Harvard President Claudine Gay’s plagiarism is worse than previously reported.
While conservative writers Christopher Rufo and Christopher Brunet divulged scholarly misconduct in Gay’s doctoral thesis, the New York Post has revealed that Harvard threatened to sue the newspaper for defamation if it revealed more than two dozen other instances of Gay’s lifting material from published sources without attribution.
The question is whether the Post’s revelation will force Gay to resign or force the nation’s oldest university to fire the diversity hire. Then again, perhaps Gay’s black privilege will protect her.
Plagiarized 27 Times
In a statement released after the Rufo-Brunet disclosure, Harvard backed Gay and said she did not violate academic standards in three articles, a reference to material the Post was investigating:
With regard to President Gay’s academic writings, the University became aware in late October of allegations regarding three articles. At President Gay’s request, the Fellows [of Harvard College] promptly initiated an independent review by distinguished political scientists and conducted a review of her published work. On December 9, the Fellows reviewed the results, which revealed a few instances of inadequate citation. While the analysis found no violation of Harvard’s standards for research misconduct, President Gay is proactively requesting four corrections in two articles to insert citations and quotation marks that were omitted from the original publications.
But that wasn’t the “full story,” the Post reported. “Harvard called in bulldog attorneys to protect Gay.”
“The Post contacted the university on October 24, asking for comment on more than two dozen instances in which Gay’s words appeared to closely parallel words, phrases or sentences in published works by other academics,” the newspaper reported:
The 27 instances were 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 was sent the material anonymously and had 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.
The Post contacted the university, whose spokesman, Jonathan Swain — a former legman for Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton — would “get back in touch over the next couple of days.”
But Swain ducked into the bushes and didn’t respond. Instead the Post received a 15-page letter from Harvard’s defamation attorney. “The letter contained comments from academics whose work Gay was alleged to have improperly cited — even though the political scientists’ review could only just have begun,” the Post continued.
The Improperly Cited Works
Plagiarism expert Jonathan Bailey told the Post that Gay violated Harvard’s policy on scholarly attribution.
“Academics whose work appeared startlingly similar to Gay’s differed in whether they felt she had appropriated their work without attribution,” the Post reported. A history professor told the newspaper that such borrowing “happens fairly often in academic writing and for me does not rise to the level of plagiarism. I am glad she read my work, learned from it, and recommended it to her readers.”
Another said, “we partnered with Claudine on some work and my guess would be that it is the connection.”
But a third, professor Anne Williamson at Ohio’s University of Miami, told the Post she was “angry” and “it does look like plagiarism to me.”
If they are going to do what they did, then I should be cited as a reference. My first reaction is shock. The second reaction is puzzlement. There was a way to draw from my paper. All she had to do is give me a credit.
Below are three examples of Gay’s plagiarism, as documented in the New York Post:
Scandal Exposed
Gay’s plagiarism went public when Rufo and Brunet put a microscope over her doctoral dissertation, Race, Sociopolitical Participation, and Black Empowerment.
The two writers reported that Gay used the work of others with either improper attribution of paraphrased material or by directly lifting material verbatim without quotation marks.
Some of the unattributed material came from former Vanderbilt and Princeton Professor Carol Swain. She told Breitbart radio that Gay is “an embarrassment” who must resign.
She also said that a “white male, or even a white female, caught in the scandal that she’s caught in” would be fired.
If Harvard keeps Gay on board, it won’t be the first time a major university protected a prominent black accused of plagiarism.
In 1991, after Boston University confessed that Martin Luther King plagiarized large portions of his doctoral thesis, it did not revoke his degree.
But, like Gay, King plagiarized material for his other works as well.
As leftist white historian Ralph Luker explained, “when he went to predominately white institutions in the North, King received extraordinarily high grades for academic work which was not only often heavily plagiarized, but was otherwise quite unexceptional.”
It appears that Gay is receiving the same soft bigotry of low expectations.
H/T: Legal Insurrection
