Harvard president’s adviser pushes back on accusations she plagiarised his work

Claudine Gay was accused of plagiarising ‘multiple sections’ of her 1997 PhD thesis on the success of Black politicians

An adviser to Harvard president Claudine Gay has pushed back on accusations that she plagiarised his work.

Chris Rufo, a conservative activist who spearheaded a right-wing campaign against critical race theory in elementary schools, has accused Ms Gay of plagiarising “multiple sections” of her 1997 PhD thesis on the success of Black politicians.

Mr Rufo claimed that Ms Gay’s thesis, titled Taking Charge: Black Electoral Success and the Redefinition of American Politics, contained “verbatim language” of academics she had cited in her work, as well as “a few trivial synonym substitutions, without providing quotation marks.”

The conservative blogger posted sections of her dissertation online, and alleged three instances of supposed plagiarism, in an apparent breach of Harvard’s anti-plagiarism policy, which states that “it’s not enough to change a few words here and there and leave the rest; instead, you must completely restate the ideas in the passage in your own words”.

Among them, Mr Rufo said the 53-year-old had plagiarised the entire appendix in her dissertation “directly… from Gary King’s book, A Solution to the Ecological Inference Problem,” arguing that Ms Gay “does not explicitly acknowledge that Appendix B is entirely grounded in King’s concepts, instead passing it off as her own original work.”

He also pointed to “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,” Mr Rufo claimed.

Claudine Gay was accused of plagiarising ‘multiple sections’ of her 1997 PhD thesis (Copyright 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.)

Mr King, who was Ms Gay’s thesis adviser and runs Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science, hit back at Mr Rufo’s claims, calling them “absurd” in an interview with The Daily Beast on Monday.

“There’s not a conceivable case that this is plagiarism,” he said. Mr King also added that Ms Gay’s work underwent extensive review and never provoked even a suggestion of plagiarism. “Her dissertation and every draft I read of it met the highest academic standards,” he insisted.

Mr Rufo also laid out another two instances of alleged plagiarism in Ms Gay’s dissertation, including claims that she had swiped “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.”

While Ms Gay’s work does contain some verbatim phrases used by Mr Bobo and Mr Gilliam that Mr Rufo argued should have been in quotation marks, she does cite them by name in her thesis.

Mr Bobo told The Daily Beast that he remains “unconcerned about these claims as our work was explicitly acknowledged.”

Bill Ackman promoted claims of plagiarism (Patrick McMullan via Getty Image)

The third instance of plagiarism, Mr Rufo argued, is verbatim material from political scientist Carol Swain.

Dr Swain criticised Ms Gay on Twitter, writing: “She would not be the first one. The practice among some academics white and black has been to use my work and never cite me.”

Despite complaints from Dr Swain and Mr Rufo, Ms Gay’s thesis does contain an in-text citation of Dr Swain’s work.

Mr Rufo has argued that Harvard “should conduct a full investigation into Claudine Gay’s academic integrity,” and suggested that any student caught doing the same thing would be punished “up to and including” expulsion.

“The same standard should apply to the university president,” he wrote.

Ms Gay came under fire recently after she attended a Congressional hearing in which she and two other university presidents failed to explicitly say that calling for the genocide of Jews would violate their colleges’ harassment and bullying codes.

Instead, they took the stance that it ”depends on the context” – something all three presidents later apologised for, with UPenn president Liz Magill resigning from her role.

Despite calls for Ms Gay’s removal as president from Harvard alum and faculty, the University’s highest governing body ruled on Tuesday that she would remain in the role.

Harvard alum and billionaire hedge fund CEO Bill Ackman had spearheaded calls for her removal, along with lawmakers, and previously claimed “one of the factors that made it challenging for the @Harvard board to fire Gay was that they were concerned it would look like they were kowtowing to me”.

Mr Ackman has been one of Ms Gay’s loudest critics since she became Harvard’s first Black president in July.

He previously questioned the 53-year-old’s academic integrity and values, posting content on social media that implies she was hired to fulfil diversity metrics.

He has also previously promoted Mr Rufo’s claims of plagiarism.

The Independent has contacted Claudine Gay for comment.