Harvard University said Wednesday that a newly disclosed review found more instances of inadequate citation in president Claudine Gay’s writings, hours after a congressional committee announced an inquiry into how the Ivy League school handled allegations of plagiarism against her.
The university said the review discovered additional “examples of duplicative language without appropriate attribution” in Gay’s 1997 doctoral dissertation, which she completed in Harvard’s government department. Gay “will update her dissertation correcting these instances of inadequate citation,” the university said.
Earlier this month, a top oversight board at Harvard said it had become aware in late October “of allegations regarding three articles.” An independent review found “no violation of Harvard’s standards for research misconduct,” but revealed “a few instances of inadequate citation.” Gay is requesting four corrections to two of her academic articles “to insert citations and quotation marks that were omitted from the original publications,” the board said.
Here’s a look at some of the passages that have come under scrutiny.
A Globe review of a passage from Gay’s dissertation found her language matched, nearly verbatim, the language from a 1996 paper from Harvard academics Bradley Palmquist and Stephen 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.
On Thursday, the New York Times published several examples of Gay’s work that appear to track closely with the writing of other scholars, without proper attribution.
Gay is accused of lifting two sentences in the acknowledgments of her dissertation from acknowledgments in the 1996 book “Facing Up to the American Dream: Race, Class, and the Soul of the Nation,” by Harvard political scientist Jennifer L. Hochschild, the Times reported.
A 1993 paper that Gay wrote as a graduate student at Harvard contains language similar to that of David Covin, then a professor at California State University, Sacramento, the Times reported.
In her paper analyzing the role of race in Brazilian society, Gay described the “expulsion of four young black athletes from the volleyball team of the Tiete Yacht Club because of their color,” the Times said.
Covin had previously written of “the dismissal of four Black male children from the volleyball team of the Tiete Yacht Club in May, 1978, because of their color,” the Times reported.
The 1993 paper also contained similarities to an article written 21 years earlier by Thomas E. Skidmore in the Journal of Latin American Studies, according to the Times.
The newspaper said Skidmore, who died in 2016, wrote: “The Brazilian adage that ‘we are becoming one people’ rests on an implicit assumption that this final amalgam will be, at worst, a light mulatto phenotype and at best a moorish Mediterranean physical type. The ideal of whitening differs so categorically from white European and North American phobias about race mixture …”
Gay’s paper stated:
“The Brazilian concept of ‘whitening,’ symbolized in the popular saying ‘we are becoming one people,’ represents an ideology entirely different from white European and North American phobias about race mixture prevalent at the turn of this century.”
On Wednesday, Harvard said that the 1993 paper, published in the journal Origins, was “initially included in the scope of the independent review,” an independent panel and a Harvard Corporation subcommittee ultimately “considered the article outside its purview due to the age of the article and because articles included in that journal generally do not include citations or quotations.”
A 2017 paper by Gay, published in the Urban Affairs Review, contains similarities to a 2006 paper from political scientists Stephen Ansolabehere and James M. Snyder Jr., the Times said.
Gay’s paper analyzes whether politicians direct housing investment toward their own constituents, the Times reported.
In their paper, Ansolabehere and Snyder wrote: “Theoretical arguments predict an interaction between partisanship of voters and party control of state government. Democratic counties are expected to receive more transfers when the state is under Democratic control …,” the Times reported.
Gay wrote: “Theory predicts an interaction between county partisanship and party control, such that the more Democratic a county, the more LIHTC allocations it should receive when the state is under Democratic control …”
Gay cited Ansolabehere and Snyder’s paper but not in that particular passage, according to the Times.
The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative news outlet, also flagged various passages in a report posted Dec. 11, including some from Gay’s 2017 paper, “A Room for One’s Own? The Partisan Allocation of Affordable Housing.”
The Beacon said the paper “borrowed language” from two sources: a 2010 book by Alex Schwartz, “Housing Policy in the United States,” and a 2011 paper by Matthew Freedman and Emily Owens, “Low-Income Housing Development and Urban Crime.”
Material from prior Globe stories was used in this report, and Mike Damiano of the Globe Staff contributed. This breaking story will be updated.
Travis Andersen can be reached at travis.andersen@globe.com.