Harvard president steps down: Why charges of plagiarism still stick

In the end, it was all about Claudine Gay’s words. Words that she did and didn’t say during a Dec. 5 congressional hearing in Washington. Words that she used in research without proper attribution. 

Jewish students questioned if Dr. Gay could keep them safe on campus in the face of antisemitism. Billionaire Harvard alum Bill Ackman claimed that Dr. Gay only got her job because she was a diversity, equity, and inclusion hire. 

Dr. Gay, only the second woman to hold the title of president of Harvard, and the first Black person, ended the shortest tenure in the university’s history on Jan. 2.

“Yes, I made mistakes,” Dr. Gay wrote in The New York Times. “My commitment to fighting antisemitism has been questioned. My inbox has been flooded with invective, including death threats. I’ve been called the N-word more times than I care to count.” 

Calls for her departure rose in the wake of her testimony before Congress. Shortly after, her scholarship was questioned, specifically missing quotation marks or attribution. Scholars argued if she should stay or go. The Harvard Corp. announced to the faculty that she had been cleared of plagiarism accusations and simply made a few instances of inadequate citations. Then, more instances of inadequate citation came to light.

“It was clear that there were people attacking the university who had her in their sights and were determined not to let up pressure on her to resign,” says Alison Frank Johnson, a Harvard history professor who joined more than 700 other faculty members in signing a letter in support of Dr. Gay in December. 

The sought-after post of university president has become fraught in a time when higher education is increasingly a target. After the congressional hearing, Liz Magill resigned as head of the University of Pennsylvania. And in July, Stanford University’s Marc Tessier-Lavigne had to step down after an independent review found significant flaws in his research going back decades.  

Dr. Gay is hardly the first prominent scholar to deal with allegations of insufficient attribution. Others include Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, and primatologist Jane Goodall. Dr. Gay is not accused of stealing ideas or artistic expression – which experts consider the most serious ethical lapses – but rather carelessness. In the circles of academia, plagiarism is a charge that remains a potential career-killer.

“The ability to think critically and independently is a crucial skill for students and faculty alike. Copying work from others, without proper acknowledgment or citation remains a major issue of academic integrity and obviously discourages critical thinking,” says Alan Kadish, president of Touro University, via email. “Despite the advances in large language processing artificial intelligence, we should insist that while using prior sources students must think and write on their own. ... The ability to reason remains crucial to educational and professional growth.” 

Critics of Dr. Gay say it would be hypocritical for presidents to be held to lesser standards than undergraduates. Dr. Gay and her supporters say that the charges were merely the lever for right-wing activists, such as Christopher Rufo, to oust her for political purposes. 

“As I depart, I must offer a few words of warning. The campaign against me was about more than one university and one leader. This was merely a single skirmish in a broader war to unravel public faith in pillars of American society,” Dr. Gay warned in the Times. 

Dr. Johnson was shocked that the Harvard Corp. did not give Dr. Gay due process. She says that in a late December meeting with faculty members, Dr. Gay assured them that she was preparing to weather the storm.

“I thought that the plagiarism allegations would be reviewed, as is common practice in academia when there are such allegations, by a committee that would do a thorough investigation, that would determine whether or not they were really serious enough to merit some kind of response,” Dr. Johnson says.

She adds that while mistakes are a part of science, plagiarism and scholarly misconduct cannot be tolerated, especially by a university president. But due process includes peer review, which Dr. Gay did not receive. Peer reviewers use scholarly principles and practices to determine if mistakes reach the level of research misconduct or if they are just regrettable errors, she says.

“I just expected the process to play out more slowly and to involve more serious and careful consideration within the university, rather than what seems to me to be a sudden response to just relentless outside pressure,” Dr. Johnson says.

According to the Harvard Guide to Using Sources, plagiarism means to draw any idea or any language from someone else without adequately crediting that source. Taking credit for someone else’s work is stealing and is unacceptable in all academic situations, intentionally or not.

“In the digital age, it is much easier to share and copy information seamlessly. However, thus far the standards for acknowledgment, sharing, and plagiarism have not materially changed,” says Dr. Kadish. “Although there has been some disagreement about the severity of copying phrases, the lack of acknowledgment in President Gay’s work, the pervasive nature of it ... is worrisome. I believe that her resignation was an affirmation of the need to maintain high standards in our nation’s institutions of higher learning.” 

Still other scholars point to racial targeting for Gay’s resignation.

“The question to assess whether this was a racist attack is not whether President Gay engaged in any misconduct. The question is whether all these people would have investigated, surveilled, harassed, written about, and attacked her in the same way if the Harvard president in this case would have been White. I. Think. Not,” Ibram X. Kendi, founder of the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University, posted on social media. 

Students on the Harvard campus, whether they support Dr. Gay or feel she needed to step down, repeatedly have spoken about their exhaustion and a need for the university to champion its own ideals.

“Public trust in elite institutions like our own has long been in decline. In many ways, it produced the controversy with Gay that now steepens the nosedive,” writes The Harvard Crimson in an editorial. “To stanch this existentially threatening trend, Harvard must commit to public accountability and transparency.”

Some students, too, point to ulterior motives behind the ouster of Dr. Gay.

“The criticisms she faced had merit, but their merits did not end her presidency – a campaign of ugly and racist political opportunism did,” writes the Crimson. “This is an assault on higher education. It employs the cheapest, most foul tactics American politics has to offer. And it will not end with Claudine Gay’s presidency.”