Harvard Profs Hire High School Ghost Writers

Harvard has sunk so far in the public's estimation that it is difficult to be disedified by any of the antics pulled off by the tenured morons who ejected Lawrence Summers from Harvard's top job. But Harvard's long, slow, spiraling descent into the porcelain poop-pot continues relentlessly as 02138 mag defrocks serial fraud Alan Dershowitz. [h/t: Steve Sailer]

Back in the day, I was supposed to appear on Ossie Davis's show in NYC and met in the green room, Alan Dershowitz, then an up-and-coming young vitellono in the academic thickets. He was nice and we had a sweet conversation about Lord-knows-what & did the show & years later, I recognized him inveighing against the evil Arabs on TV. I forgave him because he also detested Jimmy Carter, a continuing embarassment to America's international image.

Here's paras on Dershowitz:

Dershowitz generally employs one or two full-time researchers, three or four part-timers, and a handful of students who do occasional work—all paid at $11.50 per hour. (Since Dershowitz doesn’t get enough in the $7,500/year research budget the law school accords him, he often has to pay that hourly rate out of his own pocket.) Several students who have worked with him describe his hiring practices as almost arbitrary—barely looking at résumés, hiring anyone who asks him for a job, sometimes having his wife interview applicants, and often forgetting those who’ve worked with him in the past. One long-serving researcher was a local high-school student.

Several of his researchers say that Dershowitz doesn’t subscribe to the scholarly convention of researching first, then drawing conclusions. Instead, as a lawyer might, he writes his conclusions, leaving spaces where he’d like sources or case law to back up a thesis. On several occasions where the research has suggested opposite conclusions, his students say, he has asked them to go back and look for other cases, or simply to omit the discrepant information. “That’s the way it’s done; a piecemeal, ass-backwards way,” says one student who has firsthand experience with the writing habits of Dershowitz and other tenured colleagues. “They write first, make assertions, and farm out [the work] to research assistants to vet it. They do very little of the research themselves.”

When one student couldn’t find a desired source for an HLS professor’s project, a Harvard research librarian commented, “Isn’t that the opposite of how you’re supposed to do it?” Other students point out that Dershowitz has been at the law school for four decades, and thus even his most apparently off-the-cuff suppositions are based on a long career of reading and practicing law. And Dershowitz does acknowledge researchers in his books.

Now Dershowitz has been at Harvard four decades, so some slack must be cut. However, some very young profs named Howard Gates and Fryer are also outsourcing their research.

Read the whole article to understand the full panoply of Harvard's dissolute degeneration into an Ivy intellectual brothel.