Harvard’s president plagiarized multiple times, according to recent allegations.
Harvard President Claudine Gay should be held to the same standard that she would be if she were another race or gender, said one of the scholars whose work she plagiarized.
“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,” Carol Swain, the scholar in question, said on EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders.”
Ms. Gay plagiarized from Ms. Swain’s book “Black Faces, Black Interests” twice in her dissertation, which was published in 1997, activist Christopher Rufo first reported on Dec. 10. Ms. Gay also plagiarized from others in her dissertation and at least three other papers, the Washington Free Beacon found after analyzing her other work.
Plagiarism is when a person takes another person’s work and uses it without proper citation or attribution.
In one instance, Ms. Gay wrote, “Since the 1950s, the reelection rate for incumbent House members has rarely dipped below 90%.” That was nearly the exact same sentence Ms. Swain wrote in her book, which came out in 1993.
In another part of her paper, Ms. Gay wrote, “Social scientists have concentrated their analytical efforts on the ambiguous link … between descriptive representation (the statistical correspondence of demographic characteristics) and substantive representation (the correspondence of legislative goals and priorities).”
Ms. Swain had written, “Pitkin distinguishes between ‘descriptive representation,’ the statistical correspondence of the demographic characteristics … and more ‘substantive representation,’ the correspondence between representatives’ goals and those of their constituents.”
Those examples “constitute plagiarism,” Ms. Swain said. “Whether it was done accidentally or not, I don’t know.”
Peter Wood, a former associate provost of Boston University and current director of the National Association of Scholars, spoke to the Washington Free Beacon about the issue.
“If this were a stand-alone instance, it would be reprehensible but perhaps excused as the blunder of someone working hastily,” he said. “But that excuse vanishes as the examples multiply.”
By Zachary Stieber and Jan Jekielek
