The battle over the fate of Harvard President Claudine Gay took an unexpected turn this week as accusations of plagiarism in her academic work surfaced, along with questions about how the university handled them.
On Tuesday, the Harvard Corporation, the university’s governing body, announced that Dr. Gay would keep her job, despite the uproar over her remarks about campus anti-Semitism at a congressional hearing. But the Corporation also revealed it had carried out a review of her published work after receiving charges in October over three of her articles.
The Corporation said that while the review found that he had not breached the university’s standards for “research misconduct”, it found “some instances of inadequate reporting”. Dr. Gay would request “four corrections to two articles to insert references and quotation marks omitted from the original publications,” the statement said.
The accusations were first widely publicized Sunday in a newsletter by conservative education activist Christopher Ruffo. On Monday, The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative media outlet, published its own investigation, finding what it said were issues with four papers published between 1993 and 2017. The article said the papers had paraphrased or quoted nearly 20 authors without the appropriate performance.
By Tuesday afternoon, there was growing concern about the work of Dr. Gay and Harvard’s actions, after the New York Post reported that he had approached Harvard in October about similar allegations.
According to The Post, he had contacted Harvard on Oct. 24 asking for comment on what he said were more than two dozen passages in which Dr. Gay’s words appeared to closely parallel words, phrases or sentences in published works of other scholars.
A few days later, The Post reported, he received a 15-page response from a lawyer who identified himself as defamation counsel for Harvard and Dr. Gay.
Jonathan Swain, a university spokesman, said Tuesday afternoon that the Harvard company stands by its statement from earlier in the day. He declined to comment further. A spokeswoman for The Post said: “The story speaks for itself.”
Dr. Gay strongly defended her work. “I stand by the integrity of my scholarship,” she said in a statement Monday. “Throughout my career, I have worked to ensure that my scholarship is held to the highest academic standards.”
The accusations could deepen turmoil around Dr Gay, who was sworn in as president in September. After Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, he was harshly criticized by some students, faculty members, alumni and university sponsors for a series of lukewarm responses to events in Israel and Gaza and to growing anti-Semitism on campus.
That appeared to come to a head last week, when Representative Elise Stefanik, R-New York, pointedly questioned Dr. Gay and two other college presidents about what she described as tolerance for calls for genocide against Jews.
On Tuesday, Ms. Stefanik criticized Harvard’s decision to stand behind Dr. Gay. “The only update to the code of ethics is to allow a plagiarist to become president of Harvard,” he said during a news conference.
Dr. Gay, Harvard’s first black president, has been a professor of government and African and African American studies at the university since 2006. Her scholarship has explored topics such as how the election of minority officials affects citizens’ perceptions of government and how housing Mobility programs affect the political participation of the poor.
At Harvard, where she received her Ph.D. in 1998, she has been both a barrier-breaker and a know-it-all, steadily rising through the management ranks since joining the faculty.
The Harvard Corporation’s statement on Dr. Gay does not use the word “plagiarism”. But some Harvard faculty members said they were disturbed by the passages highlighted in the news coverage, saying students who committed similar offenses were often disciplined, sometimes harshly.
“It’s troubling to see that the standards we hold for undergraduates seem to differ from the standards we hold for faculty,” said Theda Skocpol, professor of government.
A Harvard student guide defines “plagiarism” broadly. “When you fail to cite your sources or when you cite them poorly, you’re plagiarizing, which is taken extremely seriously at Harvard,” he says. “Plagiarism is defined as the act of intentionally OR unintentionally submitting work written by someone else.”
But not all cases of potential plagiarism are equal, particularly when they reflect no intent to deceive, some scholars said.
The thesis of Dr. Gay in 1997, The Free Beacon said, “borrowed” two paragraphs from a 1996 conference paper by Bradley Palmquist, then a professor of political science at Harvard, and Stephen Voss, a political scientist at the University of Kentucky who was in The doctoral program of Dr. Gay at Harvard.
In an interview, Dr. Voss called Dr. Gay’s use of his work, which involved changing only a few words, “technically plagiarism.” However, he said he considered it “pretty benign”, especially since the paragraphs in question included technical description.
“If a student gave me a paper that did what they did, I would give it back to them,” he said.
Katie Robertson contributed to the report.
