Days after drawing national attention — including robust criticism and calls to resign — for her comments during a congressional hearing last week on antisemitism, Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard University, was hit by a spate of plagiarism charges. But several scholars Gay is accused of plagiarizing disputed the allegations, saying that, in their cases, the accusations were either false or not a severe infraction.
According to an analysis by The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative news outlet, Gay lifted language and improperly cited ideas from other scholars in four papers, including her doctoral dissertation. Critics quoted by the Free Beacon say some of those cases constitute severe academic misconduct; Christopher F. Rufo, the right-wing activist who first publicized the charges, has said they are grounds for her removal.
But that won’t happen, one of Harvard’s governing boards said in a statement on Tuesday. An analysis commissioned by that group, the Harvard Corporation, “found no violation of Harvard’s standards for research misconduct,” though Gay is “proactively requesting four corrections in two articles to insert citations and quotation marks that were omitted from the original publications,” the statement said. The board learned of questions about Gay’s work in late October, whereupon Gay requested an independent review; the board’s members reviewed results of that analysis on Saturday. In the aftermath of the hearing and plagiarism allegations, they said, they “unanimously stand in support” of Gay.
Rufo, who has in recent years made a career of strafing mainstream higher ed, on Sunday posted to X about “bombshell” plagiarism findings in Gay’s 1997 dissertation, and concurrently published an analysis with Christopher Brunet, a journalist and contributing editor at The American Conservative, of “at least three problematic patterns of usage and citation.” On Monday the Free Beacon published a broader analysis of many more passages it concluded had been plagiarized, in the dissertation and in three other papers Gay wrote between 1993 and 2017. The 1993 piece, an essay in a current-events magazine which was then published by Brock Publishing International, in Canada, appeared the year after Gay finished her undergraduate degree. The magazine is now published by Ohio State, and a link to the essay, hosted on the university’s website, appeared to have been taken down by midday on Tuesday.
The other two writings in question are peer-reviewed articles by Gay, by that time a tenured professor at Harvard, and were published in Urban Affairs Review. (One of the journal’s editors in chief said in an email to The Chronicle that he and his colleagues don’t comment on work that predates their time in the role. Michael A. Pagano, who was an editor in chief of Urban Affairs Review in 2012, wrote to The Chronicle that the journal’s “rigorous” double-blind review process is “well established for academic journals”; scholars who led the journal when Gay’s 2017 article was published did not immediately respond to requests for comment.)
Not ‘a Scintilla’ of Evidence
Scholars who spoke with The Chronicle and to other outlets differed on how grievous they viewed Gay’s alleged infractions to be and how they thought Harvard should respond to them.
Carol M. Swain, a prominent conservative political scientist, is one scholar whom Gay allegedly plagiarized in her dissertation by, according to Rufo and Brunet, using language very similar or identical to what appeared in a book by Swain in two instances without following proper citation practices. In an interview with Rufo, Swain criticized Gay’s research more broadly and said of the allegations: “There seems to be a pattern because it’s not just two cases from my work … At best, it was sloppiness, but it would be considered plagiarism if you lift sections of other people’s work and you pass it off as your own.”
But other scholars whom Gay is accused of having cribbed from did not see much of a problem.
Gary King, a political scientist at Harvard who was Gay’s dissertation adviser, was adamant that Gay had not plagiarized him, calling the allegation “absurd” in a phone call with The Chronicle. According to Rufo and Brunet, though Gay “cites King’s book,” she “does not explicitly acknowledge” that an appendix in her dissertation “is entirely grounded in King’s concepts, instead passing it off as her own original work. Throughout the appendix, Gay takes entire phrases and sentences directly from King’s book, without any citations or quotation marks.”
It would be “perfectly clear,” King said, to readers that Gay was using a method that King proposed in his book, A Solution to the Ecological Inference Problem, and that has now become widespread. In no way was Gay trying to pass off that method as her own, King said. He pointed out that, as her dissertation adviser, he read every draft and would therefore be the last person a student planning to plagiarize would steal from.
Alex Schwartz, a professor of urban policy at the New School, felt similarly. According to the Free Beacon, Gay copied part of a sentence from his book Housing Policy in the United States in her 2017 paper. She cited him in the same paragraph, the outlet reported, but not in that sentence. Reached by phone, Schwartz said that, in his case, there’s not “a scintilla” of evidence of plagiarism.
In that same paper, according to the Free Beacon, Gay “borrowed language” from a 2011 paper by the scholars Matthew Freedman and Emily G. Owens without citation, though Gay “thanks them for letting her use their data.” Owens, a professor of criminology and economics at the University of California at Irvine, told The Chronicle in an email that she did not think replicating “such short phrases would constitute someone taking credit for another’s writing or ideas.”
What would give Owens “pause,” she said, is when whole paragraphs or multi-sentence footnotes were “presented as an author’s independent conclusion or analysis.” But “this does not strike me as the situation with my paper” with Freedman. (Freedman, a professor of economics at Irvine, said in an email that he agreed with his co-author.)
In her dissertation, Gay did allegedly lift two paragraphs with little modification from a 1996 conference paper by Bradley Palmquist, then a Harvard scholar, and D. Stephen Voss, then a graduate student, and she did not cite the scholars anywhere in the text, according to the Free Beacon. But Voss, now an associate professor of political science at the University of Kentucky, told The Chronicle that while what Gay did is “technically plagiarism,” it’s “pretty far toward the minor side,” in part because the borrowing was, in his view, limited in scope, and Gay was not trying to pass off any significant ideas of his as her own.
Voss said he actually bought a printout of Gay’s dissertation a long time ago, and read it (or at least skimmed it), but “not once … did I stop and say, ‘Hey, wait a minute. Those are my words!’ This is such innocent borrowing of such inessential material that I never would have known it was my paragraph if somebody hadn’t put mine next to it.”
‘Very Clear and Egregious’
But to Jeremy Horpedahl, an associate professor of economics at the University of Central Arkansas, some of the examples are “very clear and egregious” instances of plagiarism, including the borrowing from Palmquist and Voss. Sure, Gay was not wrongfully taking credit for a new theory or some other innovation, Horpedahl said, but acknowledging the work of those who came before you and tracing the history of an argument are fundamental to academic research.
“There should be some punishment of some sort, and the fact that a lot of people who are involved in this are seeming to say, ‘Not a big deal’ — to me, that raises red flags,” Horpedahl said. “Harvard is one of our most prestigious research universities in the country, and she is both the president of it and was a graduate student there. And if no one there thinks this is a big deal, to me, that signals a huge problem in academia.”
When Phillip W. Magness, an economic historian at the American Institute for Economic Research, assessed the examples, including ones not discussed in this article, he saw “a pattern that seems to be going on for large swaths of her career.” Harvard, like other Ivy League institutions, is strict about what it considers acceptable use and citation practices, and it appears Gay has run afoul of their standards, Magness said. “Common sense would dictate that they should hold faculty, and especially their university leadership, to at least the minimum standard that they apply to their own students.”
Two leaders of the National Association of Scholars called on the Harvard Corporation to remove Gay, citing not only her “shoddy professional work” and the plagiarism claims, but also her “racialist policies” and “moral obtuseness that marries intolerance for all dissent from the diversity, equity, and inclusion regime.”
Though the charges against Gay, and the context in which they’re occurring, have drawn outsize attention, they are not the first academic-plagiarism cases to have risen to national prominence in recent years. In 2021, Lt. Gen. Robert L. Caslen Jr. resigned as president of the University of South Carolina within days of having plagiarized part of a commencement speech. Last year Kevin Kruse, a Princeton historian who gained a vast social-media presence by sparring with politicians and pundits, faced an online firestorm of his own after being accused of plagiarizing two other scholars in his dissertation. Princeton and Cornell, where Kruse received his doctorate, both cleared him of wrongdoing after separate investigations. (Magness brought the Kruse allegations to light in an article for Reason and on his blog.)
Several scholars questioned the timing of the claims against Gay, just as she faced intense scrutiny for her remarks during the congressional hearing. Alejandra Caraballo, a clinical instructor at the Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic, wrote on X that she saw the allegations as part of “an orchestrated campaign fueled by racism to destroy the reputation of Harvard’s first Black president.”
Rufo, for his part, said the timing was anything but coincidental. On Sunday, as the Harvard Corporation was meeting to consider its support of Gay in light of the hearing, he posted on X that he and Brunet “sat on the Claudine Gay plagiarism materials for the past week, waiting for the precise moment of maximum impact.”
