Re: Read ’Em And Weep For Harvard.

Dear Colleagues:

In 2004-2005, and on a few occasions again in 2006-2007, I wrote about ghostwriting done for leading academics, leading doctors and others who commit moral fraud by claiming the work as their own. Ghostwriting done for famous Harvard law professors was the original impetus for this work. To a considerable extent the existence of this ghostwriting at Harvard had to be deduced by logic based on statements made by the “accused,” by parsing statements made by the “accused.”

The subject has now been further pursued in an article by a recent Harvard graduate and former Wall Street Journal reporter named Jacob Hale Russell. The article, called A Million Little Writers, is in the November/December 2007 issue of 02138, which I am told is a new glossy magazine for Harvard alumni.

Russell has obviously done significant legwork and has come up with actual facts on the ground, whereas I had to rely on deductions -- damn good deductions, I think, but mere deductions nonetheless. And, based on Russell’s work, the situation at Harvard is far worse than even I suspected. The situation is shocking, horrifying, sickening, a total disgrace. Heads should roll. Faculty and administrators at the law school, and elsewhere too in the university, should be summarily fired for committing intellectual fraud or for condoning it.

As a matter of full disclosure I should say that, when preparing his piece, Russell spoke to me briefly on the phone -- perhaps for 15 minutes or so -- and received copies of a number of my blogs on the matter. But he has gone worlds beyond what I knew or wrote. Due to the power of his reporting and revelations, I shall have more to say in future about the horrifying -- and, unhappy to say, since 1960 the all too American, since 1960 the perhaps quintessentially American -- immoral fraudulence that has taken place at Harvard, at the school which sets the tone for the American academic world and much else besides in these United States. In the meanwhile, however, I am, with Russell’s permission, appending his article so that other people, who otherwise would have no reason to know that his article exists, can read his description of what has been going on in Cambridge. As we used to say when either bad or particularly good face-up cards were laid on the poker table during the course of a hand, and when the winning hand was shown after the betting was finished, “Read ’em and weep.” Weep for Harvard. Weep for the academic world. Weep for an America where immoral fraudulence is so de rigueur that reports of it don’t even raise an eyebrow among the powerful, but are instead regarded by them as simply the way everyday business is done.*

*This posting represents the personal views of Lawrence R. Velvel. If you wish to comment on the post, on the general topic of the post, or on the comments of others, you can, if you wish, post your comment on my website, VelvelOnNationalAffairs.com. All comments, of course, represent the views of their writers, not the views of Lawrence R. Velvel or of the Massachusetts School of Law. If you wish your comment to remain private, you can email me at Velvel@mslaw.edu.

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