Maybe so, says Chris Rufo

Harvard president Claudine Gay has problems. Touted as the first black woman to run the nation's most prestigious university, she assumed leadership with high expectations, but her tenure, which began this summer, has been mired in scandal. As dean and then president, Gay has been accused of bullying colleagues, suppressing free speech, overseeing a racist admissions program, and, following the Hamas terror campaign against Israel, failing to stand up to rampant anti-Semitism on campus.

We have obtained exclusive documentation demonstrating that President Gay may face yet another problem: plagiarism of sections of her Ph.D. dissertation, which would violate Harvard's own stated policies on academic integrity. (We reached out to President Gay for comment, but received no response.)

Gay published her dissertation, "Taking Charge: Black Electoral Success and the Redefinition of American Policies," in 1997, as part of her doctorate in political science from Harvard. The paper deals with white-black political representation and racial attitudes. As evaluated under the university's plagiarism policy, the paper contains at least three problematic patterns of usage and citation.

First, Gay lifts an entire paragraph nearly verbatim from Lawrence Bobo and Franklin Gilliam's paper, "Race, Sociopolitical Participation, and Black Empowerment," while passing it off as her own paraphrase and language. Here is the original, from Bobo and Gilliam:

Using 1987 national sample survey data . . . the results show that blacks in high-black-empowerment areas--as indicated by control of the mayor's office--are more active than either blacks living in low-empowerment areas or their white counterparts of comparable socioeconomic status. Furthermore, the results show that empowerment influences black participation by contributing to a more trusting and efficacious orientation to politics and by greatly increasing black attentiveness to political affairs.

And here is the language from Gay's work:

Using 1987 survey data, Bobo and Gilliam found that African-Americans in "high black-empowerment" areas--as indicated by control of the mayor's office--are more active than either African-Americans in low empowerment areas or their white counterparts of comparable socioeconomic status. Empowerment, they conclude, influences black participation by contributing to a more trusting and efficacious orientation towards politics and by greatly increasing black attentiveness to political affairs.

I feel like I'm reading it in the original Jonah Goldbergese.

Though Gay does provide a reference to the original authors, she uses their verbatim language, with a few trivial synonym substitutions, without providing quotation marks. This constitutes a clear violation of Harvard's policy, which 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 repeats this violation throughout the document, again using work from Bobo and Gilliam, as well as passages from Richard Shingles, Susan Howell, and Deborah Fagan, which she reproduces nearly verbatim, without quotation marks.

Second, Gay appears to lift material from scholar Carol Swain in at least two instances. In one passage, summarizing the distinction between "descriptive representation" and "substantive representation," she copies the phrasing and language nearly verbatim from Swain's book Black Faces, Black Interests, without providing a citation of any kind.

This is going to be a big ol' problem for Gay -- because Carol Swain herself is blowing the whistle and alleging plagiarism. Or, at least, of taking her words without citing her.

If all of this sounds like Harvard went out and hired a nigh-random black woman because their DEI officials demanded they do so, that's because that's exactly what happened.

Bill Ackman, who called for closing donor wallets to the Ivies, writes:

Bill Ackman
@BillAckman

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.

The same was likely true for other elite universities doing searches at the same time, creating an even more limited universe of DEI-eligible presidential candidates.

Shrinking the pool of candidates based on required race, gender, and/or sexual orientation criteria is not the right approach to identifying the best leaders for our most prestigious universities.

And it is also not good for those awarded the office of president who find themselves in a role that they would likely not have obtained were it not for a fat finger on the scale.

I have been called brave for my tweets over the last few weeks. The same could be said for those called out Joseph McCarthy during the Red Scare.

I don't think it will be long before we look back on the last few years of free speech suppression and the repeated career-ending accusations of racist for those who questioned the DEI movement.

We are all shortly going to realize that the DEI era is the McCarthy era Part II.

Thanks to Instapundit for all of this post.