CV NEWS FEED // According to alleged photographic evidence, Harvard President Claudine Gay plagiarized a substantial part of her doctoral thesis at the university.
Observers from across the political spectrum slammed Gay after her testimony at a House Committee hearing last week. Gay’s many critics blasted her apparent failure to adequately address the precipitous rise in anti-Semitic attacks and behavior.
Anti-Critical Race Theory (CRT) advocate Christopher Rufo called the plagiarism story a “bombshell” on X (formerly Twitter) Sunday.
Rufo wrote that he and Christopher Brunet of The American Conservative “have obtained documentation demonstrating that [Gay] plagiarized multiple sections of her Ph.D. thesis, violating Harvard’s policies on academic integrity.”
“First, Gay lifts an entire paragraph nearly verbatim from a paper by Lawrence Bobo and Franklin Gilliam’s, while passing it off as her own paraphrase and language,” Rufo continued.
“This is a direct violation of Harvard’s policy,” he noted. Rufo went on to cite a section of Harvard’s guidelines on “Avoiding Plagiarism” verbatim:
When you paraphrase, your task is to distill the source’s ideas in your own words. It’s not enough to change a few words here and there and leave the rest; instead, you must completely restate the ideas in the passage in your own words. If your own language is too close to the original, then you are plagiarizing, even if you do provide a citation.
Rufo went on to explain that Gay “repeats this violation of Harvard’s policy throughout the document,” copying work from several authors “nearly verbatim, without quotation marks.”
He provided side-by-side photos of the now-president’s thesis and her alleged source material.
“Second, Gay appears to lift material from scholar Carol Swain,” Rufo reported:
She copies the phrasing and language nearly verbatim from Swain’s book “Black Faces, Black Interests,” without providing a citation of any kind.
Gay’s use of Swain’s material is a straightforward violation of the university’s rules, which state that one “must give credit to the author of the source material, either by placing the source material in quotation marks and providing a clear citation, or by paraphrasing the source material and providing a clear citation”—neither of which Gay followed.
“These are flagrant violations of Harvard’s plagiarism policy, which states that students who commit plagiarism will suffer ‘disciplinary action, up to and including requirement to withdraw from the College,’” Rufo concluded:
The same standard should apply to the university president. I earned a master’s degree from Harvard’s night school—not nearly as prestigious as the graduate school—but, if I had committed these kinds of violations, I would have been expelled. As an alumnus, I am calling on Claudine Gay to immediately resign from her position.
An exchange between Gay and Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-NY, went viral after last Tuesday’s House Committee on Education and the Workforce hearing titled “Holding Campus Leaders Accountable and Confronting Antisemitism.”
“Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules on bullying and harassment?” Stefanik asked Gay.
Gay responded:
The rules around bullying and harassment are quite specific and if the context in which that language is used amounts to bullying and harassment, then we take, we take action against it.
“What action has been taken against students who are harassing and calling for the genocide of Jews on Harvard’s campus?” the congresswoman also asked.
“I can assure you, we have robust disciplinary actions,” Gay replied.
“What actions have been taken?” Stefanik pressed. “I’m asking what actions have been taken against those students.”
Gay answered: “Given students’ rights to privacy and our obligations under [the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA)], I will not say more about any specific cases other than to reiterate that processes are ongoing.”
Stefanik later noted that “Harvard ranks the lowest when it comes to protecting Jewish students. This is why I have called for your resignation and your testimony today and not being able to answer with moral clarity speaks volumes.”
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“I am sorry,” Gay told the student-run newspaper The Harvard Crimson days later. “Words matter. When words amplify distress and pain, I don’t know how you could feel anything but regret.”
In a Saturday letter, Bishop Robert Barron called out Gay and two other presidents of prestigious universities for what he termed their “appalling congressional testimony.”
“Donors, parents, alumni—wake up,” he wrote. “Do we want to be sending our kids to schools whose presidents cannot muster the intestinal fortitude to resist calls for genocide?”
