Last week, Harvard President Claudine Gay was accused of multiple instances of plagiarism. Three authors have said that they believe she plagiarized their work. News of this scandal followed Gay’s appalling testimony on antisemitism before Congress, a performance that sparked condemnation even from the Biden White House. But these events have exposed in turn a set of actors even more comically dangerous to the Harvard brand than Gay herself: the Fellows of Harvard College, the university’s governing board.
Rather than request President Gay’s resignation, Harvard’s board has chosen to cover for her with dissimulations that only a Harvard graduate could expect the public to swallow.
On Dec. 12, the Fellows revealed that they had convened a panel of “distinguished political scientists” to review the allegations against Gay, which they had first learned of in October. Of course, Harvard has standing faculty committees to investigate accusations of plagiarism, but the board apparently chose to use these unnamed panelists to examine the charges instead. The board made no mention of Harvard’s Committee on Professional Conduct, which ordinarily investigates claims of faculty misconduct according to the university’s detailed policy. That policy has no provision for makeshift investigations overseen by the Harvard board.
Rather than clearing President Gay, even this hand-picked panel found some of the allegations credible. The board admits that her published writings contain instances of “inadequate citation.” That term is important because Harvard’s own plagiarism policy states, “When you fail to cite your sources, or when you cite them inadequately, you are plagiarizing, which is taken extremely seriously at Harvard.” The board therefore confesses that President Gay committed plagiarism multiple times based on the university’s own definition.
Then comes the sleight of hand. The board asserts that, despite the plagiarism, there was “no violation of Harvard’s standards for research misconduct.” But in fact, Harvard’s policy on research misconduct defines the transgression this way: “fabrication, falsification, or plagiarism in proposing, performing, or reviewing research, or in reporting research results.” So, plagiarism is research misconduct, and the board admits that Gay committed plagiarism as Harvard defines it. Yet the board somehow maintains that Gay did not commit research misconduct. If anyone still teaches logic at Harvard, the Harvard board should consider sitting in on a course.
The board goes on to reassure us that President Gay “is proactively requesting four corrections in two articles to insert citations and quotation marks that were omitted.” After she was caught, President Gay “proactively” corrected her decades-old articles, like an art thief “proactively” returns a stolen Monet discovered in his attic. Pressing its luck, the board also reduces plagiarism to a punctuation mistake: “quotation marks … were omitted.” Note the use of the passive voice: so very clever, these Fellows of Harvard College!
The board left out some material facts. When presented by the New York Post with evidence of Gay’s plagiarism on Oct. 24, Harvard did not simply initiate an investigation. Instead, the university sicced a famed defamation lawyer on the Post’s reporter, only to confess last week that at least some of the potential examples did constitute plagiarism as Harvard defines it. We doubt that Harvard provided white-shoe defamation attorneys to the 27 students it kicked out for plagiarism last year. In saner times, a university president credibly accused of plagiarism would have received not a super-lawyer, but a severance package. This is not your grandfather’s Harvard.
Anyone who has followed past plagiarism scandals knows that this story is probably not over. The Fellows of Harvard College should keep their pencils sharpened and their minds nimble – they will likely need to draft more creative excuses for their president in the days ahead.
