How Harvard Tried to Save Its President

On this much, Claudine Gay, now the former president of Harvard University, and Christopher F. Rufo, a conservative activist who crusaded for her ouster, can agree: Her resignation is about more than just her.

The day after Gay stepped down — her brief presidency fatally wounded, in part, by plagiarism claims — she warned in an essay for The New York Times that her toppling is “merely a single skirmish in a broader war to unravel public faith in pillars of American society.”

Rufo also relied on the rhetoric of armed conflict. He told readers of The Wall Street Journal opinion section that now the fight must “evolve” into a “grueling form of trench warfare in which each concept, structure, and institution must be challenged,” in order to reform academe.

Lost amid the talk of combat is how, exactly, Harvard dealt with the allegations that snowballed into a crisis. The New York Post approached the university about Gay’s potential plagiarism in October. One of the institution’s first moves was to tap Clare Locke, a swaggering defamation-law firm, to protect its president. Harvard warned that the paper and the employees involved would be opening themselves up to “legal liability for defamation” should the outlet publish a story about the “demonstrably false” allegations.

Harvard also began a review of Gay’s work that happened behind closed doors and has not been fully detailed to the public. Gay ended up submitting small corrections to two papers and to her dissertation. Her “inadequate citations” were “regrettable” but did not amount to research misconduct, the Harvard Corporation concluded. By the time she resigned, more plagiarism allegations had been reported by The Washington Free Beacon.

Harvard’s unusual process played out under extraordinary circumstances in which the university tried to safeguard its new president who’d already been the subject of scrutiny following her response to Hamas’s attack on Israel. How Harvard handled the plagiarism charges against Gay is now a matter of congressional interest. It also may be instructive to higher ed at large if, as Rufo said, Gay’s resignation is only the initial grenade launched in an incendiary campaign from the right. On X, he promised to contribute $10,000 to so-called “plagiarism hunting” in order to “expose the rot in the Ivy League and restore truth, rather than racialist ideology, as the highest principle in academic life.”

A highly sought-after political scientist, Gay was reportedly “poached” from Stanford University by Harvard, where she’d completed her Ph.D. There, she eventually became the Edgerley Family dean of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences and gained a reputation among her supporters as a steady, assured leader.

Harvard named Gay as its next president, the first Black leader of the Ivy League institution, in December 2022. Around that time, gripes about Gay’s credentials, including allegations of plagiarism, were aired on econjobrumors.com, a site known for its pettiness and occasional bigotry.

In a post dated 11 months ago, an anonymous user claimed that a “report” on Gay’s misdeeds, including plagiarism, would soon be available for download. (It did not emerge, it seems.) On another post bashing one of Gay’s papers, someone commented, “Let’s not forget Gay’s plagiarism. Whole sentences in her literature review lifted off original sources with no quotation marks …This won’t end well for her now that the whole world is watching.”

Someone who was watching reached out to the New York Post. The news outlet received an anonymous dossier detailing possible plagiarism in three of Gay’s works — two papers that she’d published after she became a professor and one that she’d written as a young graduate student. (The person behind the dossier is a professor at another university, according to the Free Beacon, which first reported many of the plagiarism allegations against Gay and has declined to name the scholar.)

The Post asked Harvard about more than two dozen possible instances of plagiarism, in late October. At that time, Gay, not four months on the job, was already in the hot seat. She’d taken flack for not being quick or forceful enough in her condemnation of the Hamas attack on Israel. And the university had been weathering a storm of outrage and bad press over a statement signed by student groups that lay the blame for that attack “entirely” at Israel’s feet.

It’s in that environment that Harvard engaged Clare Locke, which advertises itself on its website, quoting The Daily Beast, as “media assassins.” Three days after its initial outreach, the Post received a 15-page letter from said assassins, on behalf of Gay and Harvard. For the paper to “attempt to destroy” Gay’s good reputation by incorrectly accusing her of plagiarism would be “reckless and irresponsible,” it read.

The university and Gay “stand together in their determination that the proposed article must not be published.”

The letter questioned the provenance of the claims, suggesting that the Post’s allegations did not stem from a “human complainant” but from “artificial intelligence,” perhaps ChatGPT. If that’s the case, the law firm wrote, this is “manufactured news.”

“Rest assured that, in any legal proceeding made necessary by the publication of defamatory allegations of plagiarism, we will explore in discovery the source … of these alleged ‘complaints,’” Clare Locke wrote.

In the intervening days between the Post’s outreach and Harvard’s response, there was a scramble to contact scholars whom Gay was alleged to have copied in those three articles, to see what they made of the plagiarism claims. Their opinions were used to defend Gay.

Stephen D. Ansolabehere, a professor of government at Harvard, told The Chronicle he heard from an administrator in Harvard’s public-affairs and communications office who asked him to take a look at similar language in a paper he’s an author of and one of Gay’s. Ansolabehere did, and was unconcerned. Gay was describing things that are “fairly technical,” he said, that cannot be depicted in many different ways. The examples “read like the sort of thing I see all the time in academic writing.” He said he sent an email to the administrator saying as much.

In a text message, Ansolabehere said he did not know if his statement was included in Clare Locke’s letter. The Post recently published the letter in full, which shows that it was.

Jens Ludwig at the University of Chicago, Jeffrey B. Liebman at Harvard, and George Reid Andrews at the University of Pittsburgh all came to the same conclusion — that Gay had not plagiarized them. Clare Locke included statements from those scholars in its letter to the Post, saying they amounted to an “extraordinary rebuke.” Those academics had “come forward to expressly reject the false conclusions proffered by the Post.”

In fact, “these denials are far more well-informed than the facile comparison of similar phrases, because they are the product of a review of the entirety of both the relevant works as well as grounded upon decades of work in academia.”

The scholars’ statements, Clare Locke asserted, “should end the inquiry entirely.”

Ludwig did not respond to The Chronicle’s interview requests. Liebman shared his statement about why he and four of his co-authors do not think Gay plagiarized them — “When we do scientific writing, we use the technical terms for things. So, it is not surprising when two researchers describe the same statistical procedure or the same government program using similar language,” he wrote — but declined to comment further.

Andrews, a historian, told The Chronicle that he was contacted by someone connected to Harvard who asked him about the Post’s plagiarism claims, and he emailed that person the same statement he’d already sent to the Post. He said he didn’t know his statement was going to be included in a letter from a defamation-law firm.

When he saw the news about the letter, “I didn’t feel good about it,” Andrews said. To him, it seemed like “kind of an abuse by a high-powered institution of legal practices to try to shut down a conversation that may have started in bad faith but is probably worth having — the conversation about how much do we allow academics to crib from other people?”

Jonathan Swain, a Harvard spokesman, declined to comment on why the university hired Clare Locke and whether the scholars who were asked for their opinions were told where their feedback would go. He also declined to share the letter.

Thomas A. Clare, a partner at Clare Locke, said in an emailed statement that the law firm’s letter “responded only to specific passages identified by the Post on October 24 — and did so by attaching first-person statements from scholars whose works were specifically referenced by the Post and who themselves said, in their own words, that their works had not been plagiarized.”

Harvard didn’t reach out to every original scholar involved.

Emily Owens, a professor of criminology and economics at the University of California at Irvine, said in an email to The Chronicle that a Post reporter contacted her in October about Gay’s alleged plagiarism of a 2011 article she’s an author of, but no one at Harvard ever did.

Owens reviewed what the Post sent her and said she thinks that the repetition of “such short phrases” does not constitute “taking credit for another’s writing or ideas.”

Anne Williamson, too, said she was asked by the Post in October about alleged plagiarism of a 2011 paper of hers by Gay but was not contacted by anyone from Harvard. Williamson is an associate professor of political science at Miami University, in Ohio.

“One thing that has gone through my mind throughout this process,” Williamson said, “is did they think I simply — myself and my institution — weren’t important enough to pay any attention to? That if they drew verbatim from me, it didn’t matter because I am not in the Ivy League?”

Williamson’s view was that Gay had plagiarized her, but that it was a “technical case” rather than “an intent to use some other author’s work in some way that it shouldn’t.”

Swain declined to comment on how the scholars who were contacted were selected.

On October 29, two days after Clare Locke sent its letter, Gay asked the Harvard Corporation, the more powerful of two university governing bodies, to carry out an “independent review” of the articles from the Post’s inquiry, the university told The Chronicle in a statement last month.

The Post would not publish anything on the topic until December, after possible plagiarism by Gay had already been reported elsewhere. (Clare said in his statement to The Chronicle that the Post “made its own decision, based on then-existing information and its own editorial judgment, whether to move forward with its reporting.”)

On November 2, the corporation appointed three political scientists with “no ties” to Harvard to evaluate the allegations, the Harvard statement said. The university has declined to name those scholars. In addition, a subcommittee of the corporation reviewed “all of President Gay’s other published works from 1993 to 2019,” except for her dissertation. The latter was excluded because the claims at the time were about Gay’s published work, Harvard said.

Neither group examined the 1993 article that Gay had published in Origins as a young graduate student — one of the three works the Post had asked about — because of the article’s age and because “articles included in that journal generally do not include citations or quotations,” Harvard said in its December statement.

Harvard chose not to investigate the issue through its research integrity offices because those offices ultimately report to the president. There was potential “for the appearance of a conflict of interest,” the university told The Chronicle.

How would such accusations have been handled normally? Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences rules spell out a deliberate process for evaluating plagiarism claims, shepherded by the research integrity officer and a committee on professional conduct.

A former member of that committee, who in December spoke on the condition of anonymity to offer a personal opinion of the allegations made against Gay thus far, told The Chronicle, “If this case had come to us about a random professor in the department of government, we would have said, ‘This is very sloppy and you should apologize publicly … Anything that came out in print, you should ask the journal to publish a correction, and then the corrections should indicate that these things are in quotes.’ That’s what we would have done.” But “I’m quite sure it would not have gone much farther than that.” (The former member, who noted that plagiarism cases before the committee often involved a “gray area,” pointed to significance and intention as the barometer by which those claims were judged.)

That’s more or less the conclusion that Harvard’s review reached. The political-scientist panel and the corporation subcommittee found no evidence of “intentional deception or recklessness,” a prerequisite to a finding of research misconduct, the university said in December.

There were, however, “instances that failed to adhere” to the university’s guide to using sources. Gay would submit four corrections to add quotation marks and citations, including to two instances that the Post had flagged to Harvard in October and that the university through Clare Locke defended as not plagiarism, according to the news outlet.

By the time the corporation learned of the review’s findings, on December 9, things were about to explode into public view. The next day, Rufo and a journalist named Christopher Brunet published their report on possible plagiarism in Gay’s dissertation — timing the post for “maximum impact,” Rufo said on X. Gay was already facing blowback for her answers in front of a congressional committee, about whether calling for the genocide of Jews violated campus rules. “There are rumors that the plagiarism scandal could be the final nail in Gay’s coffin,” Rufo wrote.

His wish came true, eventually. The Free Beacon soon reported more claims, including that Gay had copied the bulk of two paragraphs in her dissertation without quoting or mentioning the original scholars. More than a week later, Harvard said that Gay would “update” her thesis to amend “instances of inadequate citation.” That did little to stop the swelling tide of criticism. Gay in the Times described this period as harrowing. “My inbox has been flooded with invective, including death threats,” she wrote. “I’ve been called the N-word more times than I care to count.”

While it initially seemed like Gay’s presidency could be salvaged, the corporation’s support of her began to crumble under the weight of the mounting allegations and the media coverage it spawned, The New York Times reported. One member thought early on that Gay “was failing to take full responsibility for her plagiarism,” per the Times. Other board members came to believe that Gay could not stay. By December 27, the writing was on the wall.

In her Times essay, Gay defended her scholarly reputation. “Critics found instances in my academic writings where some material duplicated other scholars’ language, without proper attribution,” she wrote. When she learned of these problems, she “promptly requested corrections,” which is “consistent with how [she has] seen similar faculty cases handled at Harvard.”

Furthermore, she wrote, the errors “should not obscure a fundamental truth: I proudly stand by my work and its impact on the field.”

The circumstances that led to Gay’s resignation will be analyzed and debated for months to come. It will likely be remembered, across the political spectrum, as a new sort of proxy war in which influential actors outside of a university waged a tremendous, public, and eventually successful campaign against that institution, in order to score points for their broader movement.

Gay “was relentlessly targeted by politicians, rich alumni, and partisan media using her as a sacrifice in a larger political struggle,” Ryan D. Enos, a professor of government at Harvard, wrote in The Boston Globe. On X, Rufo has taken credit for Gay’s “scalping” and has called for “a full-blown plagiarism war.” In a statement about Gay’s “long overdue” resignation, Rep. Elise Stefanik, a Republican from New York who berated Gay and her fellow presidents at the congressional hearing, said, “I will always deliver results.”

Harvard’s handling of the matter is also likely to be second-guessed.

Take the university’s careful choice of language throughout the ordeal. Harvard has said that Gay’s work was guilty of “inadequate citations,” of “duplicative language without appropriate attribution,” but not the P-word. Yet Harvard’s guide to using sources defines plagiarism plainly: as taking ideas or language without adequately crediting the source, whether intentionally or accidentally. Not every allegation about Gay’s work seems to meet that bar, but at least some do.

When “strange locutions” are used in the place of the word “plagiarism,” that’s a red flag in a plagiarism investigation, said Michael V. Dougherty, a professor of philosophy at Ohio Dominican University who has written books on academic plagiarism but was not commenting specifically on Gay’s case.

Jacob Anbinder, a fellow in the history department at Cornell University, observed on X that he “still can’t believe the Harvard Corporation chose to go with ‘a few instances of inadequate citation.’” Apart from being “inaccurate,” Anbinder wrote, it’s as if no one on the governing board had considered what would happen if more instances became public.

Jonathan Bailey, a copyright and plagiarism consultant who runs the website Plagiarism Today, questioned Harvard’s response to the claims in a recent YouTube video about the case, since the university was caught “flat-footed” when more allegations were reported. “I’m not saying Claudine Gay would still have her job if Harvard had done their due diligence here,” Bailey said in the video. “I don’t know. She was already a lightning rod … But I know that things would have been better if they’d gotten ahead of this and found these other issues out before they were published in the media.” (Bailey’s own assessment is that out of the dozens of claims, many are unfounded, but there are between six and 12 passages of Gay’s that warrant correction.)

There are other questions about Harvard’s approach. Who inside Harvard reviewed the claims? Who are the political scientists outside the university who weighed in? And why, in the early days of the university’s own investigation, did Harvard again assert to the Post that the plagiarism claims that the paper had flagged were false? According to the news outlet, Clare Locke sent another letter on November 7. The three political scientists were appointed to assess the veracity of the allegations five days earlier, on November 2. (Swain, the Harvard spokesman, declined to comment.)

Some of these loose threads will be pulled by the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce, which said in December it was “demanding more information” about how Harvard handled the case. After Gay resigned, Rep. Virginia Foxx, the Republican from North Carolina who chairs the committee, called Gay’s behavior “academically dishonest” and said the committee’s “oversight” of Harvard will continue.

Regardless of what Foxx’s committee turns up, the answers to these questions could be instrumental to higher ed’s understanding of what happened, and of what’s to come. On X, Bill Ackman, a billionaire who publicly campaigned for Gay’s removal and whose wife, a former professor, has now become embroiled in her own plagiarism scandal, promised a “plagiarism review” of all professors, members of the administration, the governing board, and the president at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Every college “in the world” will need to do the same sort of review, he wrote.

If they don’t, Ackman wrote, someone else will.