Someone or other continues the examination of Claudine Gay’s scholarly output prior to her accession to the Harvard presidency — some 17 articles in all. The Washington Free Beacon’s Aaron Sibarium reports that six new instances of plagiarism have been cited in the complaint filed with Harvard yesterday. Sibarium reviews the record to date along with the new allegations:
Seven of Gay’s 17 published works have already been impacted by the scandal, but the new charges, which have not been previously reported, extend into an eighth: In a 2001 article, Gay lifts nearly half a page of material verbatim from another scholar, David Canon, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin.
That article, “The Effect of Minority Districts and Minority Representation on Political Participation in California,” includes some of the most extreme and clear-cut cases of plagiarism yet. At one point, Gay borrows four sentences from Canon’s 1999 book, Race, Redistricting, and Representation: The Unintended Consequences of Black Majority Districts, without quotation marks and with only minor semantic tweaks. She does not cite Canon anywhere in or near the passage, though he does appear in the bibliography.
The Free Beacon includes the helpful graphic below.
Sibarium adds that Gay’s first two footnotes are copied verbatim from Canon’s endnotes.
Canon acquits Gay of wrongdoing, but Sibarium has much more, all of it of interest to those of us following the story. I urge interested readers to read Sibarium’s current story in its entirety. It concludes:
The blowback [against Harvard] has been exacerbated by the Harvard Corporation’s feckless response to the allegations, which it initially tried to squash with a legal threat to the New York Post—and to the unnamed whistleblower who brought those allegations to the Post’s attention.
Through the bellicose litigation boutique Clare Locke, Harvard said in October that it would sue for “immense damages” if the Post published a story on the charges. It also “threatened to use legal means to out who had supplied the comparisons,” according to the paper’s reporting.
That person, a professor at another university, whom the Free Beacon has identified and granted anonymity, is behind the Monday complaint to Harvard, as well as a separate complaint last month alleging around 40 cases of plagiarism. While several Harvard scholars have faced plagiarism allegations since the early 2000s, none have seen such a large percentage of their work implicated.
Beyond outlining the new charges against Gay, the latest complaint — 25 pages of which are devoted to outlining the various examples of Gay’s alleged plagiarism — argues that Harvard’s legal saber-rattling violated its research misconduct policy for faculty, which forbids retaliation against complainants.
“At one point Gay and Harvard asked the Post, ‘Why would someone making such a complaint be unwilling to attach their name to it,’” the Monday complaint reads. “I was unwilling because I feared that Gay and Harvard would violate their policies, behave more like a cartel with a hedge fund attached than a university, try to seek ‘immense’ damages from me and who knows what else.”
As always, I particularly appreciate the institutional no-comment: “A Harvard spokesman, Jonathan Swain, did not respond to a request for comment about whether the school has reviewed all of Gay’s work, and, if so, how it missed the examples unearthed on Monday.”
What Claudine Longet did to Spider Sabich, Claudine Gay is doing to the reputation of Harvard University. Suffice it to say that the board of the Harvard Corporation failed in the diligence due its selection of a leader of the university. Gay should go and take the board of the Harvard Corporation with her when she goes.
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