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.
“I 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,” 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 “lifts an entire paragraph nearly verbatim” from a 1990 paper by authors Lawrence Bobo and Franklin Gilliam
The original 1990 paper has the following statement—“Blacks in high-black-empowerment areas—as indicated by control of the mayor’s office֫—are more active than either blacks living in low-empowerment areas or their white counterparts of comparable socioeconomic status.”
In Ms. Gay’s 1997 paper, she writes—“African-Americans in ‘high black-empowerment’ areas—as indicated by control of the mayor’s office֫—are more active than either African-Americans in low-empowerment areas or their white counterparts of comparable socioeconomic status.”
The only alteration that Ms. Gay made in her paper was to change the term “black” to “African-American.” Mr. Rufo points out that Ms. Gay’s verbatim copy of the sentence is “a direct violation of Harvard’s policy.”
University Policy
Harvard policy states, “When 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.”
Mr. Rufo alleged that Ms. Gay “repeats this violation of Harvard’s policy throughout the document,” using other papers which she “reproduced nearly verbatim, without quotation marks.”
In one instance, Ms. Gay “appears to lift material from scholar Carol Swain.” A passage in Ms. Gay’s 1997 paper uses “phrasing and language nearly verbatim” to Ms. Swain’s 1995 book, “Black Faces, Black Interests,” without citation, Mr. Rufo said.
