Harvard President Gay Goes From Frying Pan To The Fire

A Rough Year For Diversicrats Continues

It's been a rough year for the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion crowd. First the Supreme Court ruled against Affirmative Action last summer, then Harvard  President Claudine Gay and her fellow Ivy League leaders got caught flatfooted by their Affirmative Action admits' pro-Hamas protests. Now it gets even worse for President Gay: Chris Rufo and Chris Brunet just argued on X that Gay plagiarized her PhD thesis: 

First, Gay lifts an entire paragraph nearly verbatim from a paper by Lawrence Bobo and Franklin Gilliam’s, while passing it off as her own paraphrase and language.

This is a direct violation of Harvard's policy: "When you paraphrase, your task is to distill the source’s ideas… pic.twitter.com/t6enHp3dN9

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) December 10, 2023

The full quote from Harvard's plagiarism policy is: 

When you paraphrase, your task is to distill the source’s ideas in your own words. It’s not enough to change a few words here and there and leave the rest; instead, you must completely restate the ideas in the passage in your own words. If your own language is too close to the original, then you are plagiarizing, even if you do provide a citation.

Back to Rufo's thread: 

Second, Gay appears to lift material from scholar Carol Swain. In one passage, summarizing the distinction between "descriptive representation" and "substantive representation," she copies the phrasing and language nearly verbatim from Swain’s book 'Black Faces, Black Interests,'… pic.twitter.com/68bJy1F9jo

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) December 10, 2023

Third, Gay composes an entire appendix in the dissertation directly taken from Gary King's book, 'A Solution to the Ecological Inference Problem.' While she cites King’s book later in the appendix—in fact, King was her dissertation advisor—Gay does not explicitly acknowledge that… pic.twitter.com/WGZAzc6gUn

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) December 10, 2023

I earned a master's degree from Harvard's night school—not nearly as prestigious as the graduate school—but, if I had committed these kinds of violations, I would have been expelled. As an alumnus, I am calling on Claudine Gay to immediately resign from her position.

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) December 10, 2023

Early Reactions: Bill Ackman Is Happy

Hedge fund manager and Harvard alumnus and donor Bill Ackman, who had previously called for Gay to resign, is happy. 

Boom! What more can I say? https://t.co/Y7LdeuxODR

— Bill Ackman (@BillAckman) December 11, 2023

Earlier on Sunday, Ackman had posted his letter to the Harvard board calling for the university to shut down its DEI office. 

Okay, now we finally got something good out of Ackman: saying that a special carve-out for Jews under DEI is "not the right answer" and that the entire DEI office (OEDIB) is "beyond repair and should be shut down". Paragraphs 2 and 3.

Let's see if this position sticks. https://t.co/qMdC8klhzE pic.twitter.com/KzYGK5GGdf

— FbF (@FistedFoucault) December 10, 2023

In Case Ackman Decides To Hedge

Contrary to their name, modern hedge funds often don't do much hedging. But if Bill Ackman decides to hedge, he may want to give the hedged portfolio method a try. We mentioned it here a couple of months ago. 

War Clouds Call For Bulletproof Investing

With the Mideast war threatening to spread, another way to limit your risk.$ASML $FICO $RACE $SMCO $NSIT $NVDA $NVO $WYNN https://t.co/ibV5eoYAHD

— Portfolio Armor (@PortfolioArmor) October 20, 2023

Here's a more recent real-world result. In early June, our system constructed this hedged portfolio for an investor with $3 million who wanted to limit his risk to a decline of no more than 30% over the next six months. 

Screen captures via Portfolio Armor.

And here's how that portfolio performed over the next six months: it finished up 11.28%, net of hedging and trading costs, while the market was up 8.02% over the same period. 

Bill can find an interactive version of that chart here. 

If You Want To Stay In Touch

You can scan for optimal hedges for individual securities, find our current top ten names, and create hedged portfolios on our website. You can also follow Portfolio Armor on Twitter here, or become a free subscriber to our trading Substack using the link below (we're using that for our occasional emails now).