Harvard University said Wednesday night that a newly disclosed review found additional instances of inadequate citation in president Claudine Gay’s writings, hours after a congressional committee announced an inquiry into how Harvard handled allegations of plagiarism against Gay.
In a three-page summary released to the Globe, Harvard said that a recent review discovered additional “examples of duplicative language without appropriate attribution’’ in Gay’s 1997 PhD dissertation, which she completed in Harvard’s government department.
The summary said, “President Gay will update her dissertation correcting these instances of inadequate citation.’’
Those instances add to other cases of “inadequate citation’’ in two of Gay’s academic articles, which the university’s key oversight board, the Harvard Corporation, acknowledged last week. Gay has since submitted correction requests to the journals that published those articles, a university spokesperson said.
The summary also stated that Harvard learned on Oct. 24 that the New York Post “was pursuing a story on allegations of plagiarism against President Gay.’’
At Gay’s request, the Corporation then commissioned an independent review by outside experts of the allegations, the summary said. Meanwhile, a four-member subcommittee of the Corporation reviewed Gay’s published work from 1993 to 2019, it stated.
But that review did not include the PhD dissertation because, the summary said, the allegations concerned Gay’s “published works,’’ not her dissertation. It was only recently, “in response to new allegations,’’ that the subcommittee “undertook a review of the dissertation,’’ the university said.
After the reviews were completed, “the Corporation concluded that Gay’s inadequate citations’’ in her dissertation and published works “did not constitute research misconduct,’’ the summary said.
Harvard said that “a finding of research misconduct requires that . . . the respondent committed the research misconduct intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly,’’ according to the rules that were used for the review, known as the Interim Policy and Procedures for Responding to Allegations of Research Misconduct. The allegation must be “proven by preponderance of the evidence.’’
Harvard had previously announced that Gay would request four corrections to two academic articles due to the independent review’s findings.
The Wednesday summary was released 10 days after Gay, a political scientist, began facing a series of plagiarism allegations, including that she failed to adequately cite sources she paraphrased in her academic work and that she reproduced, nearly verbatim and without quotation marks, entire sentences or paragraphs.
Those allegations came on the heels of another controversy: over how Gay responded to a question at a Dec. 5 congressional hearing on antisemitism on college campuses about whether calls for genocide of Jews would violate Harvard’s rules. Her legalistic and equivocal answer prompted calls for her resignation, including from members of Congress. Gay later apologized for her answer.
MIT president Sally Kornbluth faced criticism for giving similar answers at the congressional hearing, but received a vote of confidence from her school’s governing board on Dec. 7. The president of the University of Pennsylvania, Liz Magill, who also answered similarly, resigned on Dec. 9 after facing denunciations over her testimony.
Some of the plagiarism allegations against Gay, first publicized by conservative activist Christopher Rufo on Dec. 10, emerged before the Harvard Corporation publicly responded to the furor over Gay’s testimony.
On Dec. 12, the Corporation’s appointed members unanimously backed Gay, saying in a statement: “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.’’
On Tuesday, the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative news outlet that published one of the first detailed reports on the allegations, claimed that new plagiarism allegations against Gay had come to light.
The outlet posted online a 37-page anonymous complaint that it said was submitted to a Harvard research integrity officer. The summary released by Harvard on Wednesday acknowledged receiving the complaint.
However, the summary said the school’s Research Integrity Office, which “ultimately reports to the President,’’ would not handle any investigation of the complaint “due to the potential for the appearance of a conflict of interest.’’ The initial review of the allegations raised by the New York Post was also handed off to the outside experts to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest, the statement said.
The complaint described 39 instances of alleged plagiarism in Gay’s academic publications, including peer-reviewed articles and her PhD dissertation. It compiled some of the previously reported allegations and also cited four additional instances, which the Harvard Corporation determined did not have merit, according to the summary released Wednesday.
Gay submitted four correction requests in the two peer-reviewed articles and is updating three instances of inadequate citation in her dissertation.
Several academics, including some of those Gay is accused of plagiarizing, have said that some of the passages flagged in recent days amount to plagiarism.
In one instance, Gay’s 1997 PhD dissertation included five sentences that closely tracked a passage from a 1996 paper by Bradley Palmquist and D. Stephen Voss, then members of Harvard’s government department where Gay was a doctoral candidate.
Gay’s sentences matched, nearly verbatim, the language from the 1996 paper with only minor changes of word choice and punctuation. The language was not set between quotation marks and Palmquist and Voss’s paper did not appear to be cited anywhere in a full-text PDF of Gay’s dissertation reviewed by the Globe.
The Harvard summary Wednesday said Gay’s dissertation would be updated to add quotation marks or a citation related to the Palmquist and Voss paper.
Voss told the Globe last week that the passage in question was “technically plagiarism,’’ but not a serious case. The passage described a minor methodological issue, he said, “not any key ideas that are at the heart of the paper.’’
Still, he said, it was a clear violation of academia’s strict rules about attribution and sourcing. “When you use somebody’s exact words and paragraph logic, [that’s] what we teach students is plagiarism,’’ he said.
Other scholars have said that some of the flagged passages, which paraphrase from other sources, some of which were clearly cited, do not amount to plagiarism.
The congressional committee’s review of the plagiarism allegations announced Wednesday adds to its inquiry into campus antisemitism at Harvard, UPenn, and MIT. It was initiated by the House Committee on the Education and the Workforce after the Dec. 5 congressional hearing.
In a letter to the Harvard Corporation, the congressional committee’s chair, Representative Virginia Foxx, a North Carolina Republican, demanded the school turn over “[a]ll documents and communications concerning the initial allegations of plagiarism’’ and the school’s investigation of them.
Harvard and other universities have been roiled in recent months by controversies over how to talk about the Israel-Hamas war, allegations of suppression of pro-Palestinian speech, and reports of resurgent campus antisemitism. The controversies ignited after the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack on Israel that killed about 1,200 people. Israel’s retaliatory response in the Gaza Strip has killed more than 20,000 people, according to Palestinian authorities.
At the congressional hearing, Representative Elise Stefanik, a New York Republican, asked Gay: “[A]t Harvard, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules of bullying and harassment, yes or no?’’
Gay answered: “It can be, depending on the context.’’