Plagiarism claims against Harvard President Claudine Gay boost GOP's anti-higher ed efforts

Conservatives in Congress and across the country are escalating their attacks on colleges and universities, which they have long painted broadly as environments that stoke far-left ideology.

A disastrous congressional hearing earlier this month centered on how several elite colleges are handling antisemitism on campus. The college presidents’ rote responses offered the perfect moment to unleash conservative fury with higher education, a view held by a growing share of Republicans. 

Colleges and universities have for years been a target of the right. In recent weeks, spurred on by the high-profile resignation of one Ivy League president after their calls for her ouster, conservatives are making the most of a new momentum. They’ve introduced legislation threatening to cut off federal student loans to the richest schools and impose hefty taxes on their endowments. 

Many academics, already strained by disruptive protests and free speech concerns since the start of the Israel-Hamas war, say the attacks are the latest battle in a larger conservative-led war on higher education – especially against Ivy League schools, which are unpopular with many Americans.

The latest target is Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard, who now faces allegations that she plagiarized others’ work over the course of her yearslong academic career. 

So far, the university is standing by Gay. An initial independent review found that her “inadequate citations, while regrettable, did not constitute research misconduct,” spokesperson Jason Newton said in a statement Thursday. 

The review did little to satisfy the GOP-led education committee in the House of Representatives, which said Wednesday it will probe plagiarism and academic integrity standards at Harvard, citing its own power to oversee higher education programs. That’s on top of its ongoing investigation into the school’s handling of antisemitism on campus.

"An allegation of plagiarism by a top school official at any university would be reason for concern, but Harvard is not just any university,” wrote Education and the Workforce Committee Chairwoman Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., in the Wednesday letter. “It styles itself as one of the top educational institutions in the country."

Israel-Hamas war:Free-speech battles stirred at college campuses across US

Joshua Cowen, a professor of education policy at Michigan State University, said he sees the ordeal as indicative of how the “ecosystem of right-wing politics” interacts with education. 

“I don’t think you have to be a tinfoil conspiracy theorist to look at this for what it is,” he said. “These are professional political communicators.” 

Claudine Gay and plagiarism: What happened

Allegations of plagiarism in some of Gay’s work first surfaced well before her Dec. 5 congressional testimony. 

According to Harvard’s Newton, a reporter at the conservative-leaning New York Post reached out to the university on Oct. 24 for comment about a story alleging she plagiarized portions of academic articles dating back to the 1990s. A few days later, Gay asked the university’s governing board to conduct an independent review, Newton said. That panel found no evidence of “intentional deception or recklessness” in Gay’s works. But it did find that Gay made “regrettable” and “inadequate” citation errors. She submitted two corrections on Dec. 14. 

Legitimate allegations of plagiarism, a serious concern in the academic community, should be investigated carefully by individual schools and faculty, said Irene Mulvey, president of the American Association of University Professors.

“The question is why the very public and breathless outrage targeting the first Black female president of Harvard, when we see little public outcry over the many individuals with no experience in higher education administration, or even in academia, being appointed to senior leadership positions with next-to-no scrutiny all over the country?” she said.

Plagiarism accusations at Harvard:President Claudine Gay to remain, university leaders affirm support

Ivy League schools under microscope during Israel-Hamas war

The plagiarism accusations are also swirling at a time when college and university leaders nationwide are in the hot seat over their handling of disagreements over the Israel-Hamas war. 

Since Oct. 7, antisemitic and Islamaphobic incidents on campuses have skyrocketed. Jewish and Muslim students are switching up their college admissions strategies. The federal government has launched a slew of civil rights investigations. 

Well before the Dec. 5 congressional hearing, conservative lawmakers were pouncing at the opportunity to criticize the schools – especially wealthy, highly selective ones – for allowing antisemitism to flourish on campus. 

In the last few weeks, the criticism has been relentless. 

Criticism of Gay follows DEI scrutiny

Some of the attacks on Gay reference her diversity, equity and inclusion work at Harvard before becoming president. Conservatives at the state and federal level have endeavored to disband diversity, equity and inclusion efforts on college campuses.

As of July, 40 such bills had been introduced across 23 states, seven of which passed, according to a Chronicle of Higher Education analysis. Just this week, Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Texas, introduced a bill in Congress that would strip federal funding from universities that require DEI statements. Such statements typically ask students or job applicants to describe how their values or experiences promote DEI on campus.

Gay has been framed by her critics as a DEI crusader. Before being tapped president, Gay as a dean oversaw initiatives calling on the school to, for example, update visual signage in campus spaces so they displayed more women and people of color. She also helped lead a “denaming” effort focusing on locations and programs honoring individuals who held “abhorrent” beliefs. As part of her presidency, Gay now leads Harvard’s Office of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging. 

Gay’s DEI initiatives are reflective of a national trend, with Harvard often seen as a bellwether for how higher education will respond to social justice issues. And the current attacks on Gay hint at what critics say are the underlying goals of the plagiarism accusations – part of a larger campaign to undermine the spread of DEI, and by extension progressive values, in higher education.

The campaign has already had some success. In Texas, a high-profile anti-DEI bill takes effect Jan. 1. Some campuses have, in preparation, already dissolved their multicultural centers and LGBTQ+ Pride Alliances. Others have scrapped DEI statements. 

Harvard’s DEI office “is a major contributing source of discriminatory practices on campus and highly damaging to the culture and sense of community,” argued billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman in a recent open letter calling for Gay to step down. “It is beyond repair and should be shut down.”

Ongoing frustrations with universities’ handling of activism over the Israel-Hamas war are likely to fuel the anti-DEI legislative wave. The trend includes similar bills attempting to reduce academics’ and universities’ influence by restricting tenure, for example, and taxing endowments. This past January, Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis began the process of overhauling New College, a public institution in Sarasota once known for its progressive politics. New College of Florida now has new trustees and a president who disbanded the institution’s diversity and gender studies programming, in addition to other decisions such as the denial of tenure to faculty members who were set to receive it. 

‘Duplicative language’ found in Gay’s dissertation

On the heels of her widely panned testimony in early December, Gay avoided calls for her ouster as alumni and faculty largely stood by her. 

This week, however, she began to field new plagiarism accusations first surfaced by the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative news outlet. Though the university said some of the claims were meritless, a separate review of Gay’s dissertation – which is decades old – found it included “duplicative language without appropriate attribution,” Newton said. 

An administrative subcommittee concluded no further action was required. 

Some of the material in question in Gay’s dissertation came from a paper by Stephen Voss, who was a teaching fellow at Harvard when Gay was working on her doctorate, and Bradley Palmquist, who was a political science professor at Harvard at the time. 

Voss told USA TODAY that Gay did use, almost verbatim, about a paragraph and a half from that paper.

“That falls in my definition of plagiarism,” said Voss, who is now an associate professor at the University of Kentucky. “I’ve been teaching students for more than a quarter century not to do that.” 

Still, he said, “it was a small and trivial part of our paper,” that didn’t have any bearing on the quality or value of Gay’s work. Her dissertation was awarded a prize for Harvard’s best dissertation in political science in 1998. 

“For me to get outraged over an inconsequential paragraph and half,” Voss said, “would make me a jerk.”