Harvard Attorneys Protected Claudine Gay After New York Post Confronted School in October About Possible Plagiarism in Her Works
So the school has known for months about plagiarism claims in Gay’s works, including her dissertation.
The New York Post revealed that in October, it confronted Harvard about possible plagiarism in a few of President Claudine Gay’s works, including her Ph.D. dissertation.
The public learned about the plagiarism allegations on Tuesday thanks to School choice advocate Christopher Rufo, American Conservative contributing editor Chris Brunet, and Washington Free Beacon reporter Aaron Sibarium.
Harvard’s governing board admitted the school investigated allegations in October when it affirmed support for Gay as Harvard’s president. It refused to remove her despite not taking action against antisemitism on the campus or opposing and condemning it in front of Congress.
So, the school knew about this before Rufo, Brunet, and Sibarium published everything yesterday.
From The New York Post:
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 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.
When The Post brought the allegations to Harvard, Jonathan Swain, its senior executive director of media relations and communications, asked for more time to review Gay’s work.
A day later Swain, who was part of the Biden-Harris transition team and a one-time Hillary Clinton aide, said he would “get back in touch over the next couple of days.”
Swain never got back to the Post.
On October 27, a Virginia-based attorney, Thomas Clare, sent the Post a 15-page letter.
Clare described “himself as defamation counsel for Harvard University and Gay”:
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.
Harvard has still not said what works Gay is seeking to have corrected, and whether her dissertation will be corrected. it did not respond to a further set of questions from The Post Tuesday.
The dates on the three works reviewed by The Post ranged from 1993, when Gay was a post-graduate student, until 2017 when she was Dean of Social Science at the school’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
Gay, 53, assumed office as Harvard’s first black president earlier this year.
Gay told the Boston Globe, “I stand by the integrity of my scholarship. Throughout my career, I have worked to ensure my scholarship adheres to the highest academic standards.”
I cannot people have defended the blatant plagiarism:
Professor Lawrence Bobo, Harvard College’s dean of social science, is among those whom Gay was accused of plagiarizing in the Sunday posts. Bobo said Monday, “I find myself unconcerned about these claims as our work was explicitly acknowledged.”
Professor Gary King, a leading Harvard political scientist and one of Gay’s dissertation advisers whom she was also accused of plagiarizing in the Sunday posts, called the allegations, “false and absurd.”
Katherine Tate, a Brown University professor of political science who was on Gay’s dissertation committee, said on Monday that she supports Gay and wants her to remain president of Harvard. But she said some of the passages highlighted in the Sunday night posts amounted to plagiarism.
”I think that it is an example of some plagiarism, yes,” Tate said. “But I think it’s a really minor example.” In the context of the dissertation, Tate said, it was obvious she was not stealing the ideas of other researchers, but rather referencing them.
I’m already tired of people abusing the word “context.” Gay and the other university presidents used the word a lot to avoid accountability for not doing anything about the antisemitism on their campuses.
Anne Williamson, A University of Miami in Ohio political science professor, said Gay’s 2017 paper “A Room for One’s Own? The Partisan Allocation of Affordable Housing” plagiarized material from her 2011 paper:
Williamson told The Post she was “angry” when she read the excerpts.
“It does look like plagiarism to me,” she said. “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.”
Carol Swain, author of Black Faces, Black Interests, confirmed to Rufo that Gay plagiarized her material.
Swain also lashed out at Gay on NewsNation.
EXCLUSIVE: I spoke with scholar Carol Swain, who confirms that Harvard president Claudine Gay plagiarized Swain's work. In fact, Swain saw a "clear pattern of what one would consider plagiarism."
"A white male would probably already be gone."https://t.co/WT8wcv7nbG pic.twitter.com/LP2GZa3THu
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) December 12, 2023
DONATE
Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.
Comments
Is she(?) black? I thought she was Martian, or something.
I’m personally experiencing working with a highly competent POC who seems to be privately very annoyed at POC rising rapidly through no other merit than color…. along with being annoyed by the havoc their inability to perform creates.
There’s the Peter Principle and then there’s the Peter Griffin Principle.
A fellow I hired at my last job feels the same way. He wants to be judged in his skills and ability to work with and lead others. Too often he encountered potential employers needing to fill a quota slot.
Black people on the right end of the Bell curve want a merit system and are ashamed by the performance of other blacks. They’ve noticed that they’re smarter than most whites and what the hell, what’s the problem. E.g. Loury and McWhorter in podcasts every two weeks.
Anyone on the far right of the bell curve is going to be smarter than most people by definition with color having nothing to do with it.
Not strictly true, and in an ambiguous sense that’s implied. There’s a different bell curve for each race, and the sum of them isn’t a bell curve at all. That is, the usual normal distribution statistics won’t apply to the sum. Think of the sum as having multiple peaks, with a peak for blacks, hispanics, whites, jews, asians. Within each race there’s the usual normal distribution statistics.
As it happens blacks are one standard deviation down from whites, so a 3-standard deviation black on his bell curve is a 2-standard deviation white, at the smart end. You have to do it that way to properly judge rarity, and it’s now the bell curve purifies differences in means at the tails, that is you can find a lot of super smart whites where there are no blacks at all. Shows up in rarified intellectual endeavors.
The middles of the respective distributions pretty much overlap enough to that in everyday life everybody is just people.
@rhhardin it turns out that that mixture is itself normal (with the usual assumptions of independence). But your conclusion holds still. The standard normal distribution’s tails fall off extremely quickly, as e^(-x^2). So if the mean of whites is 100 and the mean of blacks is 85, then at 130 you’re 15 points further in the tail of the distribution of blacks, and that 15 points makes a huge difference.
Offsetting that is Terman’s observation (confirmed repeatedly by others) that the distribution of intelligence is not normal, but has much fatter tails. They still fall off, but not as fast as e^(-x^2).
There is no “bell curve”. There are just some people who are smarter than others, and some who are smarter and also disciplined.
You can find that the statistics work out for a normal distribution. IQ is defined as mean 100 with standard deviation 15, which is a complete specification of a normal distribution. Then you can check it empirically by measuring the IQ distribution and find out it’s right. It’s not surprising because it’s just a number and the law of large numbers applies (everything comes out a normal distribution that relies on a large number of factors). The fly in the ointment is that you can’t combine two different populations and expect them to match statistically.
Statistics show you to be incorrect ….perhaps you have a touch of the woke virus and find fact’s uncomfortable
Actually the statistics do not show a normal distribution; the tails are fatter. There’s no reason to expect a normal distribution. It’s not a sum of repeated independent trials of an experiment, which would imply a normal distribution by the Central Limit Theorem. But there is a distribution with more toward the middle and fewer in the tails, which is pretty reasonable.
Maybe it’s just me but I don’t give a shit about Harvard hiring incompetent ideologue plagiarists. The further down they drag that stow of institution is fine by me, and I wouldn’t expend an iota of effort in helping them. I’m more concerned about that the incompetent ideologue plagiarist in the WH.
Yeah, I don’t mind being able to drag Harvard down. It’s time for others to be seen as so much better that it overcomes the vast wealth and tradition of Harvard. This will become a part of that tradition, and with the Harvard board affirming Gay as president and keeping her on the faculty, it will be an indelible black mark. It will be talked about hundreds of years from now in the history of Harvard, if it goes that long.
Harvard has done a lot of harm lately. A couple years ago the head of their chemistry department was found to have leaked secrets to China. It seems Harvard is run by hostiles — Qatar, China, etc. This just brings it out in the open more clearly.
Then I assume if they are looking for donations the best thing to send them are shovels so they can double down and keep on digging?
Normally you can defeat the Peter Principle by screwing up in ways that don’t matter, like dressing in Bermudas in a more formal office, and stay in the job you’re good at and enjoy. Black people don’t have that means of protection. They’re promoted into jobs they can’t do regardless.
The jobs Christine Gay can’t do include assistant professor. The dissertation that qualified her for jobs at that level was plagiarized, and her subsequent performance before tenure was no better apparently, proving she was not competent at that level — let alone all the higher ones that followed.
Peter Griffin Principle… I love it..
Let Harvard protect the incompetent ideologue plagiarist. Let them hire more. I could care less if that institution continues to embarrass itself. In fact, I encourage it.
When Gay was asked, in her own words, to describe how the plagiarism accusations have affected her, she stated, “He that filches from me my good name robs me of that which not enriches him and makes me poor indeed.”
But the accusations are apparently true. There’s little to no challenge from her side, no defense. So who filched from her, her good name? Do we all get the expectation of coverup if wrongdoing on our own part is found?
It’s really not a Christine Gay issue anymore, but a Harvard issue. It has made Harvard poor indeed, but others will rise to take the place more rightfully. The world doesn’t need Harvard, we will get along fine without it.
It matters little these days, how low standards have fallen. Not to mention intellectual brainpower that relates to the real world.
Terrible that she gets to correct the misdeed as if it never happened. A written note of explanation should be required.
Too bad it wasn’t a speech or two. That would last for posterity. Back in the days before Obama, it was disqualifying. But look at Biden. To progressives, morals and ethics do not matter anymore.
The real rub is that competence doesn’t matter to them, either. Putting in a citation is not all that difficult. It’s first-year competence we’re talking about, here.
They really
Don’t care….Look at this, ONE BILLION is not enough to hurt
ONE BILLION!!!
https://nypost.com/2023/12/12/news/harvard-expected-to-announce-claudine-gay-will-keep-job/
A written note of explanation wouldn’t be enough for a student caught plagiarizing on a Harvard term paper. It should certainly not be enough for a faculty member. Firing from the faculty is the minimum required. By doing anything else, Harvard shows that it has no academic standards at all, no academic values for the whole institution. It stands for nothing other than maybe a social agenda, and its huge money power.
I’m an academic. I’ve written about 120 peer reviewed papers. If it were to be demonstrated that I plagiarized in any of them, I’d lose my faculty appointment, no excuses, no appeal. But then, I’m not at Harvard.
Ahh but are you
Black, latinex, American Indian ?
And, Muslim and “trans?”
And “differently abled”?
Don’t forget 2 Spirit
It’s obvious that ‘color of skin VS content of character’ has been weaponized against society by the execrable DEI/BLM cabal, so until we can eliminate this weaponization, can we all agree to stop putting Negroes in positions of authority?
Our progeny will thank us.
Too sweeping. Carol Swain also exists.
One step at a time…
Claudin Gay is such a DEI fraud. Stealing material from black conservative female academic Carol Swain.
I’m not a fan of Claudine Gay. In my opinion, she is the least qualified Harvard President in the last century. Compare her vita with that of Derek Bok or Larry Summers, and you must conclude that she is an affirmative action (“diversity”) hire. Nevertheless, she did not commit plagiarism in her thesis or the other questioned publications.
There are widely varying standards for what constitutes plagiarism. The best definition is “Passing off someone else’s work or ideas as your own.” Most of the other definitions schools use would force you to leave footnotes for a statement as simple as “carbon’s atomic number is six.” But you’re not trying to pass off that statement as your own work, so a footnote isn’t needed.
I’ve looked at the contested passages, and Gay didn’t plagiarize.
In general, she gives a reference to the source and then give their results. Some people demand that everything be enclosed in quotes with footnotes (like we did in high school), but that seems silly. As long as the original source is cited in that paragraph or a nearby paragraph, she is not passing off that work as her own. Anyone can look at the original work and see exactly what they did.
Gay’s major flaw was being so immersed in DEI and CRT that she was unable to see blatant antisemitism when it was shoved in her face. Calling for the murder of Jews is clearly harassment and intimidation of Jewish students, and is not protected speech by any means. But her intense devotion to DEI prevents her from acknowledging that.
Many college administrators, especially the DEI devotees, consider Jews and all white people to be “oppressors,” who should be opposed “by any means.” Ask the Oberlin President whether advocating for genocide of Jews would be OK at Oberlin. I bet I bet the Oberlin students are saying that, and I bet you won’t get a straight answer!
You are absolutely wrong
She committed plagarism according to Harvard’s definition of it…that is all there is to know.
… at Harvard when she did it.
Well 3+ of the people ( with the count increasing daily) that actually had their ideas passed off by Gay as her own original thinking would beg to differ with you….I seriously doubt you went to the all original sources and then compared with all of Gays work….I will believe those who have been wrong and actual professors
See Carol Swain’s comments in the short video in the article. She absolutely does accuse Claudine Gay of stealing ideas without attribution, plagiarism in its most meaningful form.
Why are you people making such snarky comments? Don’t you understand that this is Harvard?
Only the BEST are associated with this august palace of scholarship. Little things that might harm lesser beings simply have no meaning to one such as Claudine Gay, for simply by being at Harvard, she has already proved herself WORTHY.
Now stop bothering her with trivialities and shut up you peons!
Circling the wagons to protect transparent hustlers, frauds and charlatans — the vile Dhimmi-crats excel at this.
This is the highest position in an elite university, representing the entire university before congress.
In that “context” its not possible to be overlooked.
Well, when you hire for a diversity first, you get diversity, first and not necessarily much else.
What’s the price for letting yourself be tokenized like that? We know her rate — cushy compensation, positions for life, praise and honors from tiny people who’s opinions can likewise be bought, but for less.
Has anyone asked Marc Tessier-Lavigne to weigh in on this? They circled the wagons for him, but only so that they could run over him more efficiently.
For straight white male there is no “social forgiveness”.
Yeah, I think that what might happen is that they’ve quietly told Ms. Gay that they’re doing a search to replace her, but they’ll let her retire in six months rather than being fired now. This is catastrophic (deservedly so) for Harvard, and they should have just fired her, but they think they can get away with handling it gracefully.
Penn did it right. Penn made it clear, although in slightly softer words, that Magill was fired, or would have been fired if she hadn’t resigned. And Magill wasn’t accused of the signature academic crime of plagiarism. This should stand Penn in good stead and, conversely, Harvard especially will be permanently marred by this.
It remains to be seen how MIT is perceived, but the Palestinian thugs in the Building 7 lobby, unopposed, means it isn’t the place it used to be.
Yes, that’s how Harvard handles missteps by its diversity hires. It supports them publicly while arranging their move to places like Princeton, Brown or BU.
“So, the school knew about this before Rufo, Brunet, and Sibarium published everything yesterday.’
My tinfoil hat tells me that the trio of reporters didn’t need to do their own research to uncover it, they just got tipped off by someone involved in the earlier kerfuffle.
This seems more plausible than the idea that Rufo et al. decided to slog through the collective works of Claudine Gay, together with every work referenced in those works, just in case she might have committed plagiarism.
But somebody slogged through it, or someone tipped off the NY Post. Maybe someone who got gypped and stolen from intellectually by Ms. Gay. And NY Post will protect its source. I would not assume it’s Carol Swain.
I think the point there was that the problem was discovered before her testimony, and not after, when the information could have been dismissed by the appearance of retaliation. Although the revelation of this information may have been done in retaliation, the facts of the revelation had already been established.
Harvard hasn’t been relevant since Joe Kennedy paid for a building to keep Ted in school.
I had many interactions with graduates that had an MBA from Harvard. Thought they knew everything about everything. Arrogant little pricks. They failed upward 40 years ago. It’s an institutional ethos with them. FJB
MBA. Most Bogus Accomplishment ?
Gay’s problem isn’t plagiarism but that she’s not as good as she pretended to be. She still isn’t any good.
Carol Swain on the other hand seems chiefly miffed by losing out on a citation count for what also seems to be a work of crap.
If you’re actually any good you don’t care about stuff being used without credit. If you’re any good, you’ll do something else too. A policy that puts you way ahead because you share what you’re doing and get reciprocal feedback right away.
You are utterly clueless on how academia and citations work… have you ever even read a scholarly paper… a dissertation… a book… let alone written one…I don’t know even where to begin
You can probably find me in citeseer.
Not so. It’s creepy and frustrating to have some lazy hack lift one’s original ideas and hard-earned research.
It depends on how often you have good ideas. You’re better off giving them away if it’s often.
Academics do give them away in their books and peer-reviewed papers. But giving them away doesn’t preclude the requirement (in academia) of proper citations. The academic requirement of citation doesn’t restrict the flow of information, it causes no harm. Harm, in the form of misattribution by lack of citations, is caused not when someone takes credit not due, it comes from the fact that the misattribution causes a loss of recognition to the originator, whose reputation does not accrue the credit that would result from proper citation.
My experience is that sharing leads to co-authorship on more papers than just that one.
All senior university appointments are highly political but the appointment of Gay as Harvard’s President is absolutely beyond the pale.
It has succeeded in what was once the world’s number one university, the laughing stock of the entire university world.
The job of a university president – particularly one as large as Harvard – is to be seen as an international research and education leader, and to be able to fund raise, attract and manage tens of billions of dollars in research income and endowments.
A president is also responsible for engaging with the public and government in articulate, reasoned and informed debate on complex issues.
Harvard’s President Claudine Gay does not possess a single one of these skills. Her research track record is absolutely abysmal – even if it was not being questioned. Her education record is almost non-existent, as is her ability to attract research funding from business, industry or government.
As shown by the Congressional hearings last week, Gay does not have the acuity to engage in even low level debate. At best, under normal circumstances, a person like her would struggle to obtain a position as a postdoctoral researcher or teaching assistant even in a lower-ranked institution.
What message has her appointment sent to the researchers and academic staff at Harvard? If you are a low achiever in academic research, post-secondary education and publicly funded research, but you are endorsed by the DEI industry, only a person like you can be appointed to run a joint like Harvard.
100%..and Ms. Gay needn’t fool herself into thinking they (the Board) are protecting her personally…no they are eyeball-deep still trying to protect the school. They would fire her in a minute if they thought they could.
Here I think the board has made a big blunder, and I’m sort of happy to see it. They could have washed their hands of it, investigated and fired her from the faculty, and claimed they were clean, despite her dissertation having been written at Harvard itself. And appointed someone even farther left, if any could be found.
Perhaps they think nobody will notice. Everybody in the whole world knows this was wrong, and that Harvard has no standards. When someone tells you 2+2 = 90266047, it’s wrong even if Harvard is telling you that. They seem to have overestimated their clout.
It will be interesting to see what happens now. Harvard may become even more woke, as Qatari money has complete control of Claudine Gay now. “Step out of line, and we’ll revisit those old plagiarism allegations.”
The problem at Harvard, which prevents them for taking the same kind of action against Gay that they would is she was a white or Asian guy, is much more fundamental. When you start by lowering standards for AA candidates, you’re never allowed to stop without acknowledging that such DEI / AA preferences yield lesser results. And The Narrative forbids recognizing that reality.
Harvard has let Gay skate on her affirmative action credentials for years. Like Obama, she was admitted on them, graded on them, and ultimately given a degree based on what would otherwise be viewed as mediocre academic performance at a second tier state school — because The Narrative dictates that affirmative candidates must be able do just as good at Harvard as their better credentialed white and Asian colleagues.
When the objective evidence (SAT, GRE, LSAT, MCAT scores) threatened to contradict this z narrative, they simply quit using / collecting it. (Note how schools refuse to release such data, because they well know what statistical analysis of it will show at high confidence levels.) So Gay was predestined to get a Harvard PhD from the start, regardless of the quality (or lack thereof) of her skills.
Could they have acknowledged that her dissertation is a mediocre bunch of poorly sourced hooey? Of course not, the Narrative demands that it must actually be somehow wonderful under diversity metrics (and/or evaluating it under traditional metrics is somehow racist.) So they give her an award for it and pat themselves on the back.
Now they have to hire her as a professor. Not to do so would require them to contradict The Narrative, which requires ignoring the reality of her objective academic qualifications and instead hire by box checking. This is followed by granting her tenure, despite a scarce publication record that would have been insufficient for most people to get tenure anywhere, much less an elite school. Again, The Narrative tied their hands from recognizing reality — she’s nothing special academically or as a scholar, but The Narrative demands that she must succeed whether she has or not.
Now the Harvard presidency it up. The DEI forces demand a DEI candidate, and that the board not even consider anyone else. The board complies. Once again, Gay gets socially promoted because The Narrative demands DEI prevail over objective merit.
Now that her lack of actual scholarship and management skills (as well as a nasty authoritarian streak) are on display for all to see, would Harvard even contemplate seriously evaluation her performance based on the standards it would use on a non AA hire? Of course not, because to do so would contradict The Narrative: that despite lowering standards for AA students and candidates, they somehow magically come out just as solid as their colleagues who are held to objective standards of merit.
Harvard is thus hoist upon the petard of The Narrative. It must thus not only stick with her, it must also defend her.
The rest of the world, however, sees what is going on, and this charade will devalue the Harvard brand. But again, that matters not to those invested with The Narrative as the ultimate aim.
Exactly.
Yep, that about sums it up! But it appears that The Culture of Harvard considers this to be an acceptable trade off. After all, their top tier reputation will take a hit, but mostly among little people who don’t matter anyway. And the endowment may lose a few billion, but they can easily afford that, and besides, there are still plenty of wannabe elitists willing to make that up over time. So it goes with our aristocracy, just as always, wealth and privilege provide exemptions from lesser realities.
The only group that can devalue Harvard is Harvard, and they are doing a marvelous job.
I don’t know what the fuss is all about. We have a wholesale plagiarist in the White House. Why get so worked up over some diversity hire?
Biden’s a politician. They’re expected to be greasy. He talks about his academic career as little as possible. Claudine Gay built a whole career in academics. She probably also talks about her own academic work as little as possible.
She needs to wear a sign around her neck “Don’t Blame Me, I’m An Affirmative Action Hire! DEI Is Grand!”
Any other professor brought up on plagiarism charges should use the Gay defense. Let’s see if it works for a white guy.
In Boston, there’s an old saying. “You can always tell a Harvard man, you just can’t tell him much”.
Arrogant entitled a-holes, not all, but many.
Ok Harvard, let’s go find the least attractive, least qualified black look like a lesbian, arrogant candidate for our president. This woke crap is getting boring.
The statements of the faculty downplaying the plargiasm of their work is the academic equivalent of a captured Hamas hostage telling the world that Hamas is treating them with the utmost consideration.
Implicit in the faculty statements is (to paraphrase) the old gangster shakedown line: “That’s a nice career you have. Pity if something were to happen to it.”
In effect, those academics are being held hostage.
Thank you for emphasizing the point I was making.
Now, c’mon, plagiarism worked for Joe Biden, and look where it got him.
If Gay was a white male she wound never have gotten a degree let alone the presidency of Harvard