We’ll talk with Dean Velvel of the Mass School of Law about this thought. Check this out:
MASSACHUSETTS SCHOOL OF LAW DEAN ASSAILS NOMINATION OF ELENA KAGAN TO THE UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT
ANDOVER, MA – Massachusetts School of Law Dean Lawrence Velvel is of the opinion that Elena Kagan should not have been nominated to the Supreme Court.
Kagan is the former Dean of Harvard Law School and she was chosen to join the High Court by President Barack Obama, a Harvard Law School graduate, despite the taint of having taken little or no action against two renowned Harvard law professors who plagiarized and/or, perhaps even worse, had parts or much of their books ghostwritten by students while taking sole credit for the works.
Dean Kagan and President Lawrence Summers (the former president of Harvard University when Kagan was dean of the law school) did little or nothing against two famous liberal Harvard Law professors who engaged in serious misconduct,” said Velvel, who is liberal himself. “Plagiarism and/or having your works ghostwritten is a major academic sin. It is a method of fraudulently taking all-important academic credit yourself for work done by others. This may be okay for politicians or corporate presidents, who use speech writers, but it is verboten in the academic world. And Harvard throws out students or other faculty members who engage in it.
“The actions — or inactions — by Kagan and Summers represented the kind of self protection and self aggrandizement of the east coast elite of the Boston-New York-Washington axis that began around 1960,” said Velvel. “Going to Harvard, Yale or Princeton became the method of advancement. Competence and honesty, especially honesty, took a back seat. When you look at the disasters of American life from Viet Nam through Iraq, Afghanistan and the recent economic meltdown, one form or another of dishonesty — from outright lies to suppression of information — always was a major facilitator.”
“That philosophy of protecting the Ivy League elite no matter what was reflected by the failure of Kagan and Summers to act strongly against the two famous Harvard law professors whose books were partly the result of plagiarism or ghostwriting, which are serious forms of academic dishonesty,” he said. “Neither Kagan nor Larry Summers had the guts or integrity to take on the incidents of plagiarism and ghostwriting at Harvard Law School, even though dishonesty is one of the major roots of all problems and is, as said, an academic sin.”
Velvel also remarked that Kagan’s failure to speak out on major problems was a case of classical careerism. “She set her cap to become some big deal in the legal profession and that kind of careerism is telling,” said the Dean. “If you go all the way back to when she graduated from Hunter College High School in New York, she posed for her yearbook graduation picture in judicial robes and holding a gavel, and she said she wanted to be a Supreme Court Justice. So in the last ten or fifteen years she said very little, apparently to avoid jeopardizing her chances of advancement, even though the country desperately needed intelligent people to speak up.”
Velvel also assailed the fact that, if Kagan is confirmed, all the Justices will be from Harvard (six) or Yale (three).
“The Boston-New York-Washington, Harvard-Yale-Princeton legal Mafia may not quite run the country or at least its Executive Branch,” he said, “but they are not far from it. Is there nobody who did not go to law school at Harvard or Yale who is qualified to sit on the Supreme Court?”
