Embattled Harvard President Claudine Gay has been hit with 40 new allegations of plagiarism, including claims that she deleted “entire paragraphs” in her academic papers.
The new allegations were first reported Wednesday in a shocking report by the Washington Free Beacon and include seven publications written by Gay.
The allegations range from missing quotation marks around individual phrases or sentences to entire paragraphs being deleted verbatim.
Gay, 53, has seen an investigation into anti-Semitism on campus expand into an investigation into suspected plagiarism.
During her infamous appearance at a Republican-led hearing, the under-fire president forgot to say that calling for genocide against Jews violated Harvard University rules.
Harvard President Claudine Gay is still in power despite the backlash to her statement last week and new allegations of plagiarism
Gay was accused of copying two paragraphs from papers by then-Harvard scholars D. Stephen Voss and Bradley Palmquist. A paragraph is almost identical except for a few words
However, Gay did not use quotation marks or quotations in the text – Voss and Palmquist are not quoted anywhere in their dissertation
Last week, Gay submitted two corrections to articles accusing her of plagiarism, adding “inverted commas and citations,” a university spokesman said.
On Wednesday, it was announced that Gay was correcting two additional cases of insufficient citation following the letter. The school told the Boston Globe that it found “examples of double language without appropriate attribution” in its 1997 doctoral dissertation.
“President Gay will update her dissertation and correct these instances of under-citation.”
In a Substack post, investigative journalist Christopher Rufo reported that Gay plagiarized portions of four works over 24 years, including her 1997 doctoral dissertation and a number of articles.
The university investigated the plagiarism allegations and said Friday that corrections had been made.
The corrections were made to a 2017 article titled “A Room to Yourself?” “The Partisan Allocation of Affordable Housing,” in the Urban Affairs Review.
A 2001 article titled “The Effect of Black Congressional Representation on Political Participation” in the American Political Science Review was also changed.
While the board says it found no violation of school policies in Gay's work, The Harvard Crimson, which reviewed examples of alleged plagiarism, came to a different conclusion.
The House Education and Workforce Committee announced in a letter that it is expanding the scope of its anti-gay investigations, according to a letter from Rep. Virginia Foxx
Harvard President Claudine Gay is now facing a congressional investigation into dozens of allegations of plagiarism that have surfaced since her mocked testimony at the Capitol about anti-Semitism on campus
The school's newspaper said some of Gay's writings “apparently violate Harvard's current policies regarding plagiarism and academic integrity.”
This came after the Washington Free Beacon and right-wing bloggers Rufo and Christopher Brunet alleged that Gay had plagiarized portions of four academic papers, including her 1994 PhD dissertation at Harvard entitled “Taking Charge: Black Electoral Success and the Redefinition of American Politics.”
Billionaire Bill Ackman amplified the allegations as part of his campaign to oust Gay from the top job at his alma mater.
Gay defended her work to the Boston Globe: “I stand for the integrity of my scholarship.” “Throughout my career, I have worked to ensure that my scholarship meets the highest academic standards.”
While the bloggers focused their claims on Gay's dissertation, The Free Beacon also examined three other works by the scientist: a 1993 essay in the publication Origins and two essays from 2012 and 2017, when Gay was already a Harvard professor.
While some of Free Beacon's claims involve minor citation issues, Crimson said others are “more substantive, including some paragraphs and sentences that are nearly identical to other works and lack citations.”
The student publication references Harvard's rule defining plagiarism, which states that when copying language “verbatim,” scholars “must acknowledge the author of the source material either by enclosing the source material in quotation marks and providing a clear citation, or by …”paraphrase the source material and provide a clear quote.'
Gay was accused of copying two paragraphs from papers by then-Harvard scholars D. Stephen Voss and Bradley Palmquist. A paragraph is almost identical except for a few words.
However, Gay did not use quotation marks or quotations in the text – Voss and Palmquist are not quoted anywhere in their dissertation.
It is unclear whether the same rules applied when Gay submitted her dissertation in 1997.
But Voss, who now teaches at the University of Kentucky, told The Crimson that while Gay was “technically plagiarized,” it was “minor to inconsequential.”
He said: “It doesn't seem sneaky at all… It looks like maybe she just had no sense of what we normally tell students to do and not do.”
Harvard professor Lawrence Lobo, one of those who were allegedly plagiarized by Gay, also told the Boston Globe: “These allegations do not concern me because our work was specifically acknowledged.”