Headline Roundup December 18, 2023
Did Harvard President Claudine Gay Commit Plagiarism in Her Research?
Summary from the AllSides News Team
In addition to facing backlash over her congressional testimony earlier this month regarding anti-semitism on college campuses, Harvard President Claudine Gay has now been accused of committing plagiarism in her Ph.D. thesis.
For Context: Following the plagiarism accusations, Gay submitted corrections to two scholarly articles published in 2001 and 2017.
The Accuser’s Words: In the Wall Street Journal Opinion (Lean Right bias), Carol M. Swain, the author of the works Gay is accused of plagiarizing, wrote that Gay’s work “builds on terrain where I plowed the ground.” Swain argues that Gay’s work contains no “ground-breaking originality” and that Gay used Harvard’s desire for diversity to “parlay mediocre research into tenure and administrative advancement at what was once considered a world-class university.”
Harvard’s “Woke Future”: The New York Post Editorial Board (Right bias) outlined their investigation into Gay’s alleged plagiarism, describing Harvard’s use of “high-powered attorneys to try to quash” the paper’s reporting, concluding that Harvard “tapped Gay to lead the school into the woke future, and it won’t let credible accusations of plagiarism, or soaring campus antisemitism on her watch, get in the way.”
Academic Ambiguity: The Boston Globe (Left bias) Editorial Board pushed back on Harvard’s defense of Gay regarding the accusations, asking, “If Gay didn’t violate any standards of research, why would she need to correct anything?” The Board determined Gay should not be fired but raised concerns that “the university is muddying what should be a clear-cut line and creating ambiguity about academic standards.”
Featured Coverage of this Story
Haiyun Jiang/Bloomberg
The rest of American higher education looks to Harvard for guidance on academic norms. With that leadership role in mind, the university should clear away the uncertainty over how it has applied its plagiarism policies to president Claudine Gay’s past academic work and state clearly whether several of her papers ran afoul of the rules it expects students and professors to follow — or not.
Gay’s scholarly publications have come under a microscope in recent months, and media outlets have flagged numerous examples of what appear to be nearly verbatim...
Embattled Harvard University President Dr. Claudine Gay is now being accused of plagiarism.
A political scientist claims she did not get credit in the Ph.D. thesis that helped Gay land the top spot in the Ivy League.
This comes just after the university board reaffirmed its support of Gay, who was being pressured to resign over Capitol Hill testimony where she didn’t outright condemn antisemitism on campus.
Dr. Carol Swain, a political scientist and legal scholar, told NewsNation’s Leland Vittert Tuesday night that Harvard was trying to protect Gay.
AP
Boy, are the powers-that-be at Harvard invested in protecting President Claudine Gay — not just over her telling fumbles on antisemitism, but on multiple indications of plagiarism in her (scant) published academic work.
Concerns that Harvard not only kept secret, but deployed high-powered attorneys to try to quash.
The Post began investigating Gay’s potential plagiarism weeks before her disastrous Dec. 5 House testimony on antisemitism, reaching out to Harvard Oct. 24 for comment on dozens of suspect passages.
The school’s response was to stall for days, then threaten us: The...
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