(Jacob Bruns, Headline USA) Conservative watchdog Christopher Rufo has exposed Harvard University President Claudine Gay of plagiarizing portions of her doctoral thesis.
Rufo made the announcement in a Sunday tweet thread:
EXCLUSIVE: @RealChrisBrunet and I have obtained documentation demonstrating that Harvard President Claudine Gay plagiarized multiple sections of her Ph.D. thesis, violating Harvard's policies on academic integrity.
This is a bombshell. 🧵
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) December 10, 2023
Gay made use of the writings of several other scholars in the writing of her thesis, though often including their texts without quotation marks and without proper citation, thereby skirting her own school’s plagiarism rules.
“When you paraphrase, your task is to distill the source’s ideas in your own words,” states the policy.
“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,” it continues. “If your own language is too close to the original, then you are plagiarizing, even if you do provide a citation.”
First, Gay lifts an entire paragraph nearly verbatim from a paper by Lawrence Bobo and Franklin Gilliam’s, while passing it off as her own paraphrase and language.
This is a direct violation of Harvard's policy: "When you paraphrase, your task is to distill the source’s ideas… pic.twitter.com/t6enHp3dN9
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) December 10, 2023
According to Rufo, she lifted language “nearly verbatim” from a paper by Lawrence Bobo and Franklin Gilliam.
She also took language from scholar Carol Swain, copying a distinction Swain had made without any citation of Swain’s own writing.
Rufo concluded his remarks by calling on Gay to resign from her post as uiversity president.
“As an alumnus, I am calling on Claudine Gay to immediately resign from her position,” he wrote.
I earned a master's degree from Harvard's night school—not nearly as prestigious as the graduate school—but, if I had committed these kinds of violations, I would have been expelled. As an alumnus, I am calling on Claudine Gay to immediately resign from her position.
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) December 10, 2023
Doubtless if Rufo’s claims are validated, many on the Left will come to the defense of Gay, a woman of color, on the grounds that anti-plagiarism rules are racist.
Last June, for instance, a leftist professor at the University of Cincinnati, Antar A. Tichavakunda, published a paper arguing that such rules “disproportionately harm Black and Latinx students,” as reported by Campus Reform.
Gay, who assumed office earlier this year, was a diversity hire for the woke Ivy League university.
According to Harvard alumnus and billionaire Bill Ackman, the school did not consider any candidates who “did not meet the DEI [Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion] office’s criteria.”
I learned from someone with first person knowledge of the @Harvard president search that the committee would not consider a candidate who did not meet the DEI office’s criteria.
The same was likely true for other elite universities doing searches at the same time, creating an…
— Bill Ackman (@BillAckman) December 7, 2023
Making matters worse, New Mexico Associate Psychology Professor Geoffrey Miller noted on Twitter that Gay’s resume is remarkably mediocre for a college professor, much less a president of a prestige university.
“Administrators function more like party political officers in communist Russian or Chinese universities,” Miller said, explaining how Gay attained her position. “I mean ‘party’ quite literally: the Democratic party.”
A little rant about American universities, in the light on the recent Congressional testimony debacle:
Today I learned that Harvard President Claudine Gay seems to have published only 11 peer-reviewed journal papers in her entire academic career.
'So what?', you might ask.…
— Geoffrey Miller (@primalpoly) December 7, 2023
Following Gay’s controversial testimony before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, during which she and two other college presidents refused to denounce hate speech that called for the genocide of Jews, billboard trucks parked outside the school have called for Gay’s resignation.
