CV NEWS FEED // Harvard Divinity School (HDS) offered students a “Gathering to Breathe and Heal” and to “discuss and process” the resignation of former university president and accused plagiarist Claudine Gay.
HDS’ Office of Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging (DIB) hosted the hour-long gathering in Swartz Hall’s Braun Room Thursday afternoon.
“[We] enter this semester with a deep awareness of the grief so many of us are carrying on campus,” the HDS DIB office wrote in an email sent to the “HDS Community.”
The office explained that “for many of us this grief and loss … includes the resignation of our former President Claudine Gay after her short tenure.”
“Our office remains steadfast to our commitment to engage or work and navigate these challenging times through a restorative justice rooted in indigeneity and operationalized through love,” the email went on:
Restorative justice calls us to feel our feelings and to grieve. It also calls us to center our humanity and each other’s, to lead and respond with love. There is room in the circle to hold all these feelings, and all of us, including those harmed and those who have caused harm. It is not always an easy task, but we can choose love in our response and actions to realize accountability, repair, justice, and change.
“Restorative justice” is a concept widely associated with far-left political theories such as critical race theory (CRT) and the “defund the police” movement.
“This is a space to gather to breathe and to heal, to grieve, and to share the heaviness of what we’re holding with others,” stated the DIB office’s announcement of the event. “This is not a space for debate. [R]ather, it is a container for holding emotions in community knowing that the circle holds us all.”
“For this gathering, we will create space for us to discuss and process the departure of our former president, Claudine Gay,” the announcement added.
Per the announcement, DIB Associate Dean Melissa Wood Bartholomew and DIB Assistant Dean Steph Gauchel “facilitated” the “circle.”
As The Daily Wire’s Kassy Dillon reported, “Gay was forced to resign from her position last month amid allegations of plagiarism in various academic works that came to light.” Gay “was already under immense pressure for her failure to address the rise of antisemitism on campus.”
>> ‘BOMBSHELL’ REPORT ALLEGES GAY PLAGIARIZED PHD PAPER <<
In December, anti-CRT scholar Christopher Rufo presented photographic evidence on X (formerly Twitter) appearing to show that Gay pervasively plagiarized her Harvard doctoral thesis.
“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 indicated at the time.
“This is a direct violation of Harvard’s policy,” he added:
Gay repeats this violation of Harvard’s policy throughout the document, again using work from Bobo and Gilliam, as well as passages from Richard Shingles, Susan Howell, and Deborah Fagan, which she reproduces nearly verbatim, without quotation marks.
Gay is not the only high-ranking Harvard official to face accusations of plagiarism.
“A complaint accused Harvard University Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer Sherri Ann Charleston of at least 40 instances of plagiarism,” CatholicVote noted Wednesday.
Per the complaint, “Charleston’s dissertation contains a lot of other scholars’ language verbatim without quotation marks.” In addition, it claimed that parts of it “were published previously, word for word, by her advisor, Rebecca Scott, and others.”
