World Harvard President Resigns After Mounting Plagiarism Accusations By Julia Carroll - January 2, 2024 Harvard President Claudine Gay stepped down from her role on Tuesday, as she faced further allegations of plagiarism in her academic work. Her resignation makes her the second Ivy League leader to lose her employment recently, exacerbated by controversial testimony to
Congress on campus antisemitism. Dr. Gay’s term, which began in July, abruptly came to a close marking the briefest presidency in Harvard’s history since 1636. She held the distinction of being Harvard’s first Black president and only the second woman to assume the leadership of the university. In a message to the Harvard community, Dr. Gay stated, “I am stepping down as president with a deep love for Harvard and a heavy heart.” Over the past month, allegations of plagiarism against Dr. Gay have been prevalent, signaling further scrutiny of her competence to lead the prestigious university. These claims continue to deepen the controversy over whether Harvard enforces equal standards for its president and students. The latest allegations were published through an unsigned complaint on Monday in The
Washington Free Beacon, a conservative online journal that has been campaigning against Dr. Gay. New complaints heightened the previous estimate of 40 plagiarism charges published in a similar manner, presumably by the same complainant. Support for Dr. Gay’s term started to lessen following what many deemed as Harvard’s failure to strongly condemn the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel and the corresponding pro-Palestinian student reactions. This perceived inaction culminated in an outrage among Harvard supporters, which increased in December when Dr. Gay offered ambiguous answers to Congress about violations of school policies concerning potential calls for the extermination of Jews. Dr. Gay attended a congressional hearing with two other university executives, Elizabeth Magill of the University of
Pennsylvania and Sally Kornbluth from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. During the hearing,
New York Republican Representative Elise Stefanik questioned the presidents with scenarios. Stefanik enquired to Dr. Gay, “At Harvard, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules of bullying and harassment? Yes or no?” Dr. Gay responded, “Depending upon the context, it potentially can be.” This dialogue, along with a comparable exchange between Stefanik and Magill, triggered a wave of anger on
Social Media and within the universities’ circles. Following this, amidst dwindling support due to her refusal to cancel a Palestinian writers conference, Magill resigned as Penn’s president a few days later. To manage the uproar, Dr. Gay offered an apology in an interview published in The Harvard Crimson, the campus newspaper. She regretfully mentioned that if your words cause pain and distress, then remorse should be the only response. Just a week post her congressional testimony, the Harvard Corporation, the university’s governing body, issued a statement supporting Dr. Gay, following late-night meetings. Despite calls for her removal from financial backers, high-profile Jewish alumni, and lawmakers, the body stood staunchly behind Dr. Gay. The university also revealed that it received plagiarism accusations in three academic articles authored by Dr. Gay. It noted a review finding few instances of insufficient citation but ruled out “research misconduct.” Dr. Gay was said to soon request corrections for two of these articles. On Dec. 20, amidst ongoing accusations of plagiarism fuelled by conservative media, Harvard concluded two more cases of inadequate citation in Dr. Gay’s doctoral thesis, written in 1997. They described these instances as “language duplication without suitable attribution” and informed that Dr. Gay intends to revise her dissertation to correct these. Dr. Gay, who procured her doctorate in government from Harvard in 1998 and returned eight years later to teach there, saw her backing wane as plagiarism allegations persisted. Congress also scrutinized these allegations, with a Harvard-probing committee demanding all documentation and communication related to the plagiarism allegations from the university. In total, the claims promoted by conservative media accused Dr. Gay of not duly attributing half of the 11 journal articles listed on her résumé, along with her dissertation, to the original source. These instances varied from summarizing other researchers’ work with slight paraphrasing to simply delineating technical definitions, some of which lacked proper citation. Among these cases, the most controversial was that Dr. Gay’s dissertation acknowledgments appeared to copy two sentences from another scholar’s book. As the allegations grew, scholars from Harvard and elsewhere had mixed opinions about the severity of these claims, with some identifying a disturbing pattern and others downplaying them as politically motivated. However, some people believed that Dr. Gay committed plagiarism and that Harvard should confess the same, a term absent in Harvard board’s initial statement on Dec. 12. Carol Swain, a retired political scientist from Vanderbilt University, was outraged that Dr. Gay used her work without citation and at Harvard’s defense of her actions. Contrastingly, Steven Levitsky, a Harvard government professor, opined that most of the questionable passages seemed to be cases of mild negligence. In his opinion, many of these instances occurred in sections discussing methodologies and past scholarship, not Dr. Gay’s core theories. Levitsky noted that Dr. Gay’s prime focus was data, and as such quantitative scholars don’t spend much time worrying about their literature reviews. He initiated a faculty petition supporting Dr. Gay and urged the Corporation to oppose any political pressure against Harvard’s ethos of academic freedom. Contributers to this report include Dana Goldstein , Sarah Mervosh , and Vimal Patel . President of Harvard Steps Down Following Rising Plagiarism Allegations TAGS Accusations Harvard mounting plagiarism president resigns
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