Bill Ackman’s war to make universities accountable has the left panicked
A world in which Ivy League presidents have to care what people outside their institutions think is a new world indeed and not a very welcome one to residents of the Ivy bubble.
Ackman is doubling down. With help from artificial-intelligence technology (and his extensive and well-paid research staff), he s looking for plagiarism among university administrators and faculty, and odds are he ll find quite a bit.
As a defensive move, the left-leaning press is trying to normalize plagiarism and stigmatize concerns about it as a conservative weapon.
Sounds like it knows there s a widespread problem.
A lot of unqualified people have been promoted in higher-education administration, but they still, at least formally, must check the traditional boxes with dissertations and publications.
Since nobody cared about the work s quality, though, there was probably a lot of borrowing going on. Now it s much easier to check such things.
So the obvious solution is to devalue plagiarism as an offense.
It was always a firing offense; it will soon be transmogrified into a mere peccadillo or even a blow against a privileged system.
But this is where Ackman has them trapped.
via nypost.com
And given the capabilities of AI now, I should think Ackman could run thousands of plagiarism checks almost trivially. He could probably do it completely in house. If I were a president at some university and had faked up my PhD dissertation, I would be worried. Very worried.
This is Glenn Reynolds, BTW.