Harvard University President Claudine Gay is facing more pressure to resign following fresh plagiarism allegations. First, critics called for her resignation after her testimony on antisemitism sparked a House investigation into the university. Gay now faces new plagiarism accusations.
Harvard’s top governing board is aware of the president missing proper citations in several published articles, but the board said those instances don’t meet the threshold for “research misconduct.”
The board has said it unanimously stands by its president, as it did following Congressional testimony when Dr. Gay would not say “calls for genocide” went against the school’s code of conduct.
The most recent review did not consider alleged plagiarism in her dissertation as a Ph.D. student.
The Washington Free Beacon independently reviewed four papers published by Gay between 1993 and 2017, including her doctoral dissertation. Its review found Gay “paraphrased or quoted nearly 20 authors without proper attribution more than 40 times.”
School officials said Gay will now submit three revisions to her 1997 dissertation after she left out “important quotations and citations” in her work.
Following the latest allegations, the House will expand its existing investigation into the university.
The House Committee on Education and the Workforce has begun a review of Harvard’s handling of the plagiarism accusations.
The committee chair sent a letter to Harvard’s governing board asking for all documents and communications concerning the president’s alleged plagiarism. The chair also requested a list of typical disciplinary actions the university uses when they find a faculty member or student guilty of plagiarism.
