Fresh plagiarism allegations have been unearthed in an official academic complaint against embattled Harvard President Claudine Gay.
Harvard University’ Research Integrity Office received a complaint on this week submitting over 40 allegations of plagiarism against Gay, according to a document obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
The new allegations include examples recently reported in the media, as well as “dozens of additional cases in which Gay quoted or paraphrased authors without proper attribution,” the outlet reported.
Harvard President Claudine Gay speaks during a hearing of the House Committee on Education on Capitol Hill, Tuesday, Dec. 5, 2023 in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
These plagiarism allegations, which reportedly range from missing quotation marks around phrases or sentences to entire paragraphs taken verbatim, were submitted to Harvard’s research integrity officer, Stacey Springs.
While the Harvard Corporation, the school’s governing body, said earlier this month that it initiated an independent review of Gay’s work in October and found “no violation of Harvard’s standards for research misconduct,” that investigation had only focused on three papers.
“It is impossible that your office has already reviewed the entirety of these materials,” the complaint reads, noting that “many” allegations “have not been previously reported or submitted.”
Harvard’s official policy states that all allegations of faculty plagiarism must be reviewed by the school’s research integrity officer, and that if the allegations are deemed credible, they must be sent for a further probe. Any faculty member found guilty of plagiarism can end up suspended, having their rank reduced, or even terminated.
Notably ,the university says it considers whether the misconduct “was an isolated event or part of a pattern” while deciding the appropriate level of punishment.
Harvard and Gay have been facing a heavy scrutiny over antisemitism scandals that have dominated the school’s news cycle for the past several months. As Breitbart News reported, Harvard’s early admission applications have even dropped to a four-year low.
The controversy started after the October 7 Hamas terrorist attack against Israel, to which Harvard leadership failed to properly respond to its more than 30 student groups that signed a pro-terror joint statement blaming Israel for the attack against itself.
After first remaining silent on the matter, Harvard leadership issued a vague, generic statement, in which the school failed to pushback against — or even mention — its student groups in question. After nationwide backlash, Gay issued a follow-up statement trying to distance Harvard from the student groups who signed the pro-terror joint statement.
The Ivy League university then lectured the public about the importance of free speech in a third statement — despite Harvard itself ironically being named 2023’s worst school for free speech by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).
After that, Gay, along with the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania President and MIT, delivered a disastrous testimony before congress regarding antisemitism.
During the congressional hearing, the presidents of the three prestigious schools declined to say whether advocating for the genocide of Jews is permissible on campus, which resulted in nationwide backlash. University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill subsequently resigned.
Then, Gay’s own Ph.D. dissertation was called into question, with scholar Carol Swain, whose work was cited in the Harvard president’s dissertation, telling Breitbart News that Gay “is a fraud” and “an embarrassment,” and that “she should resign.”
Harvard’s governing body responded to the allegations saying the school “unanimously” stood in support of Gay. It remains unclear what the university will make of the new allegations presented in the Tuesday academic complaint against its president.
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