CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (TND) — Harvard University alumni are speaking out after researchers Christopher Rufo and Christopher Brunet revealed school president Claudine Gay may have plagiarized her doctoral dissertation.
In a report released Sunday, Rufo and Brunet detailed accusations that Gay lifted entire sections of text from other academics to pad her own paper. This dissertation was then submitted to Harvard for review in 1997, allowing Gay to obtain her Doctor of Psychology degree and eventually become the school’s leading administrator.
First, Gay lifts an entire paragraph nearly verbatim from Lawrence Bobo and Franklin Gilliam’s paper, ‘Race, Sociopolitical Participation, and Black Empowerment,’ while passing it off as her own paraphrase and language,” the report reads. “Second, Gay appears to lift material from scholar Carol Swain in at least two instances.”They also alleged that Gay "composes an entire appendix in the dissertation directly taken from Gary King’s book, A Solution to the Ecological Inference Problem.”
Such plagiarism is what Harvard calls “verbatim plagiarism.” It is a violation of the school’s Honor Code, which can lead to the school taking substantial disciplinary actions.
“Students who, for whatever reason, submit work either not their own or without clear attribution to its sources will be subject to disciplinary action, up to and including requirement to withdraw from the College,” the school's Honor Code dictates. “Students who have been found responsible for any violation of these standards will not be permitted to submit course evaluation of the course in which the infraction occurred.”
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The researchers continued, Rufo and Brunet called on the school to thoroughly investigate Gay’s past scholarship.
In light of this troubling evidence, we call on Harvard’s Board of Overseers to conduct a full investigation into Claudine Gay’s academic integrity,” they wrote. “If she has violated the code of academic conduct, she must resign—or get voted out by the board.”Harvard alums were outraged by the revelation, with at least one calling on Gay to be dismissed from her position.
“I asked a senior member of the @Harvard faculty to examine the below allegations of plagiarism against President Gay,” Pershing Square CEO and Harvard alum Bill Ackman said. “The faculty member found them to be credible.”
“The Harvard President plagiarized her dissertation,” Harvard alum and former U.S. Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell wrote. “She must be fired. This is embarrassing for Harvard’s academic credibility.”
Gay has been under fire since her December 5 testimony to Congress about antisemitism on Harvard's campus. During the hearing, Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., pressed Gay on whether calling for the genocide of Jews constitutes harassment on Harvard's campus. Her responses have earned her widespread backlash, including calls for her resignation.
The president of the University of Pennsylvania, who also testified at the hearing, resigned from her position on Saturday.
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Gay on Monday denied the accusations, describing them as baseless in a statement to The Boston Globe.
“I stand by the integrity of my scholarship,” Gay said. “Throughout my career, I have worked to ensure my scholarship adheres to the highest academic standards.”
The school did not respond Monday to a request for comment on the matter.
In a letter titled “Claudine Gay Should Go," the National Association of Scholars called for Gay’s dismissal Monday night. In its letter, the organization said the president’s testimony to Congress was unacceptable.
“Gay also has revealed extraordinary moral obtuseness by her inability to speak clearly to condemn the moral degenerates of Harvard who have glorified the butchery of Jews and, under the thin disguise of the slogan ‘From the River to the Sea,’ called for the genocide of the Jewish nation of Israel,” the group wrote. “The time has come to bring down the curtain on a presidential appointment that plainly had the support of campus activists and a fair number of faculty members—but which was from the beginning ill-founded, and is now a national embarrassment.”
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