A Republican-led congressional committee is investigating claims of plagiarism by Harvard President Claudine Gay as a part of an inquiry into three elite universities that kicked off after their presidents made a widely criticized appearance before the panel earlier this month.
Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC), who chairs the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce, notified Harvard’s governing board on Wednesday that it had begun a review of the school’s handling of “credible allegations of plagiarism” against its president. Citing Harvard’s Honor Code in her letter, Foxx questioned whether the university held its leadership to the same strict academic standards as its students.
“If a university is willing to look the other way and not hold faculty accountable for engaging in academically dishonest behavior, it cheapens its mission and the value of its education,” Foxx wrote.
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The letter requests Harvard hand over all documents and communications regarding the plagiarism saga, which exploded into the public eye earlier this month. First accused of stealing material by right-wing activists Christopher F. Rufo and Christopher Brunet, Gay’s alleged plagiarism was quickly reported on by smaller conservative outlets like The Washington Free Beacon before spilling over into the mainstream press. (Gay’s thesis adviser told The Daily Beast last week that the claims were “absurd.”)
A day after the Free Beacon published its investigation, the New York Post joined the fray, reporting last Tuesday that it had actually approached Harvard back in October about nearly two dozen instances of alleged plagiarism across three of Gay’s published papers. The newspaper claimed that the school had responded with a 15-page response from a defamation lawyer. A Harvard spokesperson declined to comment at the time.
That same day, Harvard announced that it had cleared Gay of having committed “research misconduct” after a probe by its own investigators, who’d been quietly looking into the allegations for two months. The investigation had turned up “a few instances of inadequate citations,” according to Harvard, which said in a statement that Gay would request minor corrections be made to two of her papers.
More allegations have surfaced in the days since, including on Wednesday, when CNN reported it had verified a number of instances of alleged plagiarism in work by Gay dating back to her time as a Harvard graduate student in the 1990s. First reported by the Free Beacon, the new claims concern chunks of language that were allegedly lifted for Gay’s award-winning 1997 doctoral thesis, including in one case an entire paragraph.
Stephen Voss, an academic who co-authored the 1996 paper from which the paragraph was allegedly copied, told CNN that the plagiarism was “inconsequential in a scholarly sense” and added that he didn’t want to see her punished for it.
Harvard declined CNN’s requests for comment on the new allegations. Gay has previously said she stands by the integrity of her academic work.
The president has been mired in controversy since a widely criticized Dec. 5 appearance before the Education and the Workforce Committee, when she testified alongside the presidents of M.I.T. and the University of Pennsylvania about antisemitism on campus. The three presidents were walloped by detractors for struggling to answer the panel’s questions, including whether calling for genocide of Jews violated their universities’ codes of conduct.
Two days later, Foxx announced the House committee would be opening a formal investigation “into the learning environments at Harvard, UPenn, and MIT and their policies and disciplinary procedures.”
Though Penn president Liz Magill lost her job over the matter—she resigned that same week—Gay appears poised to remain in her position for the foreseeable future. She offered an apology for her responses in front of the committee after the House announced its campus probe, and Harvard’s governing board made the decision to rally behind her several days later.
“In this tumultuous and difficult time, we unanimously stand in support of President Gay,” the board said in the same statement clearing her of any claims of academic misconduct.
“Our extensive deliberations affirm our confidence that President Gay is the right leader to help our community heal and to address the very serious societal issues we are facing.”
