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Harvard University covered up a high-level investigation into whether its controversial president Claudine Gay was a plagiarist — and used an expensive law firm to threaten The Post over its 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.”
The Post is however reporting 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.
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