Before she became the shortest-serving president in Harvard’s history, Claudine Gay watered down the school’s policy on research misconduct, making it more difficult to sanction faculty members for plagiarism—and greenlighting the very rules the school invoked in a last-ditch effort to save her job.
The new policy, which Gay approved in 2019 as dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, redefined research misconduct to exclude accidental infractions. Professors, it said, could be sanctioned only if they plagiarized "knowingly, intentionally, or recklessly." It is precisely that clause that the Harvard Corporation leaned on as it sought to exonerate Gay from mounting allegations of plagiarism, which ultimately claimed her job.
In mid-December, after the board issued a statement indicating its unanimous support for Gay, the members said that an "independent review" of her work found several cases of "inadequate citation" but no research misconduct, since her transgressions were not "intentional or reckless." She has nonetheless requested corrections to three articles, including her dissertation.
Gay, who remains a tenured faculty member making $900,000 a year, resigned as president last week after she was hit with nearly 50 allegations of plagiarism spanning half of her published work. Neither Gay nor Harvard have conceded that she plagiarized or responded to requests for comment.
The Washington Free Beacon contacted Harvard about the 2019 policy change on December 27, the same day Gay privately agreed to resign, according to the New York Times.
The policy change, which has not been previously reported, adds a new twist to the scandal that ended Gay’s presidency and has amplified calls for the resignation of Penny Pritzker—the head of the Harvard Corporation who led the search for Gay—as the school continues to face blowback for its handling of the plagiarism charges.
The old policy for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Gay’s division of the university, did not include a carve-out for unintentional infractions, according to an archived webpage reviewed by the Free Beacon. But in 2019, one year into Gay’s deanship, she signed off on the more forgiving rules.
The 2019 policy applies only to faculty. Harvard’s guide to using sources, which is written for incoming students, defines plagiarism as "the act of either intentionally OR unintentionally submitting work that was written by someone else," and says that even accidental plagiarism can have "daunting" consequences.
Rumors of Gay’s plagiarism did not begin percolating until January 2023, and there is no evidence that she approved the 2019 policy, which tracks federal research guidelines, to preempt a probe and shield herself from consequences.
But the new rule underscores how Harvard’s top brass have exempted themselves from standards they apply to their own students, who routinely receive stiff penalties for the sorts of errors Gay made.
"[W]hen students omit quotation marks and citations, as President Gay did, the sanction is usually one term of probation—a permanent mark on a student’s record," a member of the university’s honor council wrote in an op-ed for the Harvard Crimson. Students who commit multiple infractions "are generally required to withdraw—i.e., suspended—from the College for two semesters."
Since 2019, when the laxer policy for faculty was put in place, Harvard has sanctioned hundreds of students for academic dishonesty, according to data from the honor council. But it has been comparatively soft on professors, from former New York Times editor Jill Abramson to legal scholar Larry Tribe, who admitted to plagiarism, a double standard that has rankled students.
"It’s hypocritical for the university to apply one standard to students and another standard to faculty—and perhaps even a third standard to Claudine Gay," Ian Moore, a member of the Harvard Crimson editorial board, told the paper before Gay resigned.
It is not clear whether Gay was personally involved in drafting the new policy or what motivated the change. But as dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, she would have signed off on any revisions recommended by the Committee to Review Conduct Policies and Procedures, a body that advises the dean on policy updates, and by the Committee on Professional Conduct, which deals with research integrity matters and also reports to the dean.
Asked to confirm that Gay approved the new plagiarism rules, a member of Harvard’s professional conduct committee, history professor Janet Browne, wrote in an email: "sorry, can’t help you." Other members of the committee did not respond to requests for comment.
The Harvard Corporation has never disclosed the names of the people who conducted the review of Gay’s work, referring to them only as "distinguished political scientists." Nor has it addressed its widely panned legal threat to the New York Post, which first brought the allegations to the school’s attention, through high-powered defamation attorney Tom Clare.
That threat itself relied on the policy Gay approved. In a 15-page letter to the Post, which the paper published in full on Tuesday, Clare and his co-counsel, David Sillers, cited Harvard’s research misconduct policy to argue that plagiarism "requires more than the mere use of similar phrases or descriptors"—and that publishing the allegations would make the paper liable for "immense" damages.
Harvard faculty have criticized the corporation’s cloak-and-dagger tactics. Richard Parker, a law professor, slammed the review of Gay’s work as "irregular" and "opaque." Kit Parker, a professor of bioengineering, told the Wall Street Journal that some board members should resign.
The scandal snowballed in late December as new questions emerged about Gay’s use of data and her refusal to let other researchers scrutinize it. That revelation, along with a growing list of plagiarism allegations, made her presidency even more tenuous than it was the day of her disastrous congressional testimony, when Gay hemmed and hawed about whether calls for killing Jews violate Harvard’s code of conduct.
Her support among students and faculty withered, and columnists at the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Atlantic all said that she should go. Gay announced her resignation on January 2, one day after the Free Beacon published a new batch of plagiarism allegations.
Her downfall came as Harvard was hemorrhaging donors over its handling of anti-Semitism. By some estimates, Gay cost the school $1 billion over the course of her tumultuous tenure, with businessman Len Blavatnik, whose foundation has given $270 million to Harvard, the latest scion to stop giving. The Wexner Foundation also cut ties with the university.
The plagiarism charges compounded the donor revolt and fueled a sense that Harvard, which was founded in 1636, was shredding its centuries-old brand. Former Facebook executive Sam Lessin told CNN in December that the allegations were "very embarrassing" for the university, adding that Harvard’s trustees "didn’t do their homework" when they tapped Gay, who has only published 11 academic articles, to lead the school.
"It’s pretty clear the [Harvard] Corporation … skipped a step," said Lessin, now a venture capitalist.
The scandal has also raised larger questions about the prevalence of plagiarism in academia and how it should be policed. Mark Ramseyer, a Harvard law professor who has been critical of the university’s trajectory under Gay, said the new rule she adopted made sense on the merits, in part because a less permissive policy would be subject to abuse.
"Everyone makes mistakes," he told the Free Beacon. "If colleagues could take any unintentional mistake as grounds to throw a politically incorrect professor into the research misconduct meat grinder, we’d be in deep trouble."
Ramseyer added that students, unlike professors, are unlikely to be accused of plagiarism for political reasons. "I think the different standards for faculty and students—in this context—make sense," he said.
But others argued that the bar should be higher for Gay, who was not just a professor but a university president.
"Harvard certainly should not hold its president to lower academic and moral standards than it holds its students," Omar Haque, a Harvard Medical School professor, told the Free Beacon. "If anything, the president should be held to higher standards than it holds its entire faculty."