Harvard offers more details of plagiarism review of former president

Harvard offers more details of plagiarism review of former president

Harvard University defended its reviews of plagiarism allegations involving its former president Friday, as a House panel continues to investigate how the university handled those claims.

Claudine Gay resigned earlier this month amid allegations of plagiarism and questions about antisemitism on campus, including her testimony at a December congressional hearing. The House Committee on Education and the Workforce later announced inquiries into the universities.

“We are committed to academic integrity, rigorous scholarship, free expression, respectful dialogue, and the safety of our students and community,” the university said in a memo to the committee. “We take any allegation or concern regarding our standards and policies very seriously. We also recognize our responsibility to investigate and assess the validity of any such allegation, and to do so in a manner that is fair and impartial for all, including those accused of violations.”

The eight-page memo was part of a broader set of information Harvard gave the House panel. The university did not immediately release the other documents, which a spokesperson said “are responsive to the Committee’s request.”

A spokeswoman for the House committee said Friday it was reviewing the documents.

Harvard president resigns amid plagiarism allegations, testimony backlash

Gay appeared at the December congressional hearing alongside two other university presidents. Another Ivy League president at that hearing, Liz Magill of the University of Pennsylvania, resigned under pressure last month.

Amid the criticism over their testimony, multiple allegations of plagiarism surfaced against Gay, and the House committee demanded more answers.

Those allegations would be a concern at any university, Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.), who chairs the committee, said in a statement last month, “but Harvard is not just any university. It styles itself as one of the top educational institutions in the country.”

On Friday, Foxx wrote in an opinion piece in the Daily Caller that Gay faced more than 50 allegations of plagiarism and decried her for “attempting to reaffirm the sanctity of her academic work despite mountains of evidence to the contrary. Doubling down on one last lie seems fitting — ironic even, as she portrays her resignation as the ultimate act of martyrdom for truth.”

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The university had previously offered some information about its review into the allegations involving Gay. But the memo released Friday provided a more detailed timeline of how it had responded.

After Harvard received questions from the New York Post on Oct. 24 regarding articles published in 1993, 2012 and 2017, one of Harvard’s governing boards, the Harvard Corporation, voted unanimously to initiate a review, according to the timeline provided to the committee. Gay, who was not at that meeting, separately called for an independent review that day.

For Gay, as a professor in the university’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, a finding of research misconduct would require certain elements: “a significant departure from accepted practices of the relevant research community”; “intentional, knowing, or reckless conduct”; and a preponderance of evidence proving the allegation. Harvard’s response said the policy also distinguishes research misconduct from “honest error or differences of opinion.”

While the article in question typically must have been published or cited by the author within the past six years, the panel decided to review the older works since the allegations involved scholarship by the university’s president.

The subcommittee of the board was made up of three academics and a lawyer, including a former justice of the Supreme Court of California and former presidents of Amherst College and Princeton University.

That subcommittee appointed what Harvard described as “three of the country’s most prominent political scientists” to conduct an independent review. Those three remain unnamed, which Harvard said is consistent with the norms of a confidential peer review process. But Harvard described them as “tenured faculty members at prominent research institutions across the country, fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and two are former presidents of the American Political Science Association.”

The independent panel reviewed information including the New York Post’s allegations, the three published works by Gay in question, 11 articles alleged to be plagiarized and a list of their authors, and internal honor codes and policies. It focused on the two more recent papers, according to Harvard.

The panel concluded that there was no doubt that the articles were both sophisticated and original, and that there was “virtually no evidence of intentional claiming of findings” that were not Gay’s. It found other allegations trivial. But it registered concern about nine of the 25 allegations that “paraphrased or reproduced the language of others without quotation marks and without sufficient and clear crediting of sources,” failing at times to provide appropriate citations.

The independent panel recommended a broader review of Gay’s work, which the subcommittee undertook, according to Harvard. That panel found that many of the allegations were meritless. But it concluded that two articles required corrections. The findings were submitted to the Corporation, which issued the statement on Dec. 12.

In the meantime, Harvard learned, via social media, of allegations about Gay’s dissertation, and the subcommittee looked into it and found “examples of duplicative language without appropriate attribution.” Gay submitted requests for corrections to her dissertation.

The submission of the documents come as Harvard is also working to address concerns that sparked the December inquiry. Also Friday, Harvard announced two task forces Friday, one committed to combating antisemitism, and one to combating Islamophobia and anti-Arab bias.

“Reports of antisemitic and Islamophobic acts on our campus have grown, and the sense of belonging among these groups has been undermined,” interim president Alan M. Garber wrote to the campus community Friday. “We need to understand why and how that is happening — and what more we might do to prevent it.”