Peter Wood is president of the National Association of Scholars and former Boston University professor of anthropology. At BU he also held a variety of administrative positions, including associate provost and president’s chief of staff. In his December 15 Spectator column “Claudine Gay’s way with words” (behind the Spectator paywall at the moment) Wood draws on his experience in academia to examine the case of the Harvard president:

Gay made a practice of lifting whole paragraphs and changing up a few words or phrases. Where the source she has copied has a mid-paragraph phrase “which is one description of bias,” Gay amends it to “which is one way to think about bias.” In another case, the source paragraph refers to “the torture and assassination of a black worker, Robson Silveira da Luz” which Gay rewrites as the “beating death of black worker, Robson Silveira da Luz.” The importance of these tiny changes is that show that, proof positive, Gay was not just leaving out citations to her sources but actively modifying the content.

What, you may well ask, is the point of making such tiny changes or, as she does elsewhere, rearranging the order of some phrases? The point I assume is to disguise the theft — to make it a little harder for a computer or a reader somewhat familiar with the material to recognize that the words have been twice-born.

Also, I’ve been involved with investigations of numerous cases of plagiarism over my career and I’m familiar with the pattern. Plagiarists often engage in such slight modification of the texts they steal. This must be partly a psychological matter: a way the plagiarist can tell herself that she didn’t “really” plagiarize because she changed things around.

In his accessible December 14 column “Copy that, Claudine,” Wood foresaw more to come: “In my dealings with plagiarists, I have learned that plagiarism is a repetitive practice. Almost every plagiarist keeps plagiarizing, and Gay has plainly done so in at least four well-documented instances. What about her other publications? I predict Harvard’s ad hoc committee on covering up Gay’s transgressions will have a lot more work to do.”

One of the reporters cited by Wood in his Spectator column is the Washington Free Beacon’s Aaron Sibarium. Sibarium reported on Gay’s plagiarism in his December 11 Free Beacon story here. Sibarium returns today to report “”Fresh Allegations of Plagiarism Unearthed in Official Academic Complaint Against Claudine Gay.” To readers of Wood’s Spectator column, this should come as no surprise:

Harvard University on Tuesday received a complaint outlining over 40 allegations of plagiarism against its embattled president, Claudine Gay. The document paints a picture of a pattern of misconduct more extensive than has been previously reported and puts the Harvard Corporation, the university’s governing body—which said it initiated an “independent review” of Gay’s scholarship and issued a statement of support for her leadership—back in the spotlight.

The new allegations, which were submitted to Harvard’s research integrity officer, Stacey Springs, include the examples reported by the Washington Free Beacon and other outlets, as well as dozens of additional cases in which Gay quoted or paraphrased authors without proper attribution, according to a copy of the complaint reviewed by the Free Beacon. They range from missing quotation marks around a few phrases or sentences to entire paragraphs lifted verbatim.

The full list of examples spans seven of Gay’s publications—two more than previously reported—which comprise almost half of her scholarly output. Though the Harvard Corporation said earlier this month that it initiated an independent review of Gay’s work in October and found “no violation of Harvard’s standards for research misconduct,” that probe focused on just three papers.

The Free Beacon has posted the 37-page complaint online here. Sibarium drily observes: “Lurking in the background of the complaint is the question of whether Gay, Harvard’s 30th president, will be held to the same standards as the university’s own students…,” a question also raised by Wood in his Spectator column. Sibarium has much more in his current Free Beacon story linked above.