Harvard University’s oversight board on Tuesday acknowledged that an independent review revealed several instances of “inadequate citation” in the scholarly work of embattled president Claudine Gay but found no violations of the university’s standards on research misconduct.
However academics who reviewed some of the recent allegations against Gay argued that some passages from her academic works clearly appeared to violate Harvard’s policy on plagiarism, which calls for strict delineation between a writer’s ideas and those that originated with others.
In several passages in Gay’s writings, including her 1997 PhD thesis on Black electoral politics, she cited the works of other scholars and credited them for their ideas, but did not fully quote or attribute to them when she used words and phrases from their publications.
Harvard’s plagiarism policy states quotations “must be placed properly within quotation marks and must be cited fully. In addition, all paraphrased material must be acknowledged completely.”
In some other passages of her dissertation, she used language that matched, nearly verbatim, text from other sources. In at least one case, the other source was not cited, a Globe review found.
The Harvard oversight board’s statement on Gay’s work comes shortly after several conservative voices accused her of plagiarism. On Sunday night, conservative activist Christopher Rufo and writer Christopher Brunet posted an article alleging Gay plagiarized several passages of her thesis by failing to properly quote or credit the works of seven different scholars. Then, on Monday evening, the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative news outlet, alleged that Gay plagiarized passages in three additional publications, plus two more previously unidentified paragraphs of her PhD thesis.
In one example identified by the Free Beacon, Gay’s thesis, which she wrote for her doctoral degree in political science, echoed the language of an unpublished paper by two other Harvard scholars, Bradley Palmquist and Stephen Voss, which was presented at a conference. A coauthor of that paper, Voss, now an associate professor of political science at the University of Kentucky, classified Gay’s use as “technically plagiarism” but said he was not offended.
Voss said he would correct a student who did the same, and said he was dismayed to hear excuses made by some academics who were defending Gay on social media.
“What Claudine did is technically plagiarism and it bugs me that people now, in their rush to defend her, are trying to suggest that academic standards permit that sort of copying without quotation marks,” Voss said. It’s “just not what we teach students. I don’t treat it as acceptable with my undergrads, let alone my grad students.”
In a statement released Monday, Gay said she stands “by the integrity of my scholarship. Throughout my career, I have worked to ensure my scholarship adheres to the highest academic standards.”
A Globe review of a passage from Gay’s thesis found that her language matched, nearly verbatim, the language from the 1996 paper from Palmquist and Voss with only minor changes of word choice and punctuation. The language was not set between quotation marks and their paper did not appear to be cited anywhere in a full-text PDF of the thesis reviewed by the Globe. Harvard’s plagiarism policy says that “information and opinions gained directly from other people” should be placed in quotation marks.
In other passages, Gay’s thesis also repeated language from political scientist Carol Swain’s book “Black Faces, Black Interests,” originally published in 1993, making, again, only small changes to punctuation and word choice and without the use of quotation marks. Gay only cites Swain directly in one of those instances.
Under Harvard’s plagiarism policy, “sources must be indicated” whenever “ideas or facts are derived from a student’s reading and research.”
Swain, a conservative commenter, said she was more frustrated that Gay’s thesis felt “derivative” of her own scholarship on Black representative politics without fully acknowledging her book’s influence.
“My book was a seminal publication that influenced a lot of other researchers,” Swain said. “Normally when you’re doing research like that and you’re building on someone else’s research, you acknowledge the research, you lay out what the person argued, and then you will refute it or you will agree with it.”
“If you read her work,“ Swain continued, “you would never know that she was building on my work.”
Paul Rogers, an associate professor of writing studies at the University of California Santa Barbara, said the debate over Gay’s work points to a larger problem in the research community, which is that there is “no precise and widely accepted definition of an acceptable academic paraphrase.” The definition, he said, varies across classrooms, universities, and textbooks, and advice for avoiding plagiarism is often contradictory.
“There are some gray areas here,” said Rogers, who studies plagiarism in academia.
He and his researchers reviewed the accusations against Gay and faulted her for how she paraphrased and cited other works. However, he noted that elsewhere Gay took great pains to credit other researchers with copious in-text citations. She also did not seem to be trying to pass off other scholars’ work as her own.
“I don’t see this as a person who’s trying to get by in the world on other people’s ideas,” he said. “She’s doing good work, it seems.”
Although he, too, felt Gay did violate Harvard’s plagiarism policy, Rogers does not believe those missteps warranted her firing. As a university president, Rogers said, Gay should acknowledge her shortcomings.
Rufo, the conservative activist, said there were several instances in Gay’s thesis with nearly identical language from others’ work, including an appendix that echoes sentences from a social science statistical book by Harvard professor Gary King. However, Gay does credit King later on. Similarly, she used nearly verbatim language elsewhere in her thesis from a paper by scholars Lawrence Bobo and Franklin Gilliam, whose words she fails to demarcate in quotes. But she still cites them by name repeatedly.
Bobo and King both defended Gay on Monday, prior to the publication of the Free Beacon story. King, one of Gay’s thesis advisers, called the allegations, “false and absurd.” Bobo, Harvard College’s dean of social science, told the Globe: “I find myself unconcerned about these claims as our work was explicitly acknowledged.”
The Fellows of Harvard College announced the findings in the midst of a separate controversy over Gay’s testimony at a Dec. 5 congressional hearing on campus antisemitism. Gay was one of three university leaders who offered legalistic and equivocal answers to questions about whether calls for the genocide of Jews would violate their schools’ rules, igniting intense backlash and calls for their resignations. In that same statement Tuesday, the Harvard board said it unanimously supported Gay.
The Fellows said in an email to the university community Tuesday that they had fielded allegations related to Gay’s scholarly work in late October and initiated an “independent review by distinguished political scientists.”
The statement from the Fellows said they had “reviewed the results, which revealed a few instances of inadequate citation. While the analysis found no violation of Harvard’s standards for research misconduct, President Gay is proactively requesting four corrections in two articles to insert citations and quotation marks that were omitted from the original publications.”
A spokesperson could not immediately specify which of the articles would be corrected. He also could not explain how a failure to quote or cite sources — listed as a violation of the university’s policy on plagiarism — would not constitute research misconduct.
Mike Damiano and Hilary Burns of the Globe staff contributed to this report.
Deanna Pan can be reached at deanna.pan@globe.com. Follow her @DDpan. Stephanie Ebbert can be reached at Stephanie.Ebbert@globe.com.