By Isabel Vincent – Published Dec. 12, 2023, 6:03 p.m. ET – New York Post

Harvard University covered up a high-level investigation into whether its controversial president was a plagiarist — and used an expensive law firm to threaten The Post over our own probe.

The college announced Tuesday morning that it had investigated Claudine Gay over whether some of her academic work was plagiarized and had cleared her of breaching the college’s “standards for research misconduct.”

Instead, it said that she would request four corrections in two publications to insert citations and quotation marks that were originally “omitted.”

But The Post can disclose that Harvard spent weeks failing to come clean about Gay being under investigation — staying quiet even when she was hauled in front of Congress for disastrous testimony on how the Ivy League college is dealing with antisemitism on campus.

Harvard only disclosed the investigation when the university’s governing body, Harvard Corporation, said it unanimously stood behind her despite a firestorm of criticism for her evidence to Congress.

Harvard’s public statement on the allegations of plagiarism came a day after a conservative activist posted questions on X about citations in Gay’s 1997 PhD dissertation.

Gay had vigorously defended her academic record in comments to the Boston Globe after the dissertation questions were revealed, and said: “I stand by the integrity of my scholarship. Throughout my career, I have worked to ensure my scholarship adheres to the highest academic standards.”

Tuesday’s statement, issued to “members of the Harvard community” said that the probe began in late October, after Harvard “became aware” of allegations about Gay.

But the statement did not tell the full story — including how Harvard called in bulldog attorneys to protect Gay.

The Post contacted the university on October 24, asking for comment on more than two dozen instances in which Gay’s words appeared to closely parallel words, phrases or sentences in published works by other academics.

The 27 instances were in two academic papers published in two peer-reviewed journals between 2011 and 2017, and an article in an academic magazine in 1993.

The Post was sent the material anonymously and had conducted our own analysis before asking Harvard to comment on whether Gay had plagiarized or failed to properly cite other academics’ work. We have continued to investigate since.

When The Post brought the allegations to Harvard, Jonathan Swain, its senior executive director of media relations and communications, asked for more time to review Gay’s work.

A day later Swain, who was part of the Biden-Harris transition team and a one-time Hillary Clinton aide, said he would “get back in touch over the next couple of days.”

But he did not. And two days later, on Oct. 27, The Post was sent a 15-page letter by Thomas Clare, a high-powered Virginia-based attorney with the firm Clare-Locke who identified himself as defamation counsel for Harvard University and Gay.

The letter contained comments from academics whose work Gay was alleged to have improperly cited — even though the political scientists’ review could only just have begun.

Harvard has still not said what works Gay is seeking to have corrected, and whether her dissertation will be corrected. it did not respond to a further set of questions from The Post Tuesday.

The dates on the three works reviewed by The Post ranged from 1993, when Gay was a post-graduate student, until 2017 when she was Dean of Social Science at the school’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

Gay, 53, assumed office as Harvard’s first black president earlier this year.

Jonathan Bailey, who heads up Plagiarism Now, and has worked as an expert witness involving plagiarism cases, reviewed the papers in question and said he believes that some of Gay’s work did violate Harvard’s own academic policy on citations.

“It is a violation of the policy and that alone should justify a thorough examination,” said Bailey in an email to The Post.

Academics whose work appeared startlingly similar to Gay’s differed in whether they felt she had appropriated their work without attribution.

George Reid Andrews, professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh, acknowledged that Gay “did borrow a few of my phrases” in her 1993 article “Between Black and White: The Complexity of Brazilian Race Relations” from Reid Andrews’s paper “Black Political Protest in Sao Paulo, 1888-1988,” which appeared in the Journal of Latin American Studies in 1992.

“But this happens fairly often in academic writing and for me does not rise to the level of plagiarism,” he said. “I am glad she read my work, learned from it, and recommended it to her readers.”

Jens Ludwig, an economist at the University of Chicago, had a similar response when contacted by The Post in October about similarities in a paper he co-authored in 2008 and Gay’s “Moving to Opportunity: The Political Effects of a Housing Mobility Experiment,” published in Urban Affairs Review in 2011.

“We partnered with Claudine on some work and my guess would be that it is the connection,” he said.

Among the papers under scrutiny are 2017’s “A Room for One’s Own? The Partisan Allocation of Affordable Housing,” published in Urban Affairs Review and written while Gay was dean of social science at Harvard.

In the paper, Gay uses phrases which closely parallel ones in a 2011 paper by Anne Williamson, a professor of political science at the University of Miami in Ohio.

Williamson told The Post she was “angry” when she read the excerpts.

“It does look like plagiarism to me,” she said. “If they are going to do what they did, then I should be cited as a reference. My first reaction is shock. The second reaction is puzzlement. There was a way to draw from my paper. All she had to do is give me a credit.”

Readers’ Comments

Doctortee 1 hour ago

All senior university appointments are highly political but the appointment of the Harvard President is absolutely beyond the pale. It has made what was the world’s number one university the laughing stock of the entire university world.

The job of a university president – particularly one as large as Harvard – is to be seen as an international research and education leader, and to be able to attract and manage tens of billions of dollars in research income and endowments. A president is also responsible for engaging with the public and government in articulate, reasoned and informed debate on complex issues.

The Harvard President does not possess a single one of these skills.

The President’s research track record is absolutely abysmal – even if it was not being questioned. Her education record is almost non-existent, as is her ability to attract research funding from business, industry or government. As shown by the Congressional hearings last week, this person does not have the acuity to engage in even low level debate. At best, under normal circumstances, this person would struggle to obtain a position as a postdoctoral researcher or teaching assistant even in a much-lower-ranked institution.

What message has this appointment sent to the researchers and academic staff at Harvard and around the world? That if you are a low achiever in research, education and research funding you can be appointed to run the number one university on the planet?

Wolfman 3 hours ago

It’s a cornerstone of DEI hiring to give less qualified applicants big jobs, jobs they arguably don’t deserve – because the applicant is a women, or a minority, or an immigrant. Gay checks three boxes, she is African American, she is a women, and she comes from an immigrant background. I have no problem with highly qualified minorities or women or even new immigrants getting some big job – but I think they need to be qualified. It’s no triumph when a more qualified candidate has their resume go into the trash can – because he or she is the wrong color Arguably Gay is just not qualified for her job as Harvard President. Laura Ingram reported the other night that Gay has written just 11 scholarly articles in her whole academic career, she also has written not a single book. I almost fell of my lazy boy chair when I heard that…. Now we are learning Gay may have copied others academics work, sneakily changing the wording to avoid detection (that’s an old trick fraternity members would teach to frosh pledges). Why is the mainstream press covering up Gay’s weak academic background, along with the with the possible plagiarism she has been doing with her academic writing? That’s a question all reporters should be thinking about.

Lawman897 2 hours ago

And this is what you get. Harvard clearly isn’t what it used to be. Far from it. No more SAT scores. DEI and the radical left that dominate these schools have decimated a true education.