Embattled Harvard President Claudine Gay is fending off accusations she plagiarized numerous portions of her 1997 Ph.D. thesis in direct violation of Harvard’s academic integrity policies.
Documents obtained by journalists Christopher Rufo and Chris Brunet posted on X juxtapose political scientist Gay’s paper with earlier works of several authors and academic scholars, which in some passages are replicated nearly word-for-word.
In one example, taken from page 12 of Gay’s dissertation, Rufo points out the now-Harvard president seemingly “lifts an entire paragraph” from a 1990 paper by Lawrence Bobo and Franklin Gilliam.
Appearing in Bobo and Gilliam’s original paper, published seven years before Gay wrote her thesis, is the phrase “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.”
Then in Gay’s paper she writes “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.”
In a statement to the Boston Globe Monday, Gay vehemently defended her academic rigor, saying “I stand by the integrity of my scholarship. Throughout my career, I have worked to ensure my scholarship adheres to the highest academic standards.”
Though Gay does cite Bobo and Gilliam by name in the lead-in to her own strikingly similar passage, Rufo points out her near-verbatim replication of their wording violates Harvard’s policies on paraphrasing.
“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,” the Harvard policy reads in part.
“If your own language is too close to the original, then you are plagiarizing, even if you do provide a citation.”
Rufo provided several other examples where Gay’s words bear near-identical resemblance to works by scholars including Richard Shingles, Susan Howell, Deborah Fagan and Carol Swain.
In a passage from a 1981 Richard Shingles paper, Rufo highlights that Gay reproduced the line “black consciousness contributes to political mistrust and a sense of internal policy efficacy which in turn encourages policy-related participation.”
Gay’s version of the line, which appears without quotation marks, reads: “Race consciousness, Shingles (1981) had argued, contributed to political mistrust and a sense of internal policy efficacy which in turn encouraged policy-related participation.”
Other side-by-side comparisons indicate Gay based Appendix B of her thesis almost entirely on Gary King’s book “A Solution to the Ecological Inference Problem” without acknowledging the source material, despite the fact that King was Gay’s dissertation advisor, Rufo points out.
Rufo’s X thread was also shared by billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, which garnered more than 2.3 million views in less than 24 hours.
In his post, Ackman said he had asked a “senior member” of Harvard’s faculty to look over the plagiarism allegations against Gay. He claims the school staffer “found them to be credible.”
In addition, the Washington Free Beacon further claimed four papers written by Gay and published between 1993 and 2017 did not have proper attribution.
The outlet said scholars it had consulted agreed Gay had “violated a core principle of academic integrity” and said they had found 10 instances where Gay had lifted sentences or paragraphs and only changed a word or two.
The bombshell allegations come amid increasing calls for Gay’s resignation following a disastrous congressional hearing last week in which she stopped short of denouncing Harvard students calling for “global intifada” on freedom of speech grounds.
“We embrace a commitment to free expression – even views that are objectionable, offensive [and] hateful,” she said. “It’s when that speech crosses into conduct that violates our policies against bullying and harassment. That speech did not cross that barrier.”
In the ensuing firestorm, billboard trucks calling for Gay’s ouster encircled the Ivy League school’s campus on Sunday festooned with the words “FIRE GAY” and bearing images of her appearance before Congress.
Another truck parked at the school’s main gate blaring Gay’s exchange with New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, in which the Harvard president said calls for genocide only qualify as harassment or bullying “depending on the context.”
The outpouring of criticism for Gay has grown steadily louder following the resignation of fellow Ivy League university president Liz Magill from the University of Pennyslvania. She stepped down Dec. 9 following her appearance before Congress aside Gay and Massachusetts Institute of Technology president Sally Kornbluth.
The campuses of many of America’s top universities — including Harvard — have become hotbeds of antisemitic rhetoric in the wake of Israel’s war against Hamas, which began after Oct. 7 when the terror group launched a surprise terror attack on the country, killing 1,200 civilians and kidnapping over 240.