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Notes -
I can have such a defense going for it from two angles. First one is selective punishment in corrupt organizations which Harvard arguably is with recent scandals. Everybody is fraudster and everybody knows it. In that sense I was not punished for a fraud itself, but for getting caught or even worse, I was eliminated by internal politicking. It is similar thing to when let's say Xi Jinping or Putin runs another round of anticorruption crusade that for some reason only catches people who fell from grace of existing power structures. This is particularly effective in utterly corrupt organizations, where you have to do some gang-like initiation in order to get there in the first place. Once you are inside, you are never going to betray or you will be exposed and thrown aside.
Another angle is on arbitrariness of merit. Why should it be academic results or IQ tests instead of let's say some form of holmgang, where merit is shown in duel of martial prowess? Does excel pencil pusher in Harvard have more merit than mother of 10 or a small business owner with net worth of $10 million? You say that:
This is not the whole truth, the missing part is that other people value different things. Some people see "equitable racial diversity" as value to be maximized and thus DEI policy is merit based policy in that sense. Bill Ackman maybe values people who are against Hamas or maybe he really is stickler for due process and he sympathizes as he went through something similar. It is just that you have different value and definition of merit.
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