Harvard alumni react to embattled Harvard University President Claudine Gay facing more plagiarism allegations

Harvard University alumni reacted to the university's high governing body finding more instances of "duplicative language" in Harvard President Claudine Gay's work.

Harvard admitted it found more instances of "duplicative language" in Gay’s academic work on Wednesday, as the House also expanded its probe into the Ivy League school, demanding to know whether students and the university’s leader were held to the same standards on plagiarism. 

Jonathan Harounoff, a Harvard alumnus and journalist, told Fox News Digital: "Had I or any of my classmates at Cambridge, Harvard, or Columbia been found to have plagiarized, we would have been swiftly rebuked if not worse."

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Former President Barack Obama allegedly lobbied on behalf of Harvard President Claudine Gay.  (Photo by Costas Baltas/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images/Photo by Erin Clark/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

"It’s devastating to see the leader of the country’s best university — an institution that’s meant to be a beacon of rigorous research, integrity and intellectual honesty — be held to a completely different standard to its students," Harounoff, the director of communications at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, added.

"Having said that, I am not surprised. Harvard decided to stand by President Gay amid her tepid, if not outrageous, congressional testimony about surging antisemitism on U.S. college campuses. So, Harvard will then also stand by her as her academic work is questioned over possible plagiarism."

The Harvard Corporation, the school’s highest governing body, released a summary of a review Wednesday evening, saying Gay will request three corrections from Harvard’s Office of the Provost regarding her 1997 Ph.D. dissertation, The Harvard Crimson reported. 

Through additional review, Harvard said it found two more instances of "duplicative language without appropriate attribution."

This comes over a week after the Harvard Corporation said that while "an independent review by distinguished political scientists" of Gay’s work found "no violation of Harvard’s standards for research misconduct," the university president would be "proactively requesting four corrections in two articles to insert citations and quotation marks that were omitted from the original publications." 

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Last week, Gay submitted corrections to the two articles published in 2001 and 2017. However, the request led to the uncovering of additional findings regarding her 1997 dissertation, which embroils the prestigious university in more controversy.  

Harvard’s research integrity officer Stacey Springs reportedly received a complaint on Tuesday detailing more than 40 allegations of plagiarism. The findings ranged from missing quotation marks around a few phrases or sentences to entire paragraphs lifted verbatim in Gay's work, according to a document obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. 

Harvard alumnus Eliot Cohen, a contributing writer at The Atlantic, described plagiarism as being a "violation of the values" in academia on Friday.

Claudine Gay, president of Harvard University, during a House Education and the Workforce Committee hearing in Washington, DC, US, on Tuesday, Dec. 5, 2023.  (Haiyun Jiang/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

"I have no idea how as a teacher at Harvard today I could look an undergraduate in the eye and hold forth about why plagiarism is a violation of the values inherent in the academic enterprise. They would laugh, openly or secretly, at the corruption and double standards. And I would not blame them for doing so," Cohen wrote in an opinion article.

"As it happens, I know something about plagiarism at Harvard," he separately wrote on X, formerly Twitter.

Earlier in December, the Harvard Corporation announced it would stand by Gay despite backlash to comments about antisemitism and accusations of plagiarism, although it admitted a probe found "instances of inadequate citation" in her academic writings. 

Harvard officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A Harvard senior who is bound to go to Harvard Law School sent Fox News Digital a statement about the allegations.

CAMBRIDGE, MA - DECEMBER 13: Harvard President Claudine Gay (2nd L) attends a menorah lighting ceremony on the seventh night of Hanukkah with the University's Jewish community on December 13, 2023, in Harvard Yard, Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Harvard trustees voted to keep President Gay after she responded to a Congressional hearing with an answer to a question about hate speech on campus.  (Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images)

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"All students and faculty at Harvard are aware of how taboo plagiarism is. Yet, it seems that the University is not taking the allegations against President Gay seriously because they want to protect her. This compromises the academic integrity of the University as a whole," Spencer Glassman told Fox News Digital.

Despite the backlash, other alumni have supported Gay.

More than 500 Harvard faculty members signed a letter sent to the governing board earlier this month backing Gay amid calls for her resignation. 

The Harvard Alumni Association Executive Committee and a number of Black alumni each wrote separate letters offering "unequivocal support" for the embattled president.

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Fox News Digital's Danielle Wallace and Brian Flood contributed to this report.

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