Harvard University covered up a high-profile investigation into whether its controversial president was a plagiarist and used an expensive law firm to threaten the Post over our own investigation.
The university announced Tuesday morning that it had investigated Claudine Gay about whether any of her academic work was plagiarized and had cleared her of violating the university’s “research misconduct standards.”
Instead, it said it would request four corrections to two posts to insert quotes and quotation marks that were originally “omitted.”
But The Post can reveal that Harvard spent weeks without clarifying that Gay was under investigation, remaining silent even as it was dragged before Congress for disastrous testimony about how the Ivy League university is dealing with anti-Semitism on campus.
Harvard only revealed the research when the university’s governing body, the Harvard Corporation, said it unanimously supported it despite a storm of criticism over its evidence before Congress.
Harvard’s public statement on plagiarism accusations came a day after a conservative activist questions posted in X about citations in Gay’s 1997 doctoral thesis.
Harvard did not disclose that it had conducted a plagiarism investigation against its president Claudine Gay when she appeared before Congress last week. Boston Globe via Getty Images This is how Harvard revealed that Claudine Gay was being investigated for possible plagiarism and that it had acquitted her, although it is now asking for four corrections in two published articles. Harvard/X
Gay had vigorously defended his academic record in comments to the Boston Globe after the thesis questions were revealed, saying: “I defend the integrity of my scholarship. “Throughout my career, I have worked to ensure that my scholarship meets the highest academic standards.”
Tuesday’s statement, sent to “members of the Harvard community,” said the investigation began in late October, after Harvard “became aware” of the allegations about Gay.
But the statement doesn’t tell the full story, including how Harvard called in bulldog lawyers to protect Gay.
The Post contacted the university on Oct. 24, asking for comment on more than two dozen cases in which Gay’s words appeared to closely parallel words, phrases or sentences in works published by other scholars.
The “senior member” of the Harvard Corporation is Penny Prtizker, (right), a billionaire descendant of the family that owns the Hyatt hotel who was one of President Obama’s commerce secretaries. Getty Images One of the scholars whose work closely parallels Gay’s is George Reid Andrews. He said he didn’t rise to the level of plagiarism. University of Pittsburgh Anne Williamson of Miami University, Ohio, said she was “shocked” by the parallels between her work and one of Gay’s articles and said, “It seems like plagiarism to me.” University of Miami
The 27 cases were in two academic articles published in two peer-reviewed journals between 2011 and 2017, and in an article in an academic journal in 1993.
The Post was sent the material anonymously, and we conducted our own analysis before asking Harvard to comment on whether Gay had plagiarized or failed to properly cite the work of other scholars.
We have continued investigating since then.
When The Post took the allegations to Harvard, Jonathan Swain, its senior executive director of media relations and communications, asked for more time to review Gay’s work.
A day later, Swain, who was part of the Biden-Harris transition team and a former aide to Hillary Clinton, said he would “get back in touch in the coming days.”
Among the 27 cases The Post asked Harvard to comment on was this example of Gay’s work as a graduate student, published in a trade journal.
But he did not.
And two days later, on October 27, the Post received a 15-page letter from Thomas Clare, a powerful Virginia-based attorney with the Clare-Locke firm who identified himself as a Harvard and Gay University defamation attorney.
The letter contained comments from academics whose work Gay had allegedly misquoted, even though the political scientists’ review may have only just begun.
Harvard has not yet said what works Gay is seeking to correct and whether his dissertation will be corrected.
When Gay testified before Congress about Harvard’s handling of anti-Semitism, she did not tell members of the House Education and Workforce committee that she was being investigated for plagiarism. AP
He did not respond to an additional series of questions from The Post on Tuesday.
The dates of the three works reviewed by The Post range from 1993, when Gay was a graduate student, to 2017, when she was Dean of Social Sciences in the school’s College of Arts and Sciences.
Gay, 53, took office as Harvard’s first black president earlier this year.
Jonathan Bailey, who runs Plagiarism Now and has worked as an expert witness in plagiarism cases, reviewed the articles in question and said he believes some of Gay’s work violated Harvard’s own academic policy on citations.
This was one of 27 cases The Post asked Harvard to comment on. It was published in the peer-reviewed journal Urban Affairs in 2011.
“It is a violation of policy and that alone should warrant a thorough examination,” Bailey said in an email to The Post.
Scholars whose work seemed strikingly similar to Gay’s differed on whether they felt she had appropriated their work without attribution.
George Reid Andrews, a history professor at the University of Pittsburgh, acknowledged that Gay “borrowed some of my phrases” in his 1993 article “Between Whites and Blacks: The Complexity of Brazilian Race Relations” from Reid Andrews’ article “Black Political Protest in Sao Paulo, 1888-1988”, which appeared in the Revista de Estudios Latinoamericanos in 1992.
“But this happens quite frequently in academic writing and, to me, it doesn’t rise to the level of plagiarism,” he said. “I’m glad you read my work, learned from it, and recommended it to your readers.”
Jens Ludwig, an economist at the University of Chicago, had a similar response when The Post contacted him in October about the similarities in a paper he co-authored in 2008 and Gay’s “Moving to Opportunity: The Political Effects of a Housing Mobility Experiment.” . published in Urban Affairs Review in 2011.
This example was published in Urban Affairs Review in 2017, when Gay was dean of social sciences at Harvard. This was a second instance of Urban Affairs Review in 2017, when Gay was dean of social sciences at Harvard. Harvard has not said which Gay articles it seeks to correct.
“We partnered with Claudine on some jobs and I guess that’s the connection,” he said.
Among the articles under scrutiny is “A Room for One’s Own?” 2017. The Partisan Allocation of Affordable Housing,” published in Urban Affairs Review and written while Gay was dean of social sciences at Harvard.
In the article, Gay uses phrases that closely parallel those in a 2011 article by Anne Williamson, a political science professor at Miami University in Ohio.
Williamson told The Post she was “angry” when she read the excerpts.
“It seems like plagiarism to me,” he said.
“If they are going to do what they did, then they should cite me as a reference. My first reaction is shock. The second reaction is one of perplexity. There was a way to profit from my article. All I had to do is give myself a credit.”
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