Harvard University President Dr. Claudine Gay has faced a storm of plagiarism accusations in recent weeks and has requested corrections to her academic papers, as the university’s governing body has cleared her of wrongdoing so far.

The complaints against Gay first emerged in late October, according to the Harvard Corporation, the university’s top governing body, and gained pace more recently after the embattled university head and the presidents of two other top universities came under fire for comments they made earlier this month during a congressional hearing about antisemitism on US campuses amid the Israel-Hamas conflict.

Gay, a professor who has led the prestigious US university since July 2023, was asked whether calls for “genocide” against Jews would violate Harvard’s code of conduct, to which she did not respond with a direct affirmative, instead, staying that it depended on the “context.” MIT President Sally Kornbluth and former University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill answered similarly, provoking a backlash from Republican opponents, along with alumni and donors who say the university leaders are failing to stand up for Jewish students on their campuses amid a sharp uptick in antisemitic incidents in the wake of Hamas’s shock October 7 attacks that killed 1,200 people and saw some 240 taken hostage by terrorists.

Magill resigned shortly after appearing before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, and Gay apologized and kept her position. Kornbluth also remains as head of MIT.

Harvard Corporation said it became aware of the plagiarism complaints against Gay two months ago regarding three articles she had written and her 1997 doctoral dissertation. The governing body said it reviewed the matter, which revealed “instances of inadequate citation,” but found no violation of Harvard’s standards for research misconduct.

Gay has proactively requested four corrections in two articles to insert citations and quotation marks that were omitted from the original publications, according to Harvard Corporation.

This week, Harvard said it would take no disciplinary action against Gay following a complaint detailing more than 40 cases of alleged plagiarism by her, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The new plagiarism complaint contains multiple examples of the alleged lifting by Gay of entire and specific phrases from other works, the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative news site, reported Tuesday. It said the author was an academic from a different university who submitted the document anonymously for fear of harassment in the academic community.

A Harvard board subcommittee downplayed the significance of the complaint, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday, saying has already studied most of its examples in it and cleared Gay of any breach of conduct.

Gay will add missing attributions in three sections of her Ph.D. dissertation, the school said on Wednesday in a statement that was understood to mean that Harvard again had cleared Gay of misconduct.

Most of the examples in the new complaint had already been reviewed, and the four that were new were deemed to be “without merit,” the Harvard subcommittee said.

One example cited in the complaint is from Gay’s paper titled “Between Black and White: The Complexity of Brazilian Race Relations,” which she wrote in 1993 as a graduate student at Harvard. Writing on Brazil’s so-called centers of struggle, hubs for fighting racism, Gay said that they were “to be formed in work areas, villages, prisons, candomble and umbanda temples, samba schools, churches, and favelas.”

According to the complaint, that language was lifted from a 1990 essay by David Conin that ran in the Journal of Black Studies. It uses the exact same phrasing with the addition of one word, afoxés, after “samba schools.” Conin’s work was not cited in Gay’s piece, giving rise to allegations of plagiarism, which is a major ethical issue in academia.

Other examples, highlighted by conservative author and activist Christopher Rufo, include alleged plagiarism by Gay not only in her body of work but even in the acknowledgment section of her 1997 dissertation.

She thanked another researcher for showing her “the importance of getting the data right and following where they lead without fear or favor,” using the same phrase that Jennifer Hochschild, another Harvard scholar, had used to thank a different researcher in the acknowledgments section of Hochschild’s work. Hochschild also thanked the researcher for driving her “harder than I sometimes wanted to be driven.” Gay used that same phrase to thank her family.

A more recent example comes from Gay’s 2017 essay titled “A Room For One’s Own?” where she states: “To measure the direction in which the governing party skews funds, I include the interaction between which party holds the governor’s office and county partisanship.”

A 2006 essay by Stephen Ansolabehere and James M. Snyder, Jr. contains almost that exact phrase, with one minor grammatical modification and the word “we” instead of Gay’s “I.” It also speaks of “the state government” instead of the governor’s office.

Gay is Harvard’s first Black president. Some of her conservative critics have said this is part of the reason that Harvard’s board has stood behind her despite the controversies surrounding her.

“America knows the continuation of Claudine Gay as President is untenable. Harvard is too afraid of the Far Left to stand up for academic and moral integrity,” Elise Stefanik, the Republican congresswoman who had grilled Gay on antisemitism, wrote on X Friday in a post about Gay’s alleged plagiarism.

At the December 5 hearing, Gay testified along with her counterparts at the University of Pennsylvania, Liz Magill, and MIT, Sally Kornbluth. Both gave similar answers to hers, stressing the significance of the context of calls to commit genocide against Jews as a qualifier for calling those calls a breach of the respective universities’ codes of conduct.

Magill resigned on December 10, after saying she “should have been” focused on how calling to exterminate Jews is “evil” and a form of “harassment or intimidation.”

Following an uproar over her testimony, Gay also attempted a clarification in a December 6 statement that said: “Calls for violence or genocide against the Jewish community, or any religious or ethnic group are vile, they have no place at Harvard, and those who threaten our Jewish students will be held to account.”

Kornbluth of MIT, who is Jewish, has not apologized.

A majority of the US House of Representatives on December 15 voted in favor of a resolution calling on Gay and Kornbluth to resign.