Embattled Harvard University President Claudine Gay is under fire for allegedly plagiarizing portions of her Ph.D. dissertation, which...
Embattled Harvard University President Claudine Gay is under fire for allegedly plagiarizing portions of her Ph.D. dissertation, which concerns racial themes, for her doctorate in political science from Harvard back in 1997.
Journalist Christopher F. Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, published a report on Sunday outlining what he indicated to be three instances of Gay plagiarizing, per Harvard standards, in the dissertation, “Taking Charge: Black Electoral Success and the Redefinition of American Policies.”
“[Chris Brunet] and I have obtained documentation demonstrating that Harvard President Claudine Gay plagiarized multiple sections of her Ph.D. thesis, violating Harvard’s policies on academic integrity,” Rufo said on X. “This is a bombshell.”
In one instance, Gay is accused of lifting “nearly verbatim” work from Lawrence Bobo and Franklin Gilliam in their paper called “Race, Sociopolitical Participation, and Black Empowerment.”
Rufo then cites Harvard’s own policy on paraphrasing and plagiarism to underscore his point: “When you paraphrase, your task is to distill the source’s ideas in your own words,” the guidelines state. “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.”
Gay is further accused of lifting material from legal scholar Carol Swain without giving a citation. Rufo again cites Harvard guidelines, which state that students “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.”
And lastly, Gay is accused of swiping an entire appendix. “Gay composes an entire appendix in the dissertation directly taken from Gary King’s book, ‘A Solution to the Ecological Inference Problem,'” Rufo posted. “While she cites King’s book later in the appendix—in fact, King was her dissertation advisor—Gay does not explicitly acknowledge that Appendix B is entirely grounded in King’s concepts and language, instead passing it off as her own original work.”
The plagiarism accusations come as Gay is already under fire for her recent testimony during a Congressional hearing on anti-Semitism in colleges and universities.
When Gay was questioned about whether calling for the genocide of Jews violated Harvard’s codes of conduct, she responded that it depends “on the context.” She added that calling for genocide is “at odds with the values of Harvard” and that when that kind of “speech crosses into conduct, that violates our policies.”
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