WASHINGTON – In a report to a congressional committee, released on Jan 19, Harvard gave its most detailed account yet of its handling of the plagiarism accusations against Dr Claudine Gay, who resigned in January as the university’s president.

The basic outlines of the saga were known, but Harvard had not disclosed many details, which had led to questions about the impartiality and rigour of its investigation.

In its account, Harvard defended the thoroughness of its plagiarism review. It said an outside panel had found Dr Gay’s papers to be “sophisticated and original”, with “virtually no evidence of intentional claiming of findings” that were not hers, even as it found a pattern of duplicative language in three papers.

But its account also shows a university governing board that was slow to do a full accounting of her work. Instead, over several weeks, Harvard scrambled to investigate a steady drip of plagiarism accusations, unable to give an immediate, authoritative response to questions about Dr Gay’s scholarship.

The report is part of a broader submission of documents by Harvard, made in response to a Dec 20 letter from the House committee on education and the workforce, which is investigating plagiarism and anti-semitism accusations against universities.

That committee held the now notorious hearing on campus anti-semitism at which Dr Gay and two other college presidents were criticised for their legalistic answers to questions about anti-semitism.

The committee said it was currently reviewing Harvard’s submission. So far, only the plagiarism report has been publicly released.

First accusations

Harvard’s account begins on Oct 24, when it says a New York Post reporter approached the university about the plagiarism accusations.

The Post presented Harvard with a list of 25 excerpts that Dr Gay, a political scientist, was accused of having plagiarised, from three articles that she had written. One article was dated 1993, when she was a graduate student, and the others 2012 and 2017, when she was on the faculty, the report says.

Harvard, according to the report, reached out to several of the authors she was accused of plagiarising – “none of whom objected to then president Gay’s language”.

The university formed a sub-committee to direct the review, with the help of lawyers. The members of the sub-committee were Dr Biddy Martin, a former president of Amherst College; former justice Mariano-Florentino Cuellar, of the Supreme Court of California; Dr Shirley Tilghman, a former president of Princeton University; and Mr Theodore V. Wells Jr, a partner at law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison.

The sub-committee then appointed a three-member outside panel. The summary describes the panel members as tenured faculty members at prominent research institutions, and two are former presidents of the American Political Science Association.

They have asked for their identities to be kept confidential, Harvard said. But the House committee, which has the power to subpoena witnesses, could still demand their names.

The independent panel did not do a full review of Dr Gay’s work. It considered only the accusations shared by the Post and compared Dr Gay’s three articles with 11 papers by other scholars, the report says.

The panel found that there was “virtually no evidence of intentional claiming of findings that are not president Gay’s”, the report says.

But it expressed concern about a pattern of repeated language. And Dr Gay, who stood by her scholarship, had to submit some corrections in quotation and citation.

The review appeared, briefly, to have disposed of the accusations, and the university’s governing board, the Harvard Corp, endorsed her continued presidency.

University in crisis

But by then, new accusations had surfaced on social media, this time concerning Dr Gay’s dissertation. Harvard’s account says the sub-committee “promptly” reviewed her dissertation, and Dr Gay had to submit some corrections to that, too.

On Dec 19, an additional complaint was filed with Harvard’s research integrity office, but no additional corrections were needed, the account says.

Two weeks later, she was out.

Harvard’s account acknowledges that the university did not handle the review perfectly, suggesting that the university was in crisis as it faced an uproar over its handling of anti-semitism on campus.

“These allegations arose in a time of unprecedented events and tension on campus and globally,” the report said. “We understand and acknowledge that many viewed our efforts as insufficiently transparent, raising questions regarding our process and standard of review.”

On Jan 19, Harvard also announced new rules to rein in student protests.

In a message just before the start of college classes on Jan 22, Harvard said demonstrations would not be permitted in classrooms, libraries, dormitories or dining halls without permission. Instead, protests are limited to “courtyards, quadrangles and other such spaces” and cannot block students from walking to class.

The clarification did not directly address the question raised at the congressional hearing that contributed to Dr Gay’s resignation: Whether protesters chanting slogans like “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” – which many supporters of Israel interpret as a call for wiping out Israel – would be against Harvard’s code of conduct. NYTIMES