Harvard University President Claudine Gay used “duplicative language” in her dissertation for a doctorate, the school stated this week.
Ms. Gay, 53, is requesting corrections to the dissertation, which was done in 1997, according to the Harvard Corporation.
Two of the corrections concern “duplicative language without appropriate attribution,” the corporation, a governing board that includes Ms. Gay, said in a statement to media outlets.
“President Gay will update her dissertation correcting these instances of inadequate citation,” the statement reads.
The university learned of allegations in October regarding three articles Ms. Gay wrote and initiated an independent review that revealed multiple instances of “inadequate citation,” the corporation stated on Dec. 12.
The results of the probe prompted Ms. Gay to ask for four corrections to two articles. The corrections would “insert citations and quotation marks that were omitted from the original publications,” according to the corporation.
According to analyses posted by activist Christopher Rufo and others, Ms. Gay has plagiarized from a number of books and studies in her work, including Carol Swain’s “Black Faces, Black Interests,” which was published by the Harvard University Press.
The corrections Ms. Gay requested would be made to a paper published in the American Political Science Review in 2001 and the Urban Affairs Review in 2017, a school spokesperson told the school’s newspaper.
In the 2001 paper, she wrote that results of previous research by scholars Lawrence Bobo and Franklin Gilliam found “that African Americans in areas of high black empowerment—as indicated by control of the mayor’s office—are more active than either African Americans in low empowerment areas or whites of comparable socioeconomic status.”
“Empowerment, they conclude, influences black participation by contributing to a more trusting and efficacious orientation toward politics,” Ms. Gay wrote.
Mr. Bobo and Mr. Gilliam wrote in 1990 that the results show “that blacks in high-black-empowerment areas—as indicated by control of the mayor’s office—are more active than either blacks living in low-empowerment areas or their white counterparts of comparable socioeconomic status.”
“Furthermore, the results show that empowerment influences black participation by contributing to a more trusting and efficacious orientation to politics and by greatly increasing black attentiveness to political affairs,” they wrote.
Ms. Gay wrote in the 2017 paper, “I also construct a county-level measure that captures the financial incentives developers have to build or rehabilitate affordable housing in the most impoverished places.”
Scholars Matthew Freedman and Emily Owens wrote in a 2011 paper that “we construct a county-level measure that captures the incentives developers have to build or rehabilitate affordable housing in certain tracts.”
Ms. Gay also plagiarized from Mr. Bobo and Mr. Gilliam in her dissertation, according to a review of her dissertation and the scholars’ earlier papers.
Harvard’s guide to using sources, titled “avoiding plagiarism,” advises students that their work “is held to the same standards of citation” as the work of their professors and that those standards include the necessity to cite their sources adequately.
“Plagiarism is defined as the act of either intentionally OR unintentionally submitting work that was written by someone else. If you turn in a paper that was written by someone else, or if you turn in a paper in which you have included material from any source without citing that source, you have plagiarized,” the guide reads.
Despite her plagiarism, Harvard is refusing calls to terminate Ms. Gay.
“In this tumultuous and difficult time, we unanimously stand in support of President Gay,” the fellows of the college said this month.
Ms. Gay is a political scientist who started at Harvard in 2006 and worked her way from professor to the dean of the faculty of arts and sciences before becoming president on July 1, 2023. She’s the first black president of Harvard.
She has also faced criticism recently for declining to confirm that calling for Jews to be exterminated would violate university rules. Ms. Gay and several other university presidents all declined to do so in response to questioning at a hearing in front of a congressional committee in Washington.
“Our concern is that standards are not being applied consistently, resulting in different rules for different members of the academic community,” House Education Committee Chairwoman Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) told the Harvard Corporation. “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.”
