The Harvard Corporation announced Tuesday that it reviewed allegations of plagiarism against university President Claudine Gay and concluded that she did not violate the university’s academic research standards, although the university said it will issue corrections to two of Gay’s publications that contained “inadequate citation.”
The corporation, which oversees the Ivy League university, addressed the plagiarism allegations in a statement Tuesday that announced the university would retain Gay as president despite a tumultuous two months, during which Gay declined to say if calling for the genocide of Jews violated the university’s code of conduct at a congressional hearing.
HARVARD PRESIDENT CLAUDINE GAY KEEPS JOB FOLLOWING DISASTROUS TESTIMONY
On Monday, conservative activist and Manhattan Institute senior fellow Chris Rufo published a review of Gay’s academic work that alleged the Harvard president may have plagiarized portions of her 1997 doctoral thesis.
Rufo’s questions about Gay’s thesis were followed by a Washington Free Beacon report exploring additional alleged instances of plagiarism from Gay’s published academic works spanning more than two decades.
In a statement to the Boston Globe, Gay said she stood “by the integrity of my scholarship.”
“Throughout my career, I have worked to ensure my scholarship adheres to the highest academic standards,” Gay said.
In its Tuesday announcement, the Harvard Corporation agreed with her but revealed that it had known about the plagiarism allegations since October.
“With regard to President Gay’s academic writings, the University became aware in late October of allegations regarding three articles,” the corporation 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.”
Following the review, the corporation said that the Harvard fellows found “a few instances of inadequate citation” but that these instances did not violate “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,” the statement said.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Stephen Voss, a professor at the University of Kentucky and one of the researchers Gay is accused of improperly citing, told the Harvard Crimson that Gay’s writing was “technically plagiarism” but that he saw it as “minor-to-inconsequential.”
“This doesn’t at all look sneaky,” he said. “It looks like maybe she just didn’t have a sense of what we normally tell students they’re supposed to do and not do.”
