The resignation of Harvard president Claudine Gay over allegations of plagiarism and her poor response to antisemitism put the spotlight on the university’s governing body — the Harvard Corporation.
The 12-member board is chaired by Hyatt hotel billionaire Penny Pritzker, a former Obama administration commerce secretary, who has vowed to stay on despite Gay’s departure.
Harvard itself is facing an investigation by the House Education and Workforce Committee into the plagiarism scandal and how the school handled it.
The university said it was first made aware of allegations that Gay took the words of other academics and passed them off as his own by The Post in late October when we reached out to its spokesman Jonathan Swain for comment during our report.
But what he did next — threatening The Post in a 15-page bullying letter from Clare Locke’s empty law firm and apparently Gay before investigating — left a series of unanswered questions about the university’s most important administrative figure.
Harvard Corporation leader Penny Pritzker was secretary of commerce in the Obama administration. The former president initially supported Gay despite backlash over his refusal to condemn antisemitism on campus during congressional hearings last month. Getty Images In the wake of Claudine Gay’s resignation, Harvard’s governing body is facing many questions about how it cleared the former president of violating Harvard’s own rules on academic attribution. Getty Images
Why did Harvard claim Gay’s innocence without investigating him?
In an Oct. 27 letter from Harvard’s attorneys to The Post, the university called claims that Gay plagiarized “unpublishable” and threatened legal action to find anonymous whistleblowers who approached The Post to raise their concerns.
It also claimed that Gay’s work was “properly cited and credited,” and that the plagiarism allegations were “proven false” — all within 72 hours of The Post requesting comment.
Less than two weeks later, on November 7, the university’s lawyer said: “We have conclusively refuted (with evidence) all false allegations of plagiarism that have been presented so far.”
This is part of the language used in a 15-page letter from lawyer Clare Locke to The Post in an effort to block the lawsuit against Gay. The Post is continuing its investigation.
But the corporation still has not explained how it rushed to that conclusion, and who decided that Gay was innocent.
Why did Harvard launch a secret investigation – and what did it really find?
On November 3, the Harvard Corporation began some kind of investigation, but in secret.
Four members of the 12-person corporation formed a special committee to decide what to do about the allegations — but their identities were never revealed.
The committee apparently decided to overrule Harvard’s usual rules for dealing with allegations of plagiarism against faculty members, which the corporation later said would be a conflict of interest because the body that would do it reported to the president — at the time, Gay himself.
Claudine Gay blamed “racial hostility” for the attack on her in her resignation letter Tuesday. AP
The corporation then asked three outsiders “prominent political scientists” who had “no connection” to Harvard. Their identities and the methods they used to investigate Gay were also never revealed.
But on Dec. 12, the college issued a lengthy statement defending Gay and again clearing him of plagiarism — without saying what three outside political scientists had found.
Instead it said: “On December 9, Fellows reviewed the results, which revealed several examples of inadequate citations.”
Questions remain about how Harvard conducted its investigation into Claudine Gay, who resigned as president on Tuesday. Reuters
And it said “the analysis found no violations of Harvard’s standards for research misconduct,” but did not explain how that conclusion was reached.
Will Gay be fully investigated under Harvard’s rules for faculty?
The corporation said it had to go to a secret star hall of outside political scientists and not use normal methods to investigate allegations of plagiarism because of “the potential for the appearance of a conflict of interest, as this office ultimately reports to the President.”
But the conflict no longer exists: Gay is once again a regular member of the faculty.
The Post presented an example of this possible plagiarism, published in the Urban Affairs Review in 2017, when Gay was dean of social sciences at Harvard. A Harvard lawyer told us it was “correctly quoted,” but a few weeks later, Harvard said it asked to correct it to add quotation marks and citations.
And under normal faculty rules, it’s up to the Research Integrity Officer in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences to decide whether there’s enough skepticism about Gay’s work to fully investigate — and to do so within a week, if possible.
After that, the faculty’s Standing Committee on Professional Conduct was required to begin a full investigation, give Gay written notice of it and find “individuals with appropriate scientific expertise to evaluate the evidence and issues.”
Gay already admitted he had to make four corrections on an academic paper and three on his dissertation.
Who hires and briefs bullying lawyers?
Harvard’s lawyer, Clare Locke, said they represented both the university and Gay. But it’s unclear who made the unusual decision to hire them, given that the $50 billion endowment college has its own lawyers, led by general counsel Diane Lopez, or who told them to claim Gay had been cleared of plagiarism.
Clare Locke previously represented the Sackler family, Matt Lauer, and the Russian oligarchs after the invasion of Ukraine.
It also represented Dominion Voting Systems in a lawsuit against Fox News. The Post’s parent company, News Corp, shares common ownership with Fox News’ parent company, Fox Corporation.
Harvard did not respond to The Post’s request for comment.
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Source: thtrangdai.edu.vn/en/
