New Accusations that Embattled Harvard Prez. Claudine Gay Plagiarized her PhD Thesis

Harvard University President Claudine Gay has been under fire for the past week after her remarks to Congress where she refused to condemn calling for the “genocide of Jews” as hate speech.

Harvard President Gay was among Presidents of several other elite colleges who refused to condemn the remarks, including the Presidents of the University of Pennsylvania and the head of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Just this weekend, influential Jewish groups were able to force Liz Magill, President of UPenn, to resign. Chairman of the Board at UPenn, Scott Bok, is also reportedly resigning.

Since the October 7 massacre by Hamas-affiliated terrorists against Israel, the aftermath in American academic circles has been largely pro-Hamas virtue signaling. Student groups influenced by pro-Islam arguments have been highlighting the Palestinian cause and minimizing Jewish victims and concerns. These pro-Palestinian actions are taken on college campuses despite the strong, organized, financial and political power of American Jewish supporters of Israel.

Last month after major alumni and donors threatened to withhold donations, Harvard had to specifically condemn some of its own students after they praised Hamas, in response to pro-Israeli political and business pressure on Harvard. A prominent Rabbi at Harvard resigned in protest. Congress has threatened to investigate systemic anti-Semitism. Mobile video trucks are driving around Harvard urging President Claudine Gay to resign.

And now it appears that Harvard President Claudine Gay may have plagiarized her PhD thesis, perhaps the gravest of academic sins. Gay is Harvard’s first black President, taking office in 2023. Gay received her undergraduate at Stanford, and her masters and PhD from Harvard.

Posted by Christopher Rufo of the Manhattan Institute in New York, comparisons and excerpts of Gay’s PhD thesis bears a striking resemblance to other scholars who remain un-cited and unacknowledged.

If true, this would be a major violation of Harvard’s academic policies and would threaten to invalidate much of the academic work published by Gay.

EXCLUSIVE: @RealChrisBrunet and I have obtained documentation demonstrating that Harvard President Claudine Gay plagiarized multiple sections of her Ph.D. thesis, violating Harvard’s policies on academic integrity.

This is a bombshell. 🧵

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) December 10, 2023

Rufo’s first example:

First, Gay lifts an entire paragraph nearly verbatim from a paper by Lawrence Bobo and Franklin Gilliam’s, while passing it off as her own paraphrase and language.

This is a direct violation of Harvard’s policy: “When you paraphrase, your task is to distill the source’s ideas… pic.twitter.com/t6enHp3dN9

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) December 10, 2023

Rufo’s second example:

Gay repeats this violation of Harvard’s policy throughout the document, again using work from Bobo and Gilliam, as well as passages from Richard Shingles, Susan Howell, and Deborah Fagan, which she reproduces nearly verbatim, without quotation marks. pic.twitter.com/K75YPeZwky

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) December 10, 2023

Rufo also claims that Gay plagiarized from conservative Prof. Carol Swain of Vanderbilt University, providing the following example as one of many:

Second, Gay appears to lift material from scholar Carol Swain. In one passage, summarizing the distinction between “descriptive representation” and “substantive representation,” she copies the phrasing and language nearly verbatim from Swain’s book ‘Black Faces, Black Interests,’… pic.twitter.com/68bJy1F9jo

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) December 10, 2023

Prof. Carol Swain, retired at Vanderbilt University, has responded to the controversy already on Twitter by saying:

I just learned of @realchrisrufo analysis of #ClaudineGay’s work and the allegations of plagiarism. I have not read the articles or books in question. However, two things come to mind: imitation is said to be the highest form of flattery and secondly Dr. Gay’s committee,… pic.twitter.com/0388xnHqSi

— Dr. Carol M. Swain (@carolmswain) December 11, 2023

This developing controversy threatens to further burden Claudine Gay and pressure her to resign in the wake of her shocking comments which were said by many to be anti-Semitic.