Former Harvard University President Claudine Gay, who resigned from her position in January following numerous allegations of plagiarism, ...
Former Harvard University President Claudine Gay, who resigned from her position in January following numerous allegations of plagiarism, will teach a graduate-level course on “Reading and Research” this fall.
Gay taught the same course this spring, The College Fix reported, which would have been scheduled before she resigned. She will return to teach the same independent study class in the fall, even after her alleged plagiarism was widely reported. Further, she continues to receive her $900,000-a-year salary.
According to Harvard’s website, graduate-level Reading and Research courses do not provide letter grades, and a 2011 description of the course (Gay taught the course back then as well) states that it requires “written work of sufficient quantity and quality so that the course is equivalent to a lecture course or a seminar.”
Gay resigned in January after nearly 50 examples of alleged plagiarism in her past academic work were uncovered.
“On December 19, I submitted a formal complaint with allegations of plagiarism by Claudine Gay,” a complaint against Gay, obtained by The Washington Free Beacon, said. “Now I am forced to submit an additional complaint with nearly 50 allegations, including over half a dozen examples never seen before. Some of them occur in a publication by Gay that was until now believed to be free from allegations of plagiarism. Others occur in the dissertation. Harvard’s ‘independent review’ missed them. For this reason and others, a new research misconduct inquiry must be opened.”
Gay published just 17 works during her tenure as an academic, and eight of them were reported to contain plagiarized material.
The plagiarism allegations surfaced after Gay and other university presidents testified before Congress, refusing to say that calling for the genocide of Jews violated codes of conduct. Each president suggested “context” was needed to determine whether such a call would violate the school’s code of conduct.
Months later, when Gay resigned, she attempted to downplay the allegations against her by claiming “racial animus” was behind some of her criticism.
“Amidst all of this, it has been distressing to have doubts cast on my commitments to confronting hate and upholding scholarly rigor — two bedrock values that are fundamental to who I am — and frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus,” she wrote.
Vanderbilt University professor Carol Swain, a black scholar whom Gay is accused of plagiarizing, condemned Harvard’s handling of the situation.
“I have a problem with the way Harvard has reacted to the entire situation, because it seems like — with the assistance of some of their professors and other elites — they’re trying to redefine what is plagiarism,” Swain said, according to National Review. “They’re making the argument that there are different levels and, by extension, that some of it is acceptable. That is a problem for higher education in America.”