Harvard President Claudine Gay Hit with Six Additional Plagiarism Charges

Harvard University President-elect Claudine Gay arrives on stage during the 372nd Commence
Craig F. Walker/The Boston Globe via Getty Images
Alana Mastrangelo

Harvard President Claudine Gay was hit with six additional charges of plagiarism on Monday in a complaint filed with the Ivy League university. This brings the total number of allegations against Gay to near 50.

While seven of Gay’s 17 published works have already been called into question via the plagiarism scandal, the new charges brought on Monday, which have not been previously reported, impact an eighth, according to a report by the The Washington Free Beacon.

The eighth article in question is a 2001 piece in which Gay is accused of lifting nearly half a page of material verbatim from scholar and political science professor at the University of Wisconsin, David Canon.

That article, “The Effect of Minority Districts and Minority Representation on Political Participation in California,” features “some of the most extreme and clear-cut cases of plagiarism yet,” the Washington Free Beacon reported.

In one instance, Gay reportedly takes four sentences from Canon’s 1999 book, Race, Redistricting, and Representation: The Unintended Consequences of Black Majority Districts, and does not include quotation marks.

While Canon’s name does appear in the bibliography, the Harvard president does not cite the scholar anywhere in or near the passage in her work.

Canon, meanwhile, says he believes Gay did nothing wrong, telling the Washington Free Beacon, “I am not at all concerned about the passages. This isn’t even close to an example of academic plagiarism.”

Not all scholars that Gay is accused of lifting material from, however, agree with Canon’s sentiments. Scholar Carol Swain, whose work was cited in Gay’s own Ph.D. dissertation, told Breitbart News that the Harvard president “is a fraud” and “an embarrassment,” who “should resign.”

The klieg lights have been on Gay since the October 7 Hamas terrorist attack against Israel, to which Harvard’s leadership failed to properly respond after more than 30 of its student groups signed a pro-terror statement blaming Israel for the attack against itself.

After issuing vague, generic statements, and then lecturing the public about the importance of free speech — which many found ironic, given that Harvard was named 2023’s worst school for free speech — Gay, along with the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania President and MIT, delivered a disastrous testimony before congress regarding antisemitism on their campuses. University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill resigned shortly after the hearing.

After that, Gay was accused of plagiarism, which was followed by a batch of fresh allegations being unearthed in an official academic complaint against the Harvard president last month. The university’s Research Integrity Office received a complaint featuring more than 40 alleged instances of plagiarism.

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

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