House Republicans expanded their investigation into Harvard University to include the growing list of plagiarism charges against President Claudine Gay, raising concerns that the college is holding its students to a higher standard than its leadership.
House Education and the Workforce Committee Chairwoman Virginia Foxx asked the Harvard Corporation for documents and communications related to its independent review of plagiarism charges broached in October as well as those unearthed in the last few weeks.
They include a 37-page report sent Tuesday to Harvard by a professor from another university detailing 40 plagiarism allegations, as reported by the Washington Free Beacon.
“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. Students must be evaluated fairly, under known standards — and have a right to see that faculty are, too,” said Ms. Foxx, North Carolina Republican, in the Wednesday letter to Harvard Corporation senior fellow Penny Pritzker.
The committee launched an investigation into antisemitism at Harvard after a Dec. 5 hearing featuring Ms. Gay as well as then-University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill and Massachusetts Institute of Technology President Sally Kornbluth.
All three said that it would depend on the context when asked if calling for “genocide of Jews” violated their conduct codes.
Ms. Magill resigned under pressure from alumni and donors a few days later.
Harvard stood behind Ms. Gay, the university’s first Black and second female president, in a Dec. 12 statement addressing both the antisemitism and plagiarism issues.
The Harvard Corporation said its independent review into three articles written by Ms. Gay showed “a few instances of inadequate citation,” but that the analysis “found no violation of Harvard’s standards for research misconduct.”
Ms. Gay voluntarily issued corrections to two of the articles.
As it turned out, however, those articles were only the tip of the iceberg. The last two weeks have seen a drumbeat of examples from her writings of near-verbatim paraphrasing or inadequate citation from sources.
Plagiarism charges have been detailed in separate reports from Manhattan Institute fellow Christopher Rufo, the New York Post, and the Free Beacon.
Left-tilting media outlets have begun to take notice. In a Sunday editorial, the Boston Globe asked, “Did Claudine Gay plagiarize or not? Harvard should be clear.”
“Harvard president’s corrections do not address her clearest instances of plagiarism, including as a student in the 1990s,” said CNN in a Wednesday headline.
Mr. Rufo posted Tuesday the acknowledgement on her 1997 Ph.D. thesis alongside the acknowledgement of a 1996 paper by another scholar.
“This is incredible: In her dissertation, Claudine Gay plagiarized the language of her acknowledgment from the acknowledgment of another scholar, without citing the source,” said Mr. Rufo on X. “She couldn’t even say ‘thank you’ without plagiarizing the language.”
Some have excused Claudine Gay’s plagiarism as happening long ago, but here is an example from 2017, in the last paper she wrote before becoming a full-time administrator.
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) December 20, 2023
There are 40 allegations across three decades. It’s serial plagiarism. She did it until the end. pic.twitter.com/a5DgetaTC8
In her letter, Ms. Foxx pointed out that Harvard’s federal funding is contingent upon its accreditation.
Harvard is accredited by the New England Commission of Higher Education, which states that a prerequisite for accreditation is that the university “works to prevent cheating and plagiarism as well as to deal forthrightly with any instances in which they occur.”
She also noted that Harvard holds its students to “high academic and ethical standards.” In the 2020-21 academic year, she said, the Harvard honor council investigated 100 cases, 46 of which resulted in academic probation or mandatory withdrawal.
“Again, does Harvard hold its faculty — and its own president — to the same standards?” asked Ms. Foxx, a North Carolina Republican.
Harvard has not responded publicly to the letter from the congresswoman.
• Valerie Richardson can be reached at vrichardson@washingtontimes.com.
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