Harvard plagiarism row: Gay defends research, calls it 'ideological battle'

By Pierre Paulden

Claudine Gay, who resigned as Harvard University president this week after just six months in the role, defended her scholarly research and said a campaign to remove her was a small part of a larger ideological battle within US society.
 

“Never did I imagine needing to defend decades-old and broadly respected research, but the past several weeks have laid waste to truth,” Gay wrote in the New York Times on Wednesday. “Those who had relentlessly campaigned to oust me since the fall often trafficked in lies and ad hominem insults, not reasoned argument. They recycled tired racial stereotypes about Black talent and temperament. They pushed a false narrative of indifference and incompetence.”

The school’s first Black president stepped down after allegations of plagiarism in her work and anger over the university’s handling of antisemitism on campus following Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel. Republican Congresswoman Elise Stefanik and billionaire investor Bill Ackman were two of the most vocal critics, with the furor over Gay intensifying after a widely derided appearance before Congress in December. 

Harvard backed Gay following her testimony, while also saying it had conducted a review of her research that “revealed a few instances of inadequate citation.” But the board accepted her resignation this week after additional accusations over her academic work. 

“Yes, I made mistakes,” Gay said, referring to her initial failure to strongly condemn Hamas and her congressional testimony. But she said that she’s never misrepresented her research findings or claimed credit for others’ research. She added that over the past few months she’s faced death threats and racial slurs, with her inbox “flooded with invective.”

“It is not lost on me that I make an ideal canvas for projecting every anxiety about the generational and demographic changes unfolding on American campuses: a Black woman selected to lead a storied institution. Someone who views diversity as a source of institutional strength and dynamism,” Gay wrote.