What’s New
After days of escalating scrutiny over alleged plagiarism by Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, the university on Wednesday evening shed new light on how it had investigated those claims and concluded that, while Gay had not committed research misconduct, some of the examples did not follow the institution’s guide to using sources.
Gay will “update” her dissertation, which she completed at Harvard, to correct “instances of inadequate citation,” according to a Harvard statement provided to The Chronicle by a spokesman. That’s in addition to corrections Gay had already requested on two journal articles — one published in 2001 and the other in 2017.
Harvard’s disclosure is unlikely to quiet the drumbeat of criticism over Gay’s research and the university’s handling of the allegations. The U.S. House’s Committee on Education and the Workforce told the institution in a Wednesday letter that it had started reviewing how Harvard looked into the matter. The committee also requested a trove of documents.
The Details
Gay, a professor of government and of African and African American studies at Harvard, has been accused of lifting parts of sentences, and in some cases longer chunks of text, from other works without using quotation marks and properly citing the original authors. The allegations — first detailed by Christopher F. Rufo, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, and Christopher Brunet, a contributing editor at The American Conservative, and The Washington Free Beacon — span decades of Gay’s career.
While those accusations were aired in December, a news outlet approached Harvard about them two months ago.
On October 24 the New York Post asked the Ivy League university about allegations of plagiarism in Gay’s work. Specifically, the Post was interested in two journal articles, along with a 1993 article in a current-events journal that she wrote as a graduate student, the Post previously reported. Three days later, according to the Post, a lawyer who specializes in defamation, acting on behalf of Harvard and Gay, sent the news outlet a letter that included “comments from academics whose work Gay was alleged to have improperly cited.”
The information that Harvard provided to The Chronicle does not delve into the university’s interactions with the Post, but it does detail what happened next. On October 29, Gay asked the Harvard Corporation, one of two university governing boards, to do an “independent review” of the articles that the Post had brought forward, according to Harvard. Three political scientists with no ties to the university were tapped to conduct the review.
The political scientists, whom Harvard did not name, examined those works in light of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ interim policy and procedures for responding to allegations of research misconduct. According to the policy, for there to be a finding of misconduct, the scholar must have acted “intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly.”
In addition to the political scientists’ review, a four-person subcommittee of the corporation looked at “all of President Gay’s other published works from 1993 to 2019,” though both the political scientists and the subcommittee ended up excluding the 1993 work from their scope, due to the article’s age and “because articles included in that journal [Origins] generally do not include citations or quotations,” according to Harvard’s statement.
Ultimately, neither the panel nor the subcommittee found that Gay’s work had showed evidence of “intentional deception or recklessness,” meaning she had not committed research misconduct under Harvard’s policy, the statement said. However, they did find examples in Gay’s work that “failed to adhere” to Harvard’s guide to using sources — specifically, instances in which “quotation marks were missing where they should have been, but authors were cited in the same paragraph or a neighboring paragraph,” and instances in which the “authors’ names also needed to be added.”
Those insufficient citations, while “regrettable,” did not amount to research misconduct, the corporation concluded, according to Harvard. On December 14, Gay asked for corrections to be made to her 2017 article “A Room for One’s Own? The Partisan Allocation of Affordable Housing,” published in Urban Affairs Review, and to her 2001 article “The Effect of Black Congressional Representation on Political Participation,” published in the American Political Science Review.
Neither of the two review groups initially looked at Gay’s dissertation because, according to Harvard’s statement, the allegations at the time were about some of Gay’s published works. The corporation subcommittee has since examined the dissertation and found “one replica of a missing citation or quotation mark that had already been identified in a published paper and that has since been corrected” and two examples of “duplicative language without appropriate attribution.”
Gay will “update” her dissertation to correct those instances, Harvard said.
On Tuesday the Free Beacon reported that a professor at another institution, whom it did not name, had filed a complaint with Harvard’s research-integrity officer that included more than 40 allegations of plagiarism in seven of Gay’s works.
On Wednesday, Harvard told The Chronicle that the complaint includes “four new allegations,” though the university did not specify which were new. The corporation subcommittee found those new allegations to be “without merit” and “has determined that no further action is required beyond the updates that have been and are being requested by President Gay.”
The Backdrop
It’s been a tough few months for Gay, who in July became Harvard’s first Black president. Her initial response to Hamas’s deadly attack on Israel, on October 7, was condemned by some, including Lawrence H. Summers, a former Harvard president, as lackluster. She drew the most criticism for her appearance in early December alongside two other elite-university presidents before the House education committee, where they were asked pointed questions about antisemitism and other campus issues for hours. The plagiarism allegations were first reported just days after that hearing.
Gay’s supporters have argued that the opprobrium directed at her is misguided or ginned up by bad-faith actors. So far, the Harvard Corporation has stood by her. In a statement issued earlier this month, the governing group called Gay “the right leader to help our community heal and to address the very serious societal issues we are facing.”
The Stakes
Harvard was already under a congressional microscope, and Wednesday’s announcement by the House committee amplified the intensity.
Following the testimony by Gay and the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the committee announced an investigation into the “learning environments” at the three institutions and possibly others.
On Wednesday, Rep. Virginia Foxx of North Carolina, the Republican chair of the committee, said in a letter to Penny Pritzker, senior fellow of the Harvard Corporation, that it would review Harvard’s “handling of credible allegations” of plagiarism made against Gay. Foxx wrote that it is “Harvard’s responsibility to investigate each claim with the seriousness with which it investigates allegations against students.”
The letter asks the university to provide documents related to its investigation of the allegations of plagiarism, along with an account of disciplinary actions Harvard has taken against faculty members and students for academic misconduct since 2019.
Carol M. Swain, a political scientist who has said that Gay plagiarized her work and has called for Gay to be fired, posted on X that Congress “has no business meddling in Harvard University’s plagiarism conundrum.”
Other scholars whom Gay is accused of having copied previously told The Chronicle that they do not think the instances amount to plagiarism or that the offenses are relatively minor. Some of those scholars have pointed to examples in which Gay was describing something technical or specific to the field.
Yet other academics say the examples are at odds with Harvard’s own guidance, which says that lifting language without adequate citation, even by accident, counts as plagiarism. The Harvard Crimson, the university’s student newspaper, concluded that some of the allegations “appear to violate Harvard’s current policies around plagiarism and academic integrity.” The saga has sparked a broader debate about whether colleges and universities are holding academics and undergraduates to the same strict standards.
