The New York Post said Tuesday that a lawyer for Harvard University “threatened” them for looking into plagiarism allegations against the school’s president.
The Post said it contacted the university on October 24 asking for comment on 27 alleged instances in which Harvard President Claudine Gay’s work appears very similar to other academics’ words and phrasing.
Harvard’s senior executive director of media relations and communications, Jonathan Swain, who is also a former Hillary Clinton aide and served as a member of the Biden administration’s transition team, responded by asking for more time to review Gay’s work, the Post said.
The next day, Swain said he would “get back in touch over the next couple of days” but then did not respond after that.
Then on October 27, a major Virginia attorney, Thomas Clare of the law firm Clare-Locke, contacted the Post saying he was Harvard’s and Gay’s defamation counsel.
Harvard finally publicly admitted on Tuesday that the school had investigated Gay’s academic work for plagiarism, a day after the Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo posted questions about Gay’s PhD dissertation on social media.
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In a letter to “members of the Harvard community,” the college said the probe began in late October after the school “became aware” of allegations about Gay’s work.
The investigation found “a few instances of inadequate citation” but concluded she had not violated Harvard’s “standards for research misconduct.” Harvard said Gay would request four corrections in two of her published works to insert citations and quotation marks that had been “omitted.”
“In this tumultuous and difficult time, we unanimously stand in support of President Gay,” Harvard’s letter added.
The controversy around Gay’s academic writings comes on the heels of her highly criticized congressional testimony on Harvard’s response to anti-Semitism on campus.
Gay along with the presidents of MIT and the University of Pennsylvania avoided answering whether calling for the genocide of Jews violated the universities’ codes of conduct.
“It can be, depending on the context,” Gay told the lawmakers. She said such hate speech is “at odds with the values of Harvard” and that when that kind of “speech crosses into conduct, that violates our policies.”
Some of the academics whose work appeared very similar to Gay’s said they did not feel she had plagiarized them.
However, Anne Williamson, a professor of political science at the University of Miami in Ohio, was less happy, even “angry,” she told the Post.
Gay’s 2017 paper “A Room for One’s Own? The Partisan Allocation of Affordable Housing” has phrases that are very similar to a 2011 paper by Williamson.
“It does look like plagiarism to me,” Williamson told the Post. “If they are going to do what they did, then I should be cited as a reference. My first reaction is shock. The second reaction is puzzlement. There was a way to draw from my paper. All she had to do is give me a credit.”
Gay, 53, became Harvard’s first black president earlier this year.