Harvard University shut down a high-level investigation into whether its controversial president was a plagiarist — and used an expensive law firm to threaten The Post over our own investigation.
The college announced Tuesday morning that it had investigated Claudine Gay over whether some of her academic work had been plagiarized and had cleared her of violating the college’s “standards for research misconduct.”
Instead, it said that it would request four corrections in two publications to include quotations and quotation marks that were originally “overlooked”.
But The Post can reveal that Harvard spent weeks failing to come clean about Gay being investigated — staying silent even as he was dragged before Congress for damning testimony about how the Ivy League college deals with antisemitism on campus.
Harvard only disclosed the investigation when the university’s parent body, the Harvard Corporation, said it unanimously stood behind it despite a firestorm of criticism of its evidence to Congress.
Harvard’s public statement about the alleged plagiarism comes a day after a conservative activist post a question on X about a quote in Gay’s 1997 PhD dissertation.
Harvard did not disclose that it had conducted a plagiarism investigation into its president Claudine Gay when she appeared before Congress last week. Boston Globe via Getty Images When Claudine Gay testified to Congress about Harvard’s handling of antisemitism, she did not tell House Education and Labor committee members that she was being investigated for plagiarism. AP Here’s how Harvard both revealed that Claudine Gay was under investigation for possible plagiarism and cleared her, even though she now requested four corrections in two published articles. Harvard/X
Gay has vigorously defended his academic record in comments to the Boston Globe after the dissertation question was revealed, saying: “I stand by the integrity of my scholarship. Throughout my career, I have worked to ensure that my scholarship adheres to the highest academic standards.”
Tuesday’s statement, issued to “members of the Harvard community” said that the investigation began in late October, after Harvard “became aware” of the allegations about Gay.
But that statement doesn’t tell the full story — including how Harvard called in bulldog lawyers to protect Gay.
The Post contacted the university on Oct. 24, seeking comment on more than two dozen examples in which Gay’s words appear to closely parallel words, phrases or sentences in works published by other academics.
A “senior,” or most senior member, of the Harvard Corporation is Penny Prtizker, a billionaire scion of the Hyatt hotel-owning family who is one of the Pres. Obama’s commerce secretary. Getty Images One of the academics whose work is almost identical to Gay’s is George Reid Andrews. He said it did not rise to the level of plagiarism. University of Pittsburgh Anne Williamson, of Miami University, Ohio, said she was “shocked” by the similarities between his work and one of Gay’s papers and said: “It looks like plagiarism to me.” University of Miami
27 examples are in two academic papers published in two peer-reviewed journals between 2011 and 2017, and an article in an academic magazine in 1993.
The Post has submitted the material anonymously and has conducted our own analysis before asking Harvard to comment on whether Gay had plagiarized or failed to properly cite other academics’ work. We have continued to investigate since then.
When The Post brought the allegations to Harvard, Jonathan Swain, its senior executive director of media relations and communications, asked for more time to review Gay’s work.
A day later Swain, who was part of the Biden-Harris transition team and a one-time Hillary Clinton aide, said he would “get back in touch in the next few days.”
Among the 27 examples The Post asked Harvard to review were examples of Gay’s work while he was a graduate student, published in a specialist magazine.
But he didn’t. And two days later, on October 27, The Post was sent a 15-page letter by Thomas Clare, a Virginia-based high-powered lawyer with the Clare-Locke firm who identified himself as the defamation lawyer for Harvard University and Gay.
The letter contained comments from academics whose work Gay allegedly cited inappropriately — even though the political scientist’s review had just begun.
Harvard has yet to say what Gay wants corrected, and whether his dissertation will be corrected. it did not respond to a further set of questions from The Post Tuesday.
The dates on the three works reviewed by The Post range from 1993, when Gay was a graduate student, to 2017 when he was Dean of Social Sciences in the school’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
Gay, 53, took office as Harvard’s first black president earlier this year.
This is one of 27 examples that The Post asked Harvard to comment on. It was published in the peer-reviewed journal Urban Affairs in 2011.
Jonathan Bailey, who heads Plagiarism Now, and has worked as an expert witness involving plagiarism cases, reviewed the paper in question and said he believed that some of Gay’s work violated Harvard’s own academic policy on citations.
“It is a policy violation and that alone should justify a thorough investigation,” Bailey said in an email to The Post.
Academics whose work seems surprisingly close to Gay differ in whether they feel he has appropriated their work without attribution.
George Reid Andrews, professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh, acknowledged that Gay “borrowed some of my phrases” in his 1993 article “Between Black and White: The Complexity of Brazilian Race Relations” from Reid Andrews’ paper “Black Political Protest in Sao Paulo, 1888-1988 ,” which appeared in the Journal of Latin American Studies in 1992.
This example was published in the Urban Affairs Review in 2017, when Gay was dean of social sciences at Harvard.
“But this happens quite often in academic writing and for me does not rise to the level of plagiarism,” he said. “I’m glad he read my work, learned from it, and recommended it to his readers.”
Jens Ludwig, an economist at the University of Chicago, had a similar response when contacted by The Post in October about the similarities in a paper he co-authored in 2008 and “Moving to Opportunity: Political Implications of the Housing Mobility Experiment,” Gay. published in Urban Affairs Review in 2011.
“We worked with Claudine on some work and I think it was the connection,” he said.
This is the second example from the Urban Affairs Review in 2017, when Gay was dean of social sciences at Harvard. Harvard did not say what paper Gay wanted to correct.
Among the papers examined is the 2017 “A Room for One’s Own? The Partisan Allocation of Affordable Housing,” published in Urban Affairs Review and written while Gay was dean of social sciences at Harvard.
In that paper, Gay used a phrase that closely parallels a 2011 paper by Anne Williamson, a professor of political science at Miami University in Ohio.
Williamson told The Post he was “furious” when he read the quote.
“It looks like plagiarism to me,” he said.
“If they’re going to do what they’re doing, then I should be cited as a reference. My first reaction was shock. The second reaction was bewilderment. There was a way to draw from my paper. All he had to do was give me credit.”
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Source: thtrangdai.edu.vn/en/
