New plagiarism allegations surfaced Monday against Claudine Gaye threatened to plunge Harvard deeper into the debate over what constitutes plagiarism and whether the university will hold its president and its students to the same standards.
The accusations came in an unsigned complaint published Monday in The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative online magazine that has led a campaign against Dr. Gay in recent weeks.
The new complaint added additional allegations of plagiarism to about 40 that had already been released in the same way, apparently by the same accuser.
Dr. Gay strongly defended her work. “I stand by the integrity of my scholarship,” she said in a statement Dec. 11, when the initial accusations of plagiarism were circulated by conservative activists online and the Harvard Society was considering whether she should remain president. “Throughout my career, I have worked to ensure that my scholarship is held to the highest academic standards,” said Dr. Gay.
Documents from the anonymous accuser linked to by The Free Beacon on its website show 39 examples in the first complaint, rising to a total of 47 in the second complaint. Separately, Harvard’s investigations have found instances of insufficient citation in her dissertation and in at least two of her articles.
He has not been accused of stealing big ideas, but of copying language in the works of other scholars, with minor changes to replace words or phrases or arrange them differently. Often the language in question is technical boilerplate.
The new complaint against Dr. Gay is preceded by a five-page chronology, written in a tone that ranges from dark to sarcastic — under the cheery greeting, “Happy New Year!” The chronology notes that the unnamed accuser filed the first batch of complaints with Harvard on Dec. 19.
In one paragraph, the accuser, who appears to be familiar with Harvard’s policies on plagiarism, explains why he did not want to be identified by name: “I was afraid that Gay and Harvard would violate their policies, he would behave more like a cartel with a hedge fund from a university and try to claim ‘massive’ damages from me and who knows what else.’
The New York Post reported that it approached Harvard with allegations of plagiarism against Dr. Gay in October and said that Harvard responded through a defamation lawyer.
The accuser goes on to wonder why Harvard was so keen to expose him: “Did Gay want to thank me personally for helping her improve her work, even if I drove her more than she wanted to be driven?”
The sentence is an allusion to a phrase in the acknowledgments of Dr. Gay in 1997, where she says her family “led me more than I sometimes wanted to be led.”
It’s one of the phrases he’s accused of copying, from the acknowledgments of a 1996 book, “Facing Up to the American Dream: Race, Class, and the Soul of the Nation,” by Harvard political scientist Jennifer L. Hochschild, which he was thanking another academic.
