Harvard President Claudine Gay is facing accusations of 40 acts of plagiarism following the controversial hearing over campus antisemitism.
The new complaint against Gay compiles dozens of cases where Gay, a political scientist, allegedly quoted or paraphrased authors without proper attribution in her academic works. This goes against the Ivy League schools' strict rules.
Claudine Gay Faces Plagiarism Accusations
The veracity of the allegations against Gay was reportedly verified by the Washington Free Beacon along with the author's identity. He was found to be a respected professor at another university who has requested anonymity for fear of retaliation.
The complaint read that it was impossible for the entirety of the materials to have already been reviewed by Harvard as many have not been previously reported or submitted. The university did not immediately respond to requests for comments regarding the situation.
The plagiarism allegations against the Harvard president first surfaced earlier this month, including claims that she lifted other scholars' works in her 1997 doctoral thesis. It added that four papers published between 1993 and 2017 did not have proper attribution, per the New York Post.
A former political science professor at Vanderbilt University, Carol Swain, said Gay copied sections of her 1993 book, "Black Faces, Black Interests: The Representation of African Americans in Congress." She also accused the Harvard president of copying from an article published in 1997 titled "Women and Blacks in Congress: 1870-1996."
Swain also said that Gay had no problem riding on the coattails of people whose work she used without proper attribution. She noted that many of those whose work was allegedly stolen by the Harvard president are not as sore as she is. She claims that they are elites who have instead benefited from a system that protects its own.
Following the allegations, it was revealed that Harvard University covered up a weeks-long investigation into whether or not Gay used other researchers' work without proper crediting and supposedly hired a bulldog law firm to help cover it up.
Investigation Into Harvard President
The House of Representatives committee initially launched an inquiry into Gay over antisemitism on campus but has expanded to include plagiarism accusations. Rep. Virginia Foxx, the chair of the Committee on Education and the Workforce, sent a four-page letter to Penny Pritzker, according to Fox News.
Pritzker is the head of Harvard University's governing board. The letter she received alleged that the school applies a different standard of academic integrity to faculty members than to students.
The Republican representative noted that the Ivy League's use of federal funding is contingent on its compliance with its accreditor, the New England Commission of Higher Education (NECHE).
In a statement last week, the Harvard Corporation, the university's top governing body, became aware of the plagiarism accusations against Gay in late October. It then conducted an independent review at Gay's request and found few missing citations but "no violation of Harvard's standards for research misconduct."
The Harvard president has faced widespread criticism after her congressional testimony about antisemitism within the school's campus. It was when she and other university presidents failed to explicitly say that calls for genocide of Jewish people constituted bullying and harassment on campus, said CNN.
