Harvard amusingly referred to the plagiarism allegations against its embattled president, Claudine Gay, as “duplicative language.” The university’s weasel words to describe its president’s alleged academic dishonesty are its latest move in a desperate campaign to defend its leader from a mounting chorus of critics in academia and the general public.
The Ivy League university said Wednesday that it found two examples of “duplicative language without appropriate attribution,” in Gay’s 1997 doctoral dissertation, according to a report by the New York Times.
Harvard Prez Claudine Gay holds her face in her hands (Boston Globe /Getty)
Last week, Harvard said that an earlier probe into allegations of plagiarism had found that two articles needed additional citations, and that Gay “is proactively requesting four corrections” for those articles.
“President Gay will update her dissertation correcting these instances of inadequate citation,” Harvard said on Wednesday of the university’s additional findings.
Meanwhile, fresh plagiarism allegations have recently been unearthed in an official academic complaint against Gay, suggesting that the controversy surrounding the Harvard president’s plagiarism is not over.
The klieg lights have been on Gay since the October 7 Hamas terrorist attack against Israel, to which Harvard leadership failed to properly respond after more than 30 of its student groups signed a pro-terror statement blaming Israel for the attack against itself.
Harvard President Claudine Gay testifies to Congress (Kevin Dietsch/Getty)
After initially remaining silent, Harvard 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 the school from the students who signed the pro-terror joint statement.
To make matters worse — and for some, laughable — Harvard then issued a third statement lecturing the public about the importance of free speech, despite 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 on their campuses.
During the congressional hearing, the three presidents declined to say whether advocating for the genocide of Jews is permissible on campus, which resulted in nationwide backlash and University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill resigning.
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 the Harvard president Gay “is a fraud” and “an embarrassment,” who “should resign.”
You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Facebook and X/Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.