Plagiarism Concerns Swirl Around Harvard President

The past week has been a whirlwind of news, particularly at Ivy League schools such as the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, and MIT. Most of the drama stemmed from a congressional hearing on antisemitism that the presidents of each of those three schools attended. They faced a bevy of questions about antisemitism on college campuses and their ability to provide safe spaces for all students. After fumbling questions from Congresswoman Elise Stephanik from New York, Liz Magill eventually resigned as president of Penn.

This prompted a tweet, “One down,” from hedge fund titan, Bill Ackman. It also implied there were two more to go pursuant to Harvard and MIT.

Harvard set an emergency meeting Sunday to discuss the fate of president Claudine Gay. Major donors had pulled at least $100 million from Penn due to a perceived climate of antisemitism, and Harvard and MIT could have been hit by the back draft. While Gay was under scrutiny, reports surfaced about her academic record, her qualifications as president, and whether she had plagiarized four works decades ago, including her 1997 Harvard dissertation:

In a statement to affiliates Tuesday, members of the Harvard Corporation reaffirmed their support for Gay’s leadership. Still, they addressed concerns raised regarding Gay’s scholarship, writing that the “University became aware in late October of allegations regarding three articles.”

“At President Gay’s request, the Fellows promptly initiated an independent review by distinguished political scientists and conducted a review of her published work,” they wrote.

“On December 9, the Fellows reviewed the results, which revealed a few instances of inadequate citation,” they added. “While the analysis found no violation of Harvard’s standards for research misconduct, President Gay is proactively requesting four corrections in two articles to insert citations and quotation marks that were omitted from the original publications.”

They did not specify which articles were found to contain improperly cited material or which were being corrected.

Harvard has pledged it support behind Ms. Gay, and she will remain president of the the university for the foreseeable future. However, plagiarism and the penchant of academics and journalists to copy other people’s work and pass it off as their own is in the ether and will likely not go away anytime soon. The fact that few other academics and journalists have discussed the story is telling. It all begs the question, “Who’s next?”