Sided take. The prof was all about dismissing the entire affair as an attack on fulsome education (he clearly conflated that with DEI in his attack on the recent FL and TX laws). The Atlantic guy said “wait a sec - no matter who the messenger is, we should only be concerned about the validity of the accusation”. Pushed that way, the prof said the plagiarism is minor. The Atlantic guy then said “that may be (he didn’t definitively agree), and that’s a much, much better defense of Gay than Gay offered herself.”

I think we need to separate these two things. For example, slavery was not a jobs program. A candidate for president in 2023 should not hesitate to cite slavery as the cause - the sole cause - of the Civil War, because without it it would not have happened. But that does not mean that all white people can be lumped into a group we call oppressors, and all black people should be generalized as oppressed.

We can agree about the need to address historical inequities while disagreeing about how best to do it. One of the major problems in academia today - such disagreements are too often not tolerated.
[Post edited by hoolstoptheheels at 01/05/2024 10:07AM]