a clear instance of plagiarism, like Claudine Gates. And not as Harvard tried to say, duplicative language. It's plagiarism. It's cheating. She cheated. The other thing I have to, obviously, the sort of the elephant in the room here, I suppose, when we talk about the grievance studies of error, Sokol squared, you and just to remind our viewers, you and two others submitting these false papers, because you kind of cracked the code of what you thought could get published in various blank studies, journals. Your ability to do that and figure out that there is a code was that these aren't actually genuine areas of scholarship in the first place. They're all fraudulent. So I'm really glad you said that, because that's also lost in the discussion. I'm just going to use the figure 10%. It's not that just 10% of the people have cheated to obtain their credentials. It's that there are entire lines of literature that are fraudulent. So that's a deeper level of fraud. And then there's another level of fraud that we haven't talked about, is the universities protecting the people, either through making it more difficult to find those dissertations, pulling off the names of people on DEI websites. Now, do I know that's because they don't want them to search? No, I have no idea. But it's certainly a rather remarkable coincidence since the Claudine Gay scandal. I don't know that. I can't prove that. But causally, it's extraordinarily suspicious. So the institution wanting to protect people who have committed fraud is another level of fraud. So that's like another story. So you have plagiarism as one, entire bodies of literature that are corrupt, institutions protecting people who cheated. There's no politic or polite way to say it, nor should there be. And then you have other things that we can talk about, like citation cartels, etc. But those are the three areas of corruption. Well, to me, there's a fourth area. The fourth area is the administrators. Because I think this is a trend in every single university, almost, is that the number of these administrators has grown, in some cases, beyond the faculty. It's not, again, 100% clear what they administrate. However, they're very dedicated to maintaining the structure and the ideological structure that exists. That's my observation. That's certainly been written about somewhat. So what I'm trying to say, it might not be the academics that are trying to do this. It might be this other group, which has built an empire, so to speak, and wants to keep the empire. No, that's absolutely correct. It is the administrative staff. It is DEI boards. The DEI board is kind of the engine, the weaponization of the ideological capture. So there's no question that that's true. So there are layers and layers of corruption.