Harvard president accused of plagiarism amid anti-Semitism row
The embattled president of Harvard University has been accused of plagiarism in her own PhD dissertation amid calls for her resignation over anti-Semitism on campus.
Claudine Gay, the university’s first black president, was accused on Sunday of lifting sentences from other academics for her 1997 doctoral thesis on the success of black politicians.
A conservative blogger posted sections of her dissertation that contained almost the exact phrases of academics she had cited in her work, in an apparent breach of Harvard’s anti-plagiarism policy.
‘Verbatim language’
Ms Gay was accused by Christopher Rufo of reusing “verbatim language, with a few trivial synonym substitutions, without providing quotation marks”, despite naming the academics whose works she had cited.
Harvard’s policy states that “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”.
Passages of the thesis posted online showed phrases had been lifted. In one sentence, Ms Gay remarked that “using 1987 survey data, Bobo and Gilliam found that African-Americans in ‘high black-empowerment’ areas… are more active than either African-Americans in low-empowerment areas or their white counterparts of comparable socioeconomic status”.
The original paper by the academics contained the same sentence, using “blacks” instead of “African-Americans”.
‘Words amplify distress and pain’
Ms Gay is already under pressure to resign, just six months into the job, after appearing at a congressional hearing in which she said it “depends on the context” when asked whether calling for the genocide of Jews would constitute a breach of Harvard’s bullying and harassment policies.
Ms Gay has since apologised, telling the college’s student newspaper that she had become “caught up” in a series of questions about university procedure and that “words matter”.
“When words amplify distress and pain, I don’t know how you could feel anything but regret,” she said.
Liz Magill, the president of the University of Pennsylvania, made similar comments during the hearing and has since resigned, after donors threatened to withdraw their money from the college.
At the hearing, Elise Stefanik, a New York Republican on the House education and workforce committee, repeatedly questioned the presidents of leading universities on whether students “calling for the genocide of Jews” would be in breach of their institution’s “code of conduct or rules regarding bullying and harassment”.
None of the academics present said such a call would be automatically against their rules, and that breaches would depend on the context and impact on students.
‘Political pressures’
On Sunday, a group of 14 Harvard faculty members published a petition calling for Ms Gay’s removal, while another 500 published a statement in her defence, condemning “political pressures that are at odds with Harvard’s commitment to academic freedom”.
Ms Stefanik said that Ms Magill’s resignation from the University of Pennsylvania was “one down” but called on Ms Gay and Sally Kornbluth, the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), to resign.
The Harvard Corporation, one of the university’s two governing bodies, is set to meet on Monday, the New York Times reported.
Harvard University was contacted for comment on the plagiarism allegations against Ms Gay.
