Exclusive | Plagiarism: Harvard cleared Claudine Gay THEN investigated

Chris Rufo: It's brazen, it's repeated, and it's very serious

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Harvard cleared its president Claudine Gay of plagiarism before it even investigated whether her academic work was copied, The Post reveals today.

In a threatening legal letter to The Post in late October, the college called allegations that she lifted other academics’ work “demonstrably false,” and said all her works were “cited and properly credited.”

Days later Gay herself asked for an investigation and Harvard tore up its own rules to ask outside experts to review her work, saying it had to avoid a conflict of interest.

And the experts then found she did need to make multiple corrections to her academic record.

The bare-knuckled law firm Harvard employed to try to keep the plagiarism allegations from ever coming to light told The Post it would sue for “immense” damages.

Harvard never revealed an investigation had been launched as the lawyers put pressure on The Post to kill its reporting.

But more than a month later, on December 12 Harvard said Gay had been investigated by its top governing body and was correcting two academic journals, to acknowledge where her work had really come from — meaning the claim it was “properly credited” was false.

Then this week she had to correct her own dissertation after new allegations of using others’ academic work without attribution surfaced — and was hit by an official complaint from an academic at another university which alleges 40 separate incidents of plagiarism in her 11 published works and her dissertation.

Now Gay is at the center of a wide-ranging Congressional probe into her academic record and Republican lawmakers say they are willing to subpoena Harvard over the college’s apparent sham investigation.

Rep. Elise Stefanik (NY), a Harvard alumna, told The Post: “Harvard University’s pathetic record of stifling free speech has expanded beyond campus, threatening the New York Post following their investigation and coverage of Claudine Gay’s history of serial plagiarism.

“This attempt at bullying and subsequent censorship is entirely unacceptable; the Congressional investigation will use every tool at our disposal including subpoena power to expose the rot of antisemitism plaguing higher education and the hypocrisy of the poisoned ivy towers of Harvard. This is a reckoning.”

The Post’s disclosure of how Harvard cleared Gay without investigating her, then aggressively tried to cover up the probe, thrusts the actions of the head of its governing body, billionaire Hyatt heiress Penny Pritzker into the spotlight.

How Pritzker — the Senior Fellow of the Harvard Corporation who was a commerce secretary under Pres. Obama — handled the crisis will now come under scrutiny. A member of her household staff told The Post Thursday that Pritzker was not available to comment. Harvard declined to confirm Friday that she knew the contents of the legal letter before it was sent.

Pritzker is coming into focus, just as the plagiarism storm finally gains attention from left-leaning media including CNN and the New York Times — whose opinion writer John McWhorter demanded Thursday that Harvard fire Gay over “the sheer amount of plagiarism.” If it won’t, she must resign, he wrote.

Harvard’s smokescreen to save Gay began on October 24, when The Post asked for comment on a dossier of allegations sent to us anonymously that alleged she had plagiarized parts of three published works.

After a lengthy investigation of the dossier, we presented 27 possible examples of plagiarism in two peer-reviewed journals and an academic magazine, published between 1993, when Gay was a graduate student, and 2017, when she was dean of the faculty of social sciences.

Jonathan Swain, Harvard’s senior director of communications and a long-time Democratic aide, asked The Post for more time to respond.

But three days later Harvard responded with a blistering letter from Clare Locke, a law firm which previously represented the Sackler family, Matt Lauer, and Russian oligarchs after the invasion of Ukraine.

It also represented Dominion Voting Systems in its lawsuit against Fox News. The Post’s parent company NewsCorp shares the same ownership as Fox News’ parent company, Fox Corporation.

Partner Tom Clare, who signed the letter, did not respond to request for comment Friday afternoon.

Clare Locke said it was representing both Harvard and Gay.

“These allegations of plagiarism are demonstrably false,” the law firm wrote — suggesting that Harvard had cleared Gay already.

“Harvard and President Gay stand together in their determination that the proposed article must not be published.

“The Post must not move forward with the proposed article.”

It claimed that any suggestion of plagiarism “rests on a fatally flawed understanding of what ‘plagiarism’ is (and is not) in scholarly work performed in academic journals and settings.”

It also accused The Post of conducting “facile comparisons of similar phrases” to assess whether there was evidence which would support plagiarism allegations. Plagiarism means copying without attribution.

The letter rounded up statements from academics using college letterheads — whose work The Post had found bore striking resemblance to Gay’s — to say that they did not believe they had been plagiarized.

One of the academics, George Reid Andrews, a professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh whose work Gay had appeared to use in an essay without attribution when she was a graduate student at Harvard, told The Post Thursday that he stood by that statement — but that he did not know that it would be used to threaten The Post.

And in the letter Harvard launched a bizarre conspiracy theory, that the plagiarism allegations were produced by The Post asking ChatGPT.

“[T]here are strong indications that the excerpts cited by The Post were not in fact the ‘complaints’ of a human complainant — but rather were generated by artificial intelligence or some other technological or automated means,” it said.

“If these indications are correct, and the ultimate source of these examples is an algorithm-generated list created by asking ChatGPT to (for example) ‘show me the 10 most similar passages in works by Claudine Gay to other scholarly works’ it is no ‘complaint’ at all. It is, instead, manufactured news.”

In a particularly heavy-handed move, the letter also complained about The Post’s use of an anonymous source, a common practice in journalism, and threatened to use legal means to out who had supplied the comparisons.

Meanwhile, two days after sending the letter, Gay apparently asked the Harvard Corporation, of which she is a member along with 11 outside members, to investigate the allegations.

The Corporation cast aside the college’s procedures, which set out a formal process for investigating faculty accused of plagiarism, saying it was to avoid a “conflict of interest” because of Gay’s status.

Instead it appointed a four-member sub-committee to determine what to do. They in turn asked three experts, all political scientists who are not at Harvard, to investigate. Harvard and Clare Locke never told The Post of this significant change in Harvard’s position.

The college has never disclosed who was on the subcommittee or the names of the three experts.

Clare Locke wrote a second letter denying Gay was a plagiarist on November 7 — when the investigation was active — repeating the claim the allegations were “false,” and not disclosing the probe’s existence.

The unprecedented probe continued while members of Congress questioned Gay under oath on December 5 on her handling of a wave of antisemitism on campus in the wake of Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre of hundreds of innocent Israelis.

Gay had to apologize for her disastrous testimony and on Dec. 7, Congress opened a formal investigation into antisemitism on campus at Harvard and other Ivy league colleges — and Gay faced mounting calls to quit after the University of Pennsylvania’s president Liz Magill was ousted.

Then on December 10, as the Post continued to investigate, conservative commentator Chris Rufo revealed allegations that Gay’s dissertation contained elements of plagiarism, and the following day the Washington Free Beacon revealed further allegations of unacknowledged work — making a total of 30 possible incidents of copying.

Gay issued her only statement on the storm to The Boston Globe on December 11 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.”

On Dec. 12, after days of crisis, Harvard issued a long statement rejecting calls to fire Gay, saying the Corporation unanimously stood by her.

But at the bottom of the statement, it revealed that it had investigated her over possible plagiarism.

Even though it had found “a few instances of inadequate citation,” it said “the analysis found no violation of Harvard’s standards for research misconduct.”

And Gay was revealed to be correcting two of the instances of apparent plagiarism highlighted by The Post — which Harvard’s attorneys had called “both cited and properly credited” — because of “inadequate citations.”

Gay had been cleared again in public — but on Tuesday an anonymous complaint made directly to Harvard alleged a total of 40 instances of plagiarism.

Then on Wednesday Gay issued another set of corrections, this time to her own dissertation — taking the total of amendments she has had to make to seven. She has a total of 11 published works plus her dissertation.

Separately, new details of the investigation were reported by the respected Chronicle of Higher Education.

The Corporation only looked into her dissertation after that statement, prompting this week’s new flurry of corrections.

The Chronicle reported that Harvard had decided to entirely ignore the 1993 paper Gay published, in part because of “its age,” and because the journal it was published in did not appear to demand citations at the time — even though The Post had asked for comment on 12 possible instances of plagiarism in it.

And Harvard had not looked at her dissertation at all when it issued its Dec. 12 statement publicly clearing the president.

On Wednesday Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-Va.), chair of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, demanded Gay and Harvard turn over all their documents and communications about the plagiarism probe.

And a Nobel prize-winning economist and Harvard graduate, Vernon Smith, told blog Karlstack.com, “I see Gay as getting her post at Harvard because she was a diversity, equity and inclusion candidate, not on the basis of strong academic qualifications. She is a discredit to Harvard, and that is being revealed.”

Harvard’s Swain declined to comment to The Post on a series of questions. Aside from Priztker, one Corporation member, venture capitalist Paul Finnegan, declined to comment and attempts to reach 9 others were unsuccessful.

“Harvard’s response strongly suggests that they had already decided to stand behind Claudine Gay, regardless of the evidence,” said Phillip Magness, senior research fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research and co-author of “Cracks in the Ivory Tower: The Moral Mess of Higher Education.”.

“They staged a rushed and non-transparent investigation behind closed doors, and appear to have reached a foregone conclusion of exonerating her. Unfortunately, it’s a familiar pattern in the Ivy League when plagiarism allegations implicate a ‘star’ left-wing faculty member.”

Harvard — and the wider college world — is now roiled by debate over whether Gay’s conduct is actual plagiarism, and also rises to the level of “research misconduct.”

Harvard defines plagiarism in its handbook for students as “the act of intentionally OR unintentionally submitting work that was written by somebody else,” and says any source, whether an academic paper, website or other document “must be cited properly.”

“Even if you write down your own ideas in your own words and place them around text that you’ve drawn directly from a source, you must give credit to the author of the source material, either by placing the source material in quotation marks and providing a clear citation, or by paraphrasing the source material and providing a clear citation,” it says.

The most recent figures, from the academic year 2020-2021 and reported by the Harvard Crimson, showed 47 findings of plagiarism by the college’s disciplinary body, while that year a record 27 students “withdrew” — in effect were expelled — for breaching the honor code, which includes plagiarism, exam cheating, and other infractions.

And while students are told academic staff have the same standards for plagiarism, “research misconduct,” for which they can be disciplined, has to have been committed “intentionally, knowingly or recklessly.” Harvard said it did not find evidence in Gay’s work that she acted intentionally.

One college academic said there appeared to be a double standard for Gay compared to students and researchers.

“Just speaking from my own corner of Harvard, there is no question in my mind [that] if we uncovered that pattern of academic dishonesty in any of our researchers, including myself, they would be dismissed immediately,” Brendan Case, associate director of research of the college’s Human Flourishing Program told The Boston Globe.

The left-leaning editorial board of Harvard’s hometown paper, The Boston Globe called Harvard’s statement on the plagiarism allegations “confusing” for saying Gay did not commit “research misconduct” but did need to make corrections.

“If Gay didn’t violate any standards of research, why would she need to correct anything?” it wrote.

Additional reporting by Marjorie Hernandez and Josh Christenson