The university released its most detailed account of its handling of plagiarism accusations against Claudine Gay, who resigned earlier this month.
NEW YORK TIMES
In a report to a congressional committee, released on Friday, Harvard gave its most detailed account yet of its handling of the plagiarism accusations against Claudine Gay, who resigned this month as the university’s president.
The basic outlines of the saga were known, but Harvard had not disclosed many details, which had led to questions about the impartiality and rigor of its investigation.
In its account, Harvard defended the thoroughness of its plagiarism review. It said an outside panel had found Dr. Gay’s papers to be “sophisticated and original,” with “virtually no evidence of intentional claiming of findings” that were not hers, even as it found a pattern of duplicative language in three papers.
But its account also shows a university governing board that was slow to do a full accounting of her work. Instead, over several weeks, Harvard scrambled to investigate a steady drip of plagiarism accusations, unable to give an immediate, authoritative response to questions about Dr. Gay’s scholarship.
The report is part of a broader submission of documents by Harvard, made in response to a Dec. 20 letter from the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, which is investigating plagiarism and antisemitism accusations against universities. That committee held the now notorious hearing on campus antisemitism at which Dr. Gay and two other college presidents were criticized for their legalistic answers to questions about antisemitism.
The committee said it was currently reviewing Harvard’s submission. So far, only the plagiarism report has been publicly released.
Harvard’s account begins on Oct. 24, when it says a New York Post reporter approached the university about the plagiarism accusations.
The Post presented Harvard with a list of 25 excerpts that Dr. Gay, a political scientist, was accused of having plagiarized, from three articles that she had written. One article was dated 1993, when she was a graduate student, and the others 2012 and 2017, when she was on the faculty, the report says.
Harvard, according to the report, reached out to several of the authors she was accused of plagiarizing — “none of whom objected to then-President Gay’s language.”
The university formed a subcommittee to direct the review, with the help of lawyers. The members of the subcommittee were Biddy Martin, a former president of Amherst College; Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, a former justice of the Supreme Court of California; Shirley Tilghman, a former president of Princeton University; and Theodore V. Wells Jr., partner at the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison.
