The allegations come as university president Claudine Gay is facing calls for resignation for her failure to unequivocally condemn anti-Semitism on campus.
Harvard University President Claudine Gay has been accused of plagiarizing content from other scholars.
โI have obtained documentation demonstrating that Harvard President Claudine Gay plagiarized multiple sections of her Ph.D. thesis, violating Harvard’s policies on academic integrity. This is a bombshell,โ Christopher F. Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute think tank, said in a Dec. 11 X post.
He pointed to a 1997 paper by Ms. Gay, which he said โlifts an entire paragraph nearly verbatimโ from a 1990 paper by authors Lawrence Bobo and Franklin Gilliam
The original 1990 paper has the following statementโโBlacks in high-black-empowerment areasโas indicated by control of the mayorโs officeึซโare more active than either blacks living in low-empowerment areas or their white counterparts of comparable socioeconomic status.โ
In Ms. Gayโs 1997 paper, she writesโโAfrican-Americans in โhigh black-empowermentโ areasโas indicated by control of the mayorโs officeึซโare more active than either African-Americans in low-empowerment areas or their white counterparts of comparable socioeconomic status.โ
The only alteration that Ms. Gay made in her paper was to change the term โblackโ to โAfrican-American.โ Mr. Rufo points out that Ms. Gayโs verbatim copy of the sentence is โa direct violation of Harvardโs policy.โ
University Policy
Harvard policy states, โWhen you paraphrase, your task is to distill the source’s ideas in your own words. It’s not enough to change a few words here and there and leave the rest; instead, you must completely restate the ideas in the passage in your own words. If your own language is too close to the original, then you are plagiarizing, even if you do provide a citation.โ
Mr. Rufo alleged that Ms. Gay โrepeats this violation of Harvardโs policy throughout the document,โ using other papers which she โreproduced nearly verbatim, without quotation marks.”
In one instance, Ms. Gay โappears to lift material from scholar Carol Swain.โ A passage in Ms. Gay’s 1997 paper uses โphrasing and language nearly verbatimโ to Ms. Swainโs 1995 book, โBlack Faces, Black Interests,โ without citation, Mr. Rufo said.
