Happy New Year, Harvard President Claudine Gay!
The anonymous whistleblower filed a new complaint with Harvard, calling into question six more possible incidents of plagiarism in Gay’s works.
The whistleblower, who first went to The New York Post in October, also lashed out at Harvard for using lawyers to intimidate the newspaper and the whistleblower.
The whistleblower said those actions are exactly why they are anonymous and won’t come forward (emphasis by the whistleblower):
Even worse, the New York Post reports that Gay and Harvard “threatened to use legal means to out who had supplied the comparisons,” a shocking admission that Gay and Harvard sought to retaliate against me personally. At one point Gay and Harvard asked the Post, “Why would someone making such a complaint be unwilling to attach their name to it?” I was unwilling because I feared that Gay and Harvard would violate their policies, behave more like a cartel with a hedge fund attached than a university, and try to seek “immense” damages from me and who knows what else. Since I’ve answered their lawyer’s stupid question, allow me to ask a reasonable question of my own. Why would an institution assessing allegations made in good faith, and ultimately substantiated, threaten to use its enormous resources to expose the identity of a whistleblower? Did Gay wish to personally thank me for helping her to improve her work even if I drove her harder than she wanted to be driven? Gay and Harvard sought to silence and retaliate against a journalist and a whistleblower.
Retaliating against those who make complaints violates Harvard’s policy: “Harvard community members may not retaliate in any way against complainants, witnesses, the RIO, or committee members.”
“They [Gay and members of the Harvard Corporation] should all be investigated for retaliation against a misconduct complainant (Inquiry 3),” wrote the whistleblower. “As should any other Harvard personnel who were privy to this extraordinary abuse of Harvard’s power and institutional resources to pursue a personal vendetta and to cover up a decades-long pattern of research misconduct. If Gay authorized these threats without consulting with the board, the board should tell us.”
The Washington Free Beacon‘s Aaron Sibarium reported the new complaint on Monday night.
A different Gay publication popped up in the new allegations: “The Effect of Minority Districts and Minority Representation on Political Participation in California.”
Sibarium said the allegations include “some of the most extreme and clear-cut cases of plagiarism yet.”
Most of the alleged plagiarism comes from the book Race, Redistricting, and Representation: The Unintended Consequences of Black Majority Districts, written by David Canon and published in 1999.
Canon insisted Gay did nothing wrong. He told Sibarium, “I am not at all concerned about the passages. This isn’t even close to an example of academic plagiarism.”
The complaint includes more supposed plagiarism in Gay’s 1997 dissertation, “Taking Charge: Black Electoral Success and the Redefinition of American Politics.”
These plagiarism allegations come from Frank Gilliam’s article “Exploring Minority Empowerment: Symbolic Politics, Governing Coalitions and Traces of Political Style in Los Angeles” and Gary King’s book A Solution to the Ecological Inference Problem: Reconstructing Individual Behavior from Aggregate Data.
King served as Gay’s dissertation adviser.
King and Gilliam did not respond to Sibarium for a comment.
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