Harvard President Claudine Gay survived an antisemitism uproar only to be engulfed by a plagiarism scandal that threatens her brief term in the top job, as well as the reputation of the nation’s oldest university.
Harvard President Claudine Gay survived an antisemitism uproar only to be engulfed by a plagiarism scandal that threatens her brief term in the top job and the reputation of the nation’s oldest university.
Calls for Ms. Gay to resign are mounting as the plagiarism claims snowball. She now stands accused of 41 instances of failing to give proper credit in seven articles over 30 years, according to the latest tally by Manhattan Institute senior fellow Christopher F. Rufo, who aired the first public charges two weeks ago.
The seven published writings in question represent more than half of the 11 articles listed on her resume, a conspicuously thin record of scholarship for the president of what many consider the nation’s most prestigious university.
“This is a scandal of epic proportions for the world of higher education and for the Ivy League,” Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, told The Washington Times.
He said Ms. Gay reached “sort of the summit of Mount Everest, the highest position an American academic could attain — and she got there with a very meager publication record.
“And then that record itself turns out to be largely bogus,” he said.
The Harvard Corp. reacted to the growing furor late Wednesday by telling The Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper, that Ms. Gay would request three corrections to her 1997 Ph.D. thesis based on the findings of a subcommittee formed by the board to consider the allegations.
Notably, Harvard didn’t use the word “plagiarism.” It said the subcommittee found “duplicative language without appropriate attribution.”
Ms. Gay has submitted four corrections to two of her articles after an “independent review” found “a few instances of inadequate citation.
