Harvard’s integrity questioned as Boston Globe demands clarity on President Gay’s alleged plagiarism

The Boston Globe is pressing Harvard to clarify its position on President Claudine Gay’s alleged serial plagiarism, which the university appeared to dismiss as unserious.

“Last week the university’s governing board released a confusing statement that appeared to confirm a few instances of plagiarism – without using that word,” the Boston Globe editorial board said on Monday.

Following Gay’s congressional testimony, cries for her removal have been loud. Among one of the loudest voices was The National Association of Scholars (NAS), which cited “her record of plagiarism” as one of many reasons Gay was unfit to serve as president.

Despite the backlash and compelling evidence for plagiarism, Harvard released a statement expressing its continued support for Gay.

“As members of the Harvard Corporation, we today reaffirm our support for President Gay’s continued leadership of Harvard University,” The Fellows of Harvard College wrote. “Our extensive deliberations affirm our confidence that President Gay is the right leader to help our community heal and to address the very serious societal issues we are facing.” 

The university also addressed the allegations of plagiarism without openly admitting the embattled leader was guilty. 

“With regard to President Gay’s academic writings, the University became aware in late October of allegations regarding three articles,” the letter said. “At President Gay’s request, the Fellows promptly initiated an independent review by distinguished political scientists and conducted a review of her published work. 

“On December 9, the Fellows reviewed the results, which revealed a few instances of inadequate citation. While the analysis found no violation of Harvard’s standards for research misconduct, President Gay is proactively requesting four corrections in two articles to insert citations and quotation marks that were omitted from the original publications.”  

Despite what the Fellows claimed, inadequately crediting a source is considered plagiarism under Harvard’s standards.  

“In academic writing, it is considered plagiarism to draw any idea or any language from someone else without adequately crediting that source in your paper,” Harvard’s official website states. “It doesn’t matter whether the source is a published author, another student, a website without clear authorship, a website that sells academic papers, or any other person: Taking credit for anyone else’s work is stealing, and it is unacceptable in all academic situations, whether you do it intentionally or by accident.”  

The Harvard Crimson, the university’s student newspaper, agreed some instances do violate policy. 

“Though some are minor – consisting of passages that are similar or identical to Gay’s sources, lacking quotation marks but including citations – others are more substantial, including some paragraphs and sentences nearly identical to other work and lacking citations,” the paper said. “Some appear to violate Harvard’s current policies around plagiarism and academic integrity.”  

More instances of plagiarism, some seemingly serious and clear-cut, have been identified since Monday.