One of the first people to highlight widespread plagiarism by now-ousted Harvard president Claudine Gay has bluntly accused her of “lying” by claiming she “promptly requested corrections” to her published work.
Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute think tank, joined those condemning Gay’s op-ed Wednesday in the New York Times in which she complained of being the victim of a racist “well-laid trap.”
“Claudine Gay is lying in the New York Times,” Rufo wrote on X Wednesday in a blunt response refusing to accept Gay’s take on her scandal.
“She did not ‘promptly [request] corrections,’” he said, noting how Gay and Harvard had for months thwarted The Post’s initial investigation into her plagiarism in October, which was then dismissed as being “demonstrably false.”
“She denied the allegations, intimidated the New York Post into silence, and then corrected them only under duress,” he wrote.
“There are still dozens of uncorrected instances of plagiarism,” he claimed of the now dozens of allegations over her work.
Gay, 53, claimed in her op-ed that she was a victim, rather than someone her Ivy League school admitted failed to live up to its scholarly standards and one who admits botching her handling of antisemitic threats on campus.
New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik has also blasted Gay’s op-ed, saying “This was not a ‘well-laid trap’ (to properly cite the disgraced @Harvard former president Claudine Gay).”
“Contrary to their attempts to distract and assign responsibility elsewhere, everyone knows this was not a ‘well-laid trap’ as one disgraced former university president desperately claimed,” Stefanik wrote on X.
“It wasn’t a trap. It was the university president’s cataclysmic failure on the global stage to answer a straightforward moral question.
“Good riddance.”
Harvard declined to comment Thursday on Rufo’s tweet.
However, the Ivy League school noted that the Harvard Crimson had reported that two journals that published Gay’s work have since received requests for corrections.
Urban Affairs Review Associate Managing Editor Emily Holloway told the school newspaper it “received the corrections,” and editors at the American Political Science Review confirmed Gay reached out to correct a 2001 paper, the Crimson reports.
The editors said the Review “will publish an appropriate corrigendum.”
Demands for Gay’s resignation began in the fall, when she would not condemn more than 30 Harvard student groups that published a letter holding Israel “entirely responsible” for Hamas’ terror attack.
The calls then ramped up after she refused to say that anyone calling for the genocide of Jews at Harvard would be punished when Stefanik asked her whether calls for the genocide of Jews would violate the university’s code of conduct on bullying or harassment.
“It depends on the context,” the academic replied.
In the aftermath, journalists Rufo and Chris Brunet went public with dozens of instances in which Gay seemed to have nearly replicated passages from others’ work in her 1997 thesis — which has since received three corrections for “instances of inadequate citation.”
Just hours before she announced her resignation on Tuesday, the Harvard professor was again hit with six new plagiarism charges — bringing the total number of allegations against her to well over two dozen.
But in her essay on Wednesday, Gay said she simply “neglected to clearly articulate that calls for the genocide of Jewish people are abhorrent and unacceptable, and that I would use every tool at my disposal to protect students from that kind of hate” during her congressional testimony last month.
“Never did I imagine needing to defend decades-old and broadly respected research, but the past several weeks have laid waste to truth. Those who had relentlessly campaigned to oust me since the fall often trafficked in lies and ad hominem insults, not reasoned argument,” Gay wrote.
“They recycled tired racial stereotypes about Black talent and temperament. They pushed a false narrative of indifference and incompetence.
“It is not lost on me that I make an ideal canvas for projecting every anxiety about the generational and demographic changes unfolding on American campuses: a Black woman selected to lead a storied institution,” she continued.
The former Harvard leader also issued a warning about “self-serving agendas.”
“At tense moments, every one of us must be more skeptical than ever of the loudest and most extreme voices in our culture, however well organized or well connected they might be. Too often they are pursuing self-serving agendas that should be met with more questions and less credulity,” she wrote.
“College campuses in our country must remain places where students can learn, share and grow together, not spaces where proxy battles and political grandstanding take root. Universities must remain independent venues where courage and reason unite to advance truth, no matter what forces set against them.”
Gay’s resignation marked the shortest tenure for a Harvard president, serving just six months and one day.
She was the first black leader at the nation’s most prestigious university.