New York Post: Harvard Covered for Claudine Gay Before the School Investigated Plagiarism Allegations
Through powerful lawyers, Harvard told The Post that the claims against Gay were false before it even started the investigation.
The New York Post announced that Harvard covered for President Claudine Gay before even investigating plagiarism allegations against her.
Last week, the newspaper revealed that in October, anonymous sources told it about possible plagiarism committed by Gay. The Post reached out to the school.
Through powerful lawyers, Harvard bullied The Post, claiming that the accusations were “demonstrably false” and that Gay “cited and properly credited” sources in her works.
The Clare Locke law firm “previously represented the Sackler family [former owners of Purdue Pharma, linked to the opioid cases], Matt Lauer, and Russian oligarchs after the invasion of Ukraine” along with Dominion Voting Systems against Fox News:
Clare Locke said it was representing both Harvard and Gay.
“These allegations of plagiarism are demonstrably false,” the law firm wrote — suggesting that Harvard had cleared Gay already.
“Harvard and President Gay stand together in their determination that the proposed article must not be published.
“The Post must not move forward with the proposed article.”
It claimed that any suggestion of plagiarism “rests on a fatally flawed understanding of what ‘plagiarism’ is (and is not) in scholarly work performed in academic journals and settings.”
It also accused The Post of conducting “facile comparisons of similar phrases” to assess whether there was evidence which would support plagiarism allegations. Plagiarism means copying without attribution.
The letter rounded up statements from academics using college letterheads — whose work The Post had found bore striking resemblance to Gay’s — to say that they did not believe they had been plagiarized.
Clare Locke also represented Sarah Palin in her defamation lawsuit against The New York Times and Project Veritas against Stanford University
Harvard's lawyers told the New York Post that Claudine Gay's plagiarized passages were "not plagiarism" before launching any investigation. Then the lawyers bullied the Post into silence, saying the paper "must not move forward with the proposed article." This is corruption. pic.twitter.com/ENcDhL89Fp
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) December 22, 2023
The Post learned that two days after Harvard sent the letters, Gay supposedly asked for an investigation a few days later, which led to the school putting together a subcommittee to review her works.
The subcommittee went against the formal policy of investigating faculty members. Harvard claimed it wanted “to avoid a ‘conflict of interest’ due to Gay’s status.”
The experts, none from Harvard, “found she did need to make multiple corrections to her academic record.”
Then, that powerful law firm hired by Harvard threatened to sue The Post “for ‘immense’ damages.”
Except for…the initial investigation never happened:
Harvard never revealed an investigation had been launched as the lawyers put pressure on The Post to kill its reporting.
But more than a month later, on December 12 Harvard said Gay had been investigated by its top governing body and was correcting two academic journals, to acknowledge where her work had really come from — meaning the claim it was “properly credited” was false.
This story has become beyond…bizarre.
One letter from Harvard sticking up for Gay suggested the AIO program ChatGPT produced the alleged plagiarism:
“[T]here are strong indications that the excerpts cited by The Post were not in fact the ‘complaints’ of a human complainant — but rather were generated by artificial intelligence or some other technological or automated means,” it said.
“If these indications are correct, and the ultimate source of these examples is an algorithm-generated list created by asking ChatGPT to (for example) ‘show me the 10 most similar passages in works by Claudine Gay to other scholarly works’ it is no ‘complaint’ at all. It is, instead, manufactured news.”
The letter also threatened to expose those who supplied The Post with the plagiarism allegations.
Harvard tells students that it holds faculty and academic members to the same standards. The policy states:
“Even if you write down your own ideas in your own words and place them around text that you’ve drawn directly from a source, you 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.”
When in doubt, add a footnote and citation! It’s not hard to do.
Harvard hit a six-year high in 2020-2021 when 27 undergraduates had to withdraw because of honor code violations, “which includes plagiarism, exam cheating, and other infractions.”
“Plagiarism and exam cheating were the most cited concerns in Honor Council cases,” The Harvard Crimson reported in November 2022. “Inappropriate collaboration dropped from 27.6 percent of cases in the 2019-2020 academic year to 12 percent in the 2020-2021 academic year.”
The Honor Council found 47 types of plagiarism and 60 types of exam cheating during that time period.
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Comments
In 2004, Charles Ogletree, a Harvard professor, was also accused of plagiarism. He countered that his student assistants didn’t properly attribute the source in his book. And that was enough. It didn’t really matter that Ogletree was taking credit for the work of his assistants. Maybe Ms. Gay can offer a similar defense? She didn’t plagiarize, it was just a sloppy student assistant?
I’d also like to question those on her dissertation panel.
Don’t bother. Her whole field is a complete joke that has no business anywhere in serious academia.
Gay is not smart enough to think of that, she is used to a free pass.
Poster child for the reasons why not to do diversity hires.
You’re looking at it from our viewpoint. But from their viewpoint, she’s the poster child for reasons why to do more diversity hires.
Well, if you ever need a dirty law firm that will lie, cheat and bully others in your defense, better call Clare Locke LLP.
I would love to work as a defense attorney because I don’t think many people get a fair trial…but this law firm creeps me out like that one that worked with Hillary Clinton….Perkins Coie!
LOL.
That has to be the most retarded thing I’ve read in years – which is saying quite a lot, these days.
…
…
I’m still laughing …
I’m still laughing, too. Desperation leaves an awful smell.
Absolutely. It discounts the possibility that an AI search is incapable to finding plagiarism in a work. Undoubtedly, AI could wrongfully identify plagiarism where it doesn’t exist, but just as surely it’s likely capable of accurately identifying it too. This is where the human element comes into the equation, in the verification of the AI’s work.
Correction: “It discounts the possibility that an AI search is capable of finding…”
Gay, by the way, is a product of Exeter Academy (how she got there who the hell knows?), Princeton, Stanford, and Harvard.
Let that all sink in.
And she seems to have spent a decent amount of her childhood in Saudi Arabia (though no one wants to say exactly how much). It feels as though I’ve seen this movie before … once or twice.
So, you’re thinking we may have just seen the derailing of the “Historic First(!) Black Female President?”
They will keep her till the train runs off the track. Harvard will be derailed before she is.
I was speaking of “US president;” I realize now that the remark was too ambiguous.
Your post is clear. My apologies for jumping the gun.
Plagiarism won’t be a problem in the future for her because she can use ChatGPT instead.
At this point the Harvard Corporation is between a rock and a hard place. I’m really enjoying the shit show, especially the logic used by some to defend her. I wonder who is in charge of the soft pedal word smithing like calling her plagiarism “duplicative language”.
They almost went with “undocumented citations”, but that got voted down.
Bwahaha!
Althouse blog comment
I haven’t been able to find anything about the development minister, but the link to the cement company is good.
It keeps her in shoes.
Seems like making public defamatory claims of shoddy reporting and made up sources deserves a similar threatening letter.
Time for The Sandman Maneuver, I think. What’s an initial retainer to get Dewie, Cheatum, n Howe on the job.
Hmmm, let’s see
Just spitballin here
Clearly, this woman could not possibly have been hired based on her record of academic achievements. I mean, objectively, even a child understands that ~11 articles isn’t much.
OK… and just as clearly this woman could not possibly have been hired based on her record of faithful adherence to societal norms of honesty. Or decency. I mean, objectively, even a child understands you don’t copy other people’s stuff.
And yet, apparently Obama apparently made time to make phone calls to keep her in her job as president of harvard
Apparently Obama did not make phone calls to get her removed — as one might have assumed that he might.
No. Obama took time out of his schedule to keep this woman in her position.
Why would this Harvard personnel matter be such a high priority to him?
BLACK
Obama was merely hustlin’ to help a fellow hustler.
Doesn’t the lead photo simply scream “Patsy?”
It doesn’t scream “Pasty.”
The basic problem is that in any of the disciplines associated with the social sciences have NOTHING for any PH.D student to discover. STEM programs have new discoveries every day or week which PhD students can explore with original work. The social sciences have nothing so they have to be creative in the work of PhD students which is why you get silly dissertations claiming that Milton is not a man, CRT is a must, everyone is racist etc. etc. and the claims go into more and more bizarre proposals to reach for that PhD. It is predictable when someone has spent their entire academic career (10 years plus) that they will reach into someone else’ work to complete their work. Academics have reached peak silliness – not only do they produce little that if valuable to most people, but they do it at great cost to everyone.
The only solution is to kill a lot of universities/colleges and their programs.
Typically brazen mendacity and bullying from the arrogant Dhimmi-crats. If you wonder why our federal government apparatchiks act in a similarly dishonest and obnoxious manner, it’s because many of these reprobates are products of the rotten institution that is Harvard.
And, it’s no surprise whatsoever to learn that the vile narcissist-incompetent and apologist for Muslim supremacism/terrorism/Islamofascism, dunce Obama, went to bat for Gay in this situation, using his clout to back up a fellow hustler.
Honestly, I’m just annoyed by her silly haircut and glasses.