Claudine Gay’s dissertation contains ‘duplicative language without appropriate attribution,’ university acknowledges.
Harvard University President Claudine Gay used “duplicative language” in her dissertation for a doctorate, the school stated this week.
Ms. Gay, 53, is requesting corrections to the dissertation, which was done in 1997, according to the Harvard Corporation.
Two of the corrections concern “duplicative language without appropriate attribution,” the corporation, a governing board that includes Ms. Gay, said in a statement to media outlets.
“President Gay will update her dissertation correcting these instances of inadequate citation,” the statement reads.
The university learned of allegations in October regarding three articles Ms. Gay wrote and initiated an independent review that revealed multiple instances of “inadequate citation,” the corporation stated on Dec. 12.
The results of the probe prompted Ms. Gay to ask for four corrections to two articles. The corrections would “insert citations and quotation marks that were omitted from the original publications,” according to the corporation.
According to analyses posted by activist Christopher Rufo and others, Ms. Gay has plagiarized from a number of books and studies in her work, including Carol Swain’s “Black Faces, Black Interests,” which was published by the Harvard University Press.
“I’m not calling for her to resign or be fired, but I’m calling on the board of Harvard to look very seriously at these issues and hold her to the same standard that they would hold a white male or a white female to,” Ms. Swain said on EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders.”
The corrections Ms. Gay requested would be made to a paper published in the American Political Science Review in 2001 and the Urban Affairs Review in 2017, a school spokesperson told the school’s newspaper.
In the 2001 paper, she wrote that results of previous research by scholars Lawrence Bobo and Franklin Gilliam found “that African Americans in areas of high black empowerment—as indicated by control of the mayor’s office—are more active than either African Americans in low empowerment areas or whites of comparable socioeconomic status.”
