A new report to Congress confirms that after The Post contacted Harvard University over plagiarism allegations against its former president last year, the Ivy League school’s board of trustees hired a powerful law firm, where a leader of The board has long been a senior partner.
William Lee, a partner at WilmerHale, was, until June 2022, a Senior Fellow at Harvard Corporation.
Despite leaving the Harvard Corporation in 2022, Lee, who is also a law professor at the school, “has continued to exert significant influence among Harvard’s senior leaders, including senior administrators, members of the Corporation and its successor, the Principal Investigator Penny Pritzker. ”According to the Harvard Crimson.
A prominent law professor, who asked not to be identified, criticized Harvard’s decision to withhold Lee’s signature, telling The Post that it “does not satisfy the appearance of justice,” because Lee’s role at the university gave his signs “a tremendous advantage.” He is an important figure in the law firm and was an important figure in the corporation.”
“There was no conflict,” Lee told The Post.
But that doesn’t satisfy New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik.
Former Harvard president Claudine Gay resigned earlier this month amid growing accusations of plagiarism. Harvard University/AFP via Getty Images
“The Harvard Corporation actively worked to cover up the negligence and failures of Harvard University, doubling down in defense of its corrupt leadership,” Stefanik told The Post in a statement. “In fact, instead of protecting Jewish students and removing Claudine Gay, former Harvard Corporation Board member William Lee lined the pockets of his WilmerHale law firm. [hired] to defend the former Harvard president’s history of serial plagiarism and anti-Semitism. A reckoning is taking place; “Our robust congressional investigation will continue to expose the institutional problems plaguing our most elite colleges and universities and provide needed accountability to the American people.”
Neither Lee nor a WilmerHale spokesperson responded to a Post question about whether or not the company was paid when, as the report said, it “withheld… in connection with these [plagiarism] accusations.”
According to an April 2022 article on his company’s website, Lee was instrumental in the university’s last two presidential searches. He clarified to The Post that it was a reference to former Harvard presidents “Drew Faust and Larry Bacow.” “I was not involved in the most recent search.”
William Lee, who resigned from the leadership of Harvard’s governing body last year, is a partner at WilmerHale, one of two high-powered law firms hired to respond to Claudine Gay’s plagiarism allegations. Wilmer Hale LLP
Lee, 74, was personally involved, along with another lawyer from his firm, in preparing Gay before his disastrous testimony – led by Stefanik – about campus anti-Semitism before Congress last month. Earlier this month, the embattled president, who faced multiple accusations of plagiarism, resigned.
“Harvard is playing with everyone,” said Carol Swain, a former political science professor at Vanderbilt University and an acclaimed African-American scholar who accused Gay of plagiarizing her work. “That’s how they responded every step of the way.”
Swain said his attorney sent a letter to the Harvard Corporation on Jan. 3, requesting to know what “remedies” the Ivy League institution seeks to take for the unauthorized use of his work. Swain told The Post on Wednesday that he has not received a response from the school’s governing body.
Congresswoman Elise Stefanik questioned then-Harvard President Claudine Gay during a congressional hearing in December. “The Harvard Corporation actively worked to cover up the negligence and failures of Harvard University,” she told The Post. @RepStefanik /X
“I have no intention of abandoning this issue,” he said. “It is deeply disturbing that Harvard University can ignore its own academic guidelines, rules that the rest of us are expected to follow.”
In its six-page report to the House Committee on Education and the Workforce released last week, the Harvard Corporation admitted that “we understand and recognize that many felt that our efforts were not sufficiently transparent, raising questions about our review process and standard.”
The Corporation appointed a subcommittee of four fellows, who then appointed a review panel consisting of “three of the country’s most prominent political scientists” to conduct the review of Gay’s work, the letter said. The corporation declined to name the three academics, citing its own desire to remain anonymous.
Penny Pritzker, a senior researcher at the Harvard Corporation, hired WilmerHale and another high-profile law firm after The Post contacted the school about plagiarism allegations against Gay. Yevhen Kotenko/Ukrinform via ZUMA / SplashNews.com
“They’re anonymous because they knew what they were doing was fake,” Swain said. “They should have been willing to put their name on it. He is clearly someone who wants something from Harvard and is afraid.”
The Corporation took all of these actions following questions from The Post in October about more than two dozen alleged cases of plagiarism by Gay. Three days after The Post sent questions to the school’s public relations office on Oct. 24, we received a threatening 15-page letter that said in part that the allegations against Gay were “demonstrably false” even before the Corp. would have embarked on his own investigation. .
Now, a watchdog group is demanding that an accrediting institution investigate Harvard University for its handling of plagiarism allegations against Gay, a move that could determine whether the Ivy League school continues to receive hundreds of millions in federal funding. as The Post learned.
Prominent political scientist Carol Swain says Claudine Gay plagiarized her seminal work on the representation of black Americans in Congress. She says it is “deeply disturbing” that Harvard has abandoned its own guidelines on the integrity of academic work. Fox News
The American Council of Trustees and Alumni, a nonprofit organization based in Washington, D.C., sent a formal complaint earlier this month to the New England Commission on Higher Education, a group that has been accrediting colleges for the Department of Education since its foundation in 1885.
A spokesman for the Harvard Corporation declined to comment.
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