Opinion: How Unchecked Power Corrupts Government and Higher Education

By John F. Di Leo, Opinion Contributor

“There are only so many hours in a day.”

Trite perhaps, but a saying we all heard in our youth – and like so many such sayings, it is one of unassailable veracity.

You can’t argue with it. Each day is 24 hours; each week is seven such days. Each year is 52 such weeks.

Make them count.

Too often, though, people use this as an excuse. And not just people – industries, organizations, institutions, politicians.

Consider the responsibilities of our Congress: raise taxes and spend them, create agencies in the executive branch and give them things to do.

What happens when the tax collectors exceed their authority and harass the innocent? Remember what the IRS did to Tea Party groups a decade ago, for example.

What happens when agencies blow past their charters to regulate more than they were established to control? Remember that the EPA was created to reduce actual pollution, and today it’s upending the world to control the harmless CO2 we exhale.

What happens when federal judges violate their oaths of office, and issue rulings in direct opposition to the law, because they can’t resist abusing their lifetime appointments to inflict their political philosophy upon the rest of us? Consider the many judges who threw out 2020 election lawsuits on technicalities in order to keep real evidence from being presented, so the candidate of their choice could undeservedly move into the White House?

In thousands of examples like these, the executive and judicial branches have been unfettered for generations. Congress has the power to impeach individuals, and defund or even shut down agencies and departments, but do they? Do they ever?

“We’re too busy for that,” we are told. “There are only so many hours in the day.”

So the House keeps creating agencies, and the Senate keeps confirming judges and cabinet secretaries, and a destructive, corrupt bureaucracy keeps right on doing damage to our country, because the people who ought to be controlling them say they don’t have time to do so.

And the problem only grows greater.

We have seen a particularly special example of this in the world of academia in recent weeks. Claudine Gay, a diversity hire with a PhD at Harvard University was caught spouting nonsense in a Congressional hearing, so people started asking the obvious questions: How could an academic rise to leadership in an American university, without recognizing a moral obligation to oppose antisemitism?

Reporters, politicians, parents and alumni looked into her closet, and an avalanche of academic improprieties worthy of Fibber McGee tumbled out of it.

Diligent research by reporters Christopher Rufo, Christopher Brunet, Aaron Sibarium, Phillip W. Magness, and others have found at least 41 specific instances of plagiarism, so far – presenting other writers’ work as her own, in various ways – in multiple publications throughout her long career, beginning with her PhD dissertation. (See Reason’s summary, entitled “If You Ignore Claudine Gay’s Plagiarism, Shame On You”)

Despite having been truthfully accused of this crime against higher education on occasion, Harvard rewarded Gay for these transgressions instead of punishing her, awarding her degrees and advancements, promoting her all the way to the presidency of what was once among the most prestigious universities in the world.

Academia and the media have had a field day with the issue. Snark blogger David Burge concluded “In fairness, nobody who writes academic papers actually expects anybody to read them.”

Even the gatekeepers who are supposed to make sure they haven’t been written before?

The story has done the service of prompting numerous articles about how rampant plagiarism has become across education, from junior high to grad school, and as we now see, in the offices of deans and chancellors.

What excuse are we given? That hunting for plagiarism in a dissertation or speech is hard, complex, time-consuming. You aren’t just looking for identical words, after all; that’s easy (but even that is often not even attempted). You’re also to check for footnotes, quote marks, similarities. And with the sudden new popularity of the internet theft engine – sorry, it’s formally called “Artificial Intelligence” – it’s even harder than ever now.

So what’s the easy solution? Disregard it. Just say it’s too hard to find. And maybe the standards were too strict anyway, all these centuries. Maybe it’s time to disregard the crime of plagiarism, not just quietly but out loud. What’s the big deal about dishonesty, anyway? Who cares if someone gets a job based on demonstrating that he knew the material, when in fact he didn’t?

We know better. Plagiarism has been easier and easier to commit ever since the “copy and paste” functions of word processors intersected with the search engine function of the internet. When crimes are easier to commit, enforcement must command greater attention, or society itself is jeopardized.

What do these two issues have in common? There aren’t enough hours in the day. Just as Congress won’t take the time to rein in their creations when they exceed their charters, so too has academia lost interest in caring whether its own charges are obeying the rules. As the taxpayer suffers from the one, the academic consumer suffers from the other. There’s definitely overlap there.

In the manufacturing world, we have a concept called LEAN. When companies have challenges – any challenges at all, from quality to speed, from cost control to waste – they bring in a LEAN engineer to study the process, and find the root causes.

The two houses of Congress have changed majorities several times in recent decades; has either party attempted a LEAN review to change the way it works, and find a way to get this leviathan under control? Not on your life.

Similarly, the education world – both public and private, large and small – has broadened its arena to include sports and entertainment, diversity and endowment investment, collaboration with foreign governments. All, arguably, at the expense of education.

The more you are tasked to do, the less you can do well. There are only so many hours in the day.

But is that true, really? Or is it just a convenient excuse?

If the incompetent get their public to accept incompetence from others, then they won’t stand out as unusually incompetent themselves.

Or worse, if the corrupt get their public to accept corruption from others, then they won’t stand out as unusually corrupt themselves.

We want to believe it’s incompetence. Failing to notice regulatory overreach, failing to notice academic plagiarism, failing to notice that employees in positions of power are abusing their authority.

But it may not be incompetence at all. It could well be that the leaders who don’t enforce the law don’t believe in the law themselves. Read the party platforms; read the academics’ speeches. Judge them by their goals and results, not just by their respective institutions’ century old mottos that they may not have honored in generations.

Our very culture is under assault, and these blatant violations at the highest level should be a clarion call for reform across our society.

Copyright 2023 John F. Di Leo

John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based trade compliance trainer and transportation manager, writer, and actor. County Chairman of the Milwaukee County Republican Party in the 1990s, after serving as president of the Ethnic American Council in the 1980s, he has been writing regularly for Illinois Review since 2009. Follow John F. Di Leo on Facebook, Twitter, Gettr or TruthSocial.

A collection of John’s Illinois Review articles about vote fraud, “The Tales of Little Pavel,” and his 2021 political satires about current events, “Evening Soup with Basement Joe,” Volumes One, Two, and Three, in either paperback or eBook, only on Amazon.