“How much longer will Harvard keep Claudine Gay as president” is a fair question right now.

If you have been following the story, then you know that Gay was among the three university presidents that gave horrible answers to the questions posed to them about dealing with anti-Semitism on their campuses.

The blowback was severe enough that Liz Magill of UPenn, after offering a forced videotaped “apology,” resigned when the donor money began walking out the door. Gay also offered up a backtracking apology, which said this:

“I am sorry,” Gay said in an interview with The Crimson on Thursday. “Words matter.”

“When words amplify distress and pain, I don’t know how you could feel anything but regret,” Gay added.

Gay said she sought to use her testimony before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce on Tuesday to highlight efforts underway at Harvard to combat antisemitism. Her remarks, however, only served to inflame criticism of Gay’s response to reports of antisemitism on campus.

“There are some who have confused a right to free expression with the idea that Harvard will condone calls for violence against Jewish students,” Gay said. “Let me be clear: Calls for violence or genocide against the Jewish community, or any religious or ethnic group are vile, they have no place at Harvard, and those who threaten our Jewish students will be held to account.”

But the damage had been done, an error Gay acknowledged on Thursday as the fallout continued. The House Committee on Education and the Workforce announced an official congressional investigation into antisemitism at Harvard. Hours later, Rabbi David Wolpe resigned from an advisory group to combat antisemitism on campus that Gay established only weeks earlier, citing her congressional testimony.

“I got caught up in what had become at that point, an extended, combative exchange about policies and procedures,” Gay said in the interview. “What I should have had the presence of mind to do in that moment was return to my guiding truth, which is that calls for violence against our Jewish community — threats to our Jewish students — have no place at Harvard, and will never go unchallenged.”

“Substantively, I failed to convey what is my truth,” Gay added.

As the above notes, the apology may be too little, too late. Rabbi David Wolpe resigned from a Harvard anti-Semitism group, saying, “the short explanation is that both events on campus and the painfully inadequate testimony reinforced the idea that I cannot make the sort of difference I had hoped” while still being complimentary to Claudine Gay and Harvard on Twitter/X (his complete statement can be read here). Harvard is now under investigation by the Department of Education for alleged Title VI violations. Gay’s scholarship as a faculty member and her love and devotion to DEI as dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences have now either come to light or gotten more exposure after her testimony last week.

But now, a new report from Christopher Rufo is shining a light on Claudine Gay’s academic integrity. And if these charges, which look pretty damning with the evidence he and Chris Brunet have compiled regarding Gay’s Ph.D thesis – and the plagiarism they found.

We have obtained exclusive documentation demonstrating that President Gay may face yet another problem: plagiarism of sections of her Ph.D. dissertation, which would violate Harvard’s own stated policies on academic integrity. (We reached out to President Gay for comment, but received no response.)

Gay published her dissertation, “Taking Charge: Black Electoral Success and the Redefinition of American Policies,” in 1997, as part of her doctorate in political science from Harvard. The paper deals with white-black political representation and racial attitudes. As evaluated under the university’s plagiarism policy, the paper contains at least three problematic patterns of usage and citation.

Rufo and Brunet cite three major problems with Gay’s thesis – and they provide evidence of each claim.

First, Gay lifts an entire paragraph nearly verbatim from Lawrence Bobo and Franklin Gilliam’s paper, “Race, Sociopolitical Participation, and Black Empowerment,” while passing it off as her own paraphrase and language.

Evidence of the first claim can be seen here, along with subsequent examples found of direct plagiarism later in the thesis.

Second, Gay appears to lift material from scholar Carol Swain in at least two instances. In one passage, summarizing the distinction between “descriptive representation” and “substantive representation,” she copies the phrasing and language nearly verbatim from Swain’s book Black Faces, Black Interests, without providing a citation of any kind.

Carol Swain is a scholar of distinction, and a conservative one as well. It seems rather hilarious that Gay would plagiarize her directly, but Swain herself was taking the revelation with a balance of humor and gravity Sunday evening.

I just learned of @realchrisrufo analysis of #ClaudineGay’s work and the allegations of plagiarism. I have not read the articles or books in question. However, two things come to mind: imitation is said to be the highest form of flattery and secondly Dr. Gay’s committee,… pic.twitter.com/0388xnHqSi

— Dr. Carol M. Swain (@carolmswain) December 11, 2023

Finally, Rufo and Brunet find that Gay copied her thesis advisor’s work.

Third, Gay composes an entire appendix in the dissertation directly taken from Gary King’s book, A Solution to the Ecological Inference Problem. While she cites King’s book—in fact, King was her dissertation advisor—Gay does not explicitly acknowledge that Appendix B is entirely grounded in King’s concepts, instead passing it off as her own original work. Throughout the appendix, Gay takes entire phrases and sentences directly from King’s book, without any citations or quotation marks. In total, Gay borrows material from King in at least half a dozen paragraphs—all in violation of Harvard’s standard on academic integrity.

The Harvard rules regarding plagiarism are clear – and have been clearly bent before, as Gay is also accused of protecting a professor from being investigated for plagiarism.

Let’s not forget that Claudine Gay protected this professor, Ryan Enos, from being investigated for fabricating data. And of course she did, since she herself appears to be a plagiarist! https://t.co/rJ6JbE8ozI https://t.co/hsJuqZEfJM

— Solveig Gold (@solveiggold) December 11, 2023

The Harvard board met on Sunday night, but faculty was apparently standing up for Gay. Or, at least, they don’t want “outside pressure” telling them what to do, even if that pressure is coming from alumni and donors. However, the letter that faculty signed in support of Gay was done before the news broke of the plagiarism accusations due to Rufo and Brunet’s work.

So let’s look at the evidence at hand. Gay has a thin publishing record, is a committed DEI believer, and now stands credibly accused of plagiarism. And those issues don’t even begin to take into account the anti-Semitism that has been allowed to metastasize under her tenure as president of Harvard, and the Title VI investigation now underway. If the board does not ask for her resignation or fire her right now, then they had better take the plagiarism allegations seriously and open an investigation into Gay’s thesis. If they don’t – well, then that “outside pressure” that the faculty so doesn’t want to take into consideration will likely get a whole lot louder.

Featured image: Claudine Gay at her inauguration as president of Harvard on September 29, 2023, cropped, from the Flickr account of Governor Maura Healey of Massachussetts, photo by Charlotte Hysen/Governor’s Press Office, Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 DEED)