On Tuesday, the Harvard Crimson, Harvard University’s student newspaper, published an article asserting that the plagiarism allegations against Claudine Gay raise questions about her selection as Harvard’s president.

The Harvard Crimson said that the Harvard Corporation’s “concerns” over Gay’s issues with plagiarism “call into question the presidential search committee’s vetting process for the search that ended in Gay’s selection less than one year ago.” The Harvard Corporation serves as Harvard’s highest governing body.

Gay was already facing intense criticism for her response to on-campus anti-Semitism and the Israel–Hamas war when an article published Sunday by Manhattan Institute fellow Christopher F. Rufo and journalist Christopher Brunet accused her of committing plagiarism in her Harvard Ph.D. dissertation. That accusation was followed by an article published Monday in the Washington Free Beacon that revealed a more extensive pattern of plagiarism by Gay spanning more than two decades.

“If [Gay’s plagiarism] were a stand-alone instance, it would be reprehensible but perhaps excused as the blunder of someone working hastily,” Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, told the Washington Free Beacon. “But that excuse vanishes as the examples multiply.”

On Tuesday, the Harvard Corporation said that an analysis of Gay’s work did not find that she had committed “research misconduct.” It claimed that the analysis instead found she had engaged in “inadequate citation.” According to the board, Gay “is proactively requesting four corrections in two articles to insert citations and quotation marks that were omitted from the original publications.” Alongside its acknowledgment of Gay’s pattern of using others’ words without proper attribution, the board affirmed its support for Gay: “In this tumultuous and difficult time, we unanimously stand in support of President Gay.”

Harvard’s liberal student newspaper — which just last year endorsed the “boycott, divestment, and sanctions” movement against Israel — characterized the plagiarism scandal as a significant development in the ongoing saga of dissatisfaction with Gay. “The concerns raised by Harvard’s highest governing body about the plagiarism allegations against Gay mark a head-spinning twist in the controversy surrounding Gay’s tumultuous first semester as president,” the Harvard Crimson wrote.

In a separate story published Tuesday, the Harvard Crimson departed from the university’s analysis and reported that some of Gay’s work under scrutiny “appear[s] to violate Harvard’s current policies around plagiarism and academic integrity.”

“The Crimson independently reviewed the published allegations,” students Rahem D. Hamid, Nia L. Orakwue, and Elias J. Schisgall wrote. “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 Harvard Crimson’s response to the plagiarism allegations against Gay suggests that Harvard’s students are not as willing as Harvard’s governing board to simply cast aside Gay’s failure to adhere to academic standards. That makes sense given that Harvard’s board possesses an additional motive to defend Gay: She publicly represents the “diversity, equity, and inclusion” project, the cause on which the board has staked Harvard’s reputation. (READ MORE: Backlash Against Harvard’s Claudine Gay Is Indictment of ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion’)

In recent days, it has been alleged that Gay was elevated to the role of Harvard president at least in part because she met the “criteria” of Harvard’s DEI office. That allegation was first leveled by activist alumnus Bill Ackman, who wrote on X, “I learned from someone with first person knowledge of the @Harvard president search that the committee would not consider a candidate who did not meet the DEI office’s criteria.” Gay has long been one of the foremost drivers of the ideological effort to enact the “diversity, equity, and inclusion” project at Harvard, as she spearheaded Harvard’s efforts to increase the racial diversity of its faculty while she was dean of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. In that role, Gay also announced a study that would “identify concrete steps we can take to increase racial diversity of senior staff.”

Those circumstances make the plagiarism allegations part of a broader controversy over Harvard’s subservience of merit to its desire to exalt certain racial groups — African Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans — over others — whites, Jews, and Asians. In the 2023 case Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the Supreme Court found that Harvard illegally discriminated against Asian students on the basis of race. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority opinion that “black applicants in the top four academic deciles are between four and ten times more likely to be admitted to Harvard than Asian applicants in those deciles.” Following the Supreme Court’s decision, Harvard suggested that it will continue to discriminate in favor of its preferred races through less detectable means.

The Harvard Crimson suggested that the plagiarism allegations may pose a greater challenge for Gay than the controversy surrounding her reaction to the Israel–Hamas War. “While some speculated the Corporation might oust Gay over her response to the Israel-Hamas war,” the student newspaper said Tuesday, “the statement on Tuesday suggests the academic dishonesty allegations might prove more perilous to the future of Gay’s presidency.”

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