The controversies surrounding Harvard President Claudine Gay have continued to mount since her disastrous congressional testimony earlier this month, in which she argued context was necessary to determine whether calls for genocide against Jewish people would violate the school’s harassment and bullying policies. Researchers Christopher Rufo and Christopher Brunet combed through her dissertation and found “repeated instances of plagiarism.” As Spencer wrote earlier this week, that turned out to be just the tip of the iceberg, as Harvard is now in possession of a complaint detailing more than 40 allegations of plagiarism from seven of her publications, The Washington Free Beacon reported.
Now, after corrections were made last week to two of her articles, The Harvard Crimson reports that Gay is requesting three corrections to her dissertation.
The new corrections were announced […] in a summary of a review undertaken by the Harvard Corporation — the University’s highest governing body — into Gay’s academic work after they first became aware of the plagiarism allegations.
The summary paints the clearest picture to date of the Corporation’s decision-making behind requesting the corrections but stops short of imposing harsher sanctions on Gay.
In the summary, the University clarified that a review by both an independent panel of three experts and a subcommittee of the Harvard Corporation found evidence that Gay did not cite properly in some instances, but her actions fell short of more serious wrongdoing.
“The members of the subcommittee and the Corporation concluded that Gay’s inadequate citations, while regrettable, did not constitute research misconduct,” the summary stated. (The Harvard Crimson)
In an update posted later Wednesday evening, the Crimson detailed that Harvard came to learn of the plagiarism allegations from a New York Post inquiry on Oct. 24. The Corporation created a subcommittee to “consider the merit of the anonymous allegations” and appointed an independent panel to review the allegations
While Gay's scholarly work was analyzed, her dissertation was not part of the allegations the Post inquired about. Once those reports came out, however, that too was subject to review.
Former professor and award-winning political scientist Carol Swain, who has argued Gay lifted some of her groundbreaking research, explained in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed why Harvard has supporter her, despite the mounting allegations.
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“Harvard can’t condemn Ms. Gay because she is the product of an elite system that holds minorities of high pedigree to a lower standard,” Swain wrote. “This harms academia as a whole, and it demeans Americans, of all races, who had to work for everything they earned.”
