Harvard University president Claudine Gay faced increased calls to resign Monday, Dec. 11, as outrage grew over her perceived failure to address growing anti-Semitism on the Ivy League campus, while the uproar has led to new allegations that she plagiarized major sections of her Ph.D. dissertation while pursuing her doctorate from the college 26 years ago.
The paper “Taking Charge: Black Electoral Success and the Redefinition of American Politics” was penned by Gay in 1997 as part of Harvard’s requirement for her Ph.D. in political science, which she received in 1998.
The new scrutiny surrounding Gay comes as she and other college presidents faced a firestorm of criticism this past week as lawmakers and conservative advocates accused the schools of not enforcing codes of conduct as some students had called for the killing of Jews amid the Israel-Hamas war.
University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill has resigned since last week’s congressional hearings to address whether Ivy League policy leaders were being too soft on inflammatory rhetoric amid an explosive campus atmosphere that challenged the limits of free speech.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology president Sally Kornbluth and American University professor Pamela Nadell were also grilled by lawmakers last week alongside Gay and Magill, but it was Gay who appeared to be the primary target of Republicans who sought to slam her leadership after less than six months on the job.
After the hearing, each of the educators was heavily criticized for not answering directly when Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York asked if they condemned speech that called for the destruction of Israel and the genocide of Jews. Instead, the academic leaders cited scripted policies on harassment and bullying before they eventually denounced anti-Semitism, leading to even louder calls for their resignations.
Meanwhile, 511 faculty members at Harvard have signed a letter of support for Gay, saying she should remain in her leadership post “to defend the independence of the university and to resist political pressures that are at odds with Harvard’s commitment to academic freedom, including calls for the removal of President Claudine Gay.”
More than 770 Black Harvard alumni and allies also pledged support for Gay in another letter that also condemned anti-Semitism.
This comes as billboard trucks reportedly drove around the campus with signs that read “Fire Gay.”
The new controversy surrounding Gay’s dissertation was likely to add more fuel to the calls for her to step down.
The thesis, which weighed in on the black-and-white divide in American politics as well as racial attitudes toward candidates and lawmakers, was found to contain at least three issues related to the usage patterns and citation of sources as assessed under Harvard’s plagiarism policy, according to the investigation by the New York-based public policy magazine and website City Journal.
The conservative media outlet, which is published by the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, claims Gay violated Harvard policies on academic integrity after she copied whole passages from separate but similar academic papers without proper attribution.
One of the primary works that Gay allegedly lifted was titled “Race, Sociopolitical Participation, and Black Empowerment,” written by Lawrence Bobo and Franklin Gilliam.
To substantiate the claims, the publication provided writing samples from the competing works side-by-side, indicating their similarities in phrasing and language. The report does acknowledge that Gay did cite the authors of the original work but that she failed to properly paraphrase the passage as Harvard academic policies require.
The policy states: “When you paraphrase, your task is to distill the source’s ideas in your own words. It’s not enough to change a few words here and there and leave the rest; instead, you must completely restate the ideas in the passage in your own words. If your own language is too close to the original, then you are plagiarizing, even if you do provide a citation.”
Gay allegedly repeated this same violation throughout her thesis while failing to cite more passages from Bobo and Gilliam and other works, including those written by academic scholars Richard Shingles, Susan Howell and Deborah Fagan, and Carol Swain, whose prose she allegedly tried to pass off as her own.
The report accuses Gay of twice plagiarizing Swain as she summarized the distinction between “descriptive representation” and “substantive representation,” which Gay allegedly copied verbatim from Swain’s book “Black Faces, Black Interests” although she never cites Swain as a source in her work.
Again and again, City Journal cites multiple instances in Gay’s work where the lifelong academician apparently copied works without quoting or paraphrasing and attributing phrases to the original authors.
The exclusive report further alleges that the appendix in Gay’s work was directly lifted from Gary King’s book “A Solution to the Ecological Inference Problem,” claiming Gay cited King but never acknowledged that the afterword she penned was entirely based on the author’s concepts.
Throughout the paper, Gay borrows material from King in at least half a dozen paragraphs, the outlet says while calling on Harvard’s Board of Overseers to conduct a full investigation into Gay’s academic past.
