Harvard’s Claudine Gay hasn’t even finished her first semester as university president, and she’s already found herself mired in scandal.
Earlier this month, Gay appeared in Congress as the poster child for Harvard’s hypocrisy over hate speech. Now, Gay has been accused of numerous instances of plagiarism — and Harvard’s student-run newspaper is calling the plagiarism allegations “substantial.”
Before her time as president, Gay served as an academic. She researched voter turnout as a political scientist.
Conservative activist Chris Rufo accused Gay of plagiarism Sunday after her viral appearance in Congress over unchecked antisemitism on college campuses. In a Substack post, Rufo reviewed Gay’s 1997 dissertation and found two passages lifted nearly verbatim from other scholars.
The conservative Washington Free Beacon later reported they’d found more suspected plagiarism in three other papers published between 1997 and 2017.
Gay has downplayed the plagiarism allegations, but also requested four corrections across two articles.
“I stand by the integrity of my scholarship,” Gay said in a statement obtained by Inside Higher Ed. “Throughout my career, I have worked to ensure my scholarship adheres to the highest academic standards.”
The Harvard Corporation, the university’s board, has known of the plagiarism allegations since October. On Saturday, the board quietly cleared Gay and called the lifted passages as “inadequate citation.”
The board said in a statement that it “found no violation of Harvard’s standards for research misconduct.”
Not everyone at Harvard is convinced.
Harvard’s student-run newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, reviewed all four allegations of plagiarism… and the Crimson described them as “substantial.”
“The Crimson independently reviewed the published allegations. Though some are minor — consisting of passages that are similar or identical to Gay’s sources, lacking quotation marks but including citations — others are more substantial, including some paragraphs and sentences nearly identical to other work and lacking citations,” the Crimson wrote.
“Some appear to violate Harvard’s current policies around plagiarism and academic integrity.”
Previously, the newspaper’s editors had defended Gay’s contrversial presidency. On Tuesday, the editorial board said in a headline, “Harvard and President Gay Must Not Yield.”
“On a House committee’s invitation, University President Claudine Gay testified about antisemitism on college campuses,” the Crimson editorial board wrote.
“In name, the hearing was about students fearing for their safety; in practice, it was a pretext for opportunistic politicians to launch an all-out assault on higher education.”
Now after the plagiarism scandal, even Gay’s allies at the Crimson are turning on her.
The Horn editorial team