Christopher Rufo: Harvard President Claudine Gay’s Ph.D Dissertation Violates School’s Plagiarism Standards

Claudine Gay named 30th president of Harvard University, will be schools first Black leade
Erin Clark/The Boston Globe via Getty Images
Alana Mastrangelo

Conservative activist and CRT expert Christopher Rufo has combined forces with journalist Christopher Brunet to raise troubling questions of potential plagiarism around embattled Harvard President Claudine Gay’s Ph.D. dissertation.

As dean and then president, Gay has been accused of bullying colleagues, suppressing free speech, overseeing a racist admissions program, and, most recently, failing to stand up to unabashed antisemitism on campus in the wake of the October 7 Hamas terror attack against Israel.

Now, yet another concern, plagiarism, has been called into question by author and New College of Florida board member Christopher Rufo, who has obtained documents showcasing sections of Gay’s dissertation, which Rufo and journalist Christopher Brunet say would violate Harvard’s own stated policies on academic integrity.

Gay’s dissertation, “Taking Charge: Black Electoral Success and the Redefinition of American Policies,” which deals with white-black political representation and racial attitudes, was published in 1997, and was part of Gay’s doctorate in political science from Harvard.

But “as evaluated under the university’s plagiarism policy, the paper contains at least three problematic patterns of usage and citation,” Rufo claims.

The New College of Florida board member says Gay “lifts an entire paragraph nearly verbatim from Lawrence Bobo and Franklin Gilliam’s paper, ‘Race, Sociopolitical Participation, and Black Empowerment,’ while passing it off as her own paraphrase and language.”

Here is the language from Bobo and Gilliam’s work:

Using 1987 national sample survey data . . . the results show that blacks in high-black-empowerment areas—as indicated by control of the mayor’s office—are more active than either blacks living in low-empowerment areas or their white counterparts of comparable socioeconomic status. Furthermore, the results show that empowerment influences black participation by contributing to a more trusting and efficacious orientation to politics and by greatly increasing black attentiveness to political affairs.

Here is the language from Gay’s dissertation:

Using 1987 survey data, Bobo and Gilliam found that African-Americans in “high black-empowerment” areas—as indicated by control of the mayor’s office—are more active than either African-Americans in low empowerment areas or their white counterparts of comparable socioeconomic status. Empowerment, they conclude, influences black participation by contributing to a more trusting and efficacious orientation towards politics and by greatly increasing black attentiveness to political affairs.

Rufo noted that while Gay provides a reference to Bobo and Gilliam, “she uses their verbatim language, with a few trivial synonym substitutions, without providing quotation marks,” which is in clear violation of Harvard’s policy.

The Ivy League university’s policy reads as follows:

When you paraphrase, your task is to distill the source’s ideas in your own words. It’s not enough to change a few words here and there and leave the rest; instead, you must completely restate the ideas in the passage in your own words. If your own language is too close to the original, then you are plagiarizing, even if you do provide a citation.

Moreover, Gay continues on with this violation “throughout the document,” Rufo asserts, noting that she uses Bobo and Gilliam’s work again, as well as work from Richard Shingles, Susan Howell, and Deborah Fagan.

In one example, Gay appears to take phrasing and language nearly verbatim from Swain’s book Black Faces, Black Interests, while summarizing the difference between “descriptive representation” and “substantive representation” — but this time, she doesn’t offer a citation of any kind.

Here is the language from Swain’s work:

Pitkin distinguishes between “descriptive representation,” the statistical correspondence of the demographic characteristics … and more “substantive representation,” the correspondence between representatives’ goals and those of their constituents.

Here is the language from Gay’s dissertation:

Social scientists have concentrated . . . between descriptive representation (the statistical correspondence of demographic characteristics) and substantive representation (the correspondence of legislative goals and priorities).

 

In yet another example cited by Rufo, Gay appears to take an entire appendix directly taken from Gary King’s book, A Solution to the Ecological Inference Problem.

While Gay cites King’s book, she “does not explicitly acknowledge that Appendix B is entirely grounded in King’s concepts, instead passing it off as her own original work,” Rufo says, adding, “Gay takes entire phrases and sentences directly from King’s book, without any citations or quotation marks.”

“In total, Gay borrows material from King in at least half a dozen paragraphs,” the New College of Florida board member declares.

As Breitbart News reported, the embattled Harvard president has been under fire recently over her failure to condemn genocide against Jews while antisemitism rages on Harvard’s campus in the wake of a Hamas terrorist attack against Israel that left more than 1,400 Israelis dead.

Last week, while testifying at a congressional hearing, Gay, along with the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) declined to say whether advocating for the genocide of Jews is permissible on campus.

After that, calls for the three university presidents to resign mounted. On Sunday, University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill resigned as president of the university.

You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Facebook and X/Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.

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