Harvard president Claudine Gay’s plagiarism scandal has become a slow burn worthy of a Sunday-night slot on premium cable.
After initial allegations that Gay plagiarized much of her 1997 doctoral dissertation, reporting uncovered three more publications in which Gay had seemingly copied others’ work and passed it off as her own.
Soon after, Harvard’s board acknowledged “a few instances of inadequate citations” but affirmed their support for the president, who the board claimed committed “no violation of Harvard’s standards for research misconduct.”
Then the other shoe dropped.
The New York Post reported that it had contacted Harvard in October about potential plagiarism, only to receive a letter from a high-powered law firm accusing the Post of defamation. Dozens of other potential instances of plagiarism—not confined to the initial four publications—emerged, including one in the acknowledgments of Gay’s dissertation.
Gay eventually requested three more corrections, these addressing certain uncited language in her dissertation, but Harvard once again found that her behavior fell short of violating its academic-integrity standards.
Subsequent developments call into question how thoroughly the university investigated the claims: A National Review report found that Harvard never reached out to academics who believed Gay had plagiarized their work, and former Vanderbilt University professor Carol Swain questioned the validity of Gay’s doctorate, based as it was on a dissertation—meant to introduce new research into the academic world—scavenged from Swain’s own work, without attribution. As the plagiarized statements pile up, Harvard is choosing to keep Gay as its face, which is a statement of its own.
The National Review
