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EXCLUSIVE: @RealChrisBrunet and I have obtained documentation demonstrating that Harvard President Claudine Gay plagiarized multiple sections of her Ph.D. thesis, violating Harvard's policies on academic integrity.

This is a bombshell. 🧵 

First, Gay lifts an entire paragraph nearly verbatim from a paper by Lawrence Bobo and Franklin Gilliam’s, while passing it off as her own paraphrase and language.

This is a direct violation of Harvard's policy: "When you paraphrase, your task is to distill the source’s ideas in your own words. It’s not enough to change a few words here and there and leave the rest; instead, you must completely restate the ideas in the passage in your own words. If your own language is too close to the original, then you are plagiarizing, even if you do provide a citation."

Gay repeats this violation of Harvard's policy throughout the document, again using work from Bobo and Gilliam, as well as passages from Richard Shingles, Susan Howell, and Deborah Fagan, which she reproduces nearly verbatim, without quotation marks.

Second, Gay appears to lift material from scholar Carol Swain. In one passage, summarizing the distinction between "descriptive representation" and "substantive representation," she copies the phrasing and language nearly verbatim from Swain’s book 'Black Faces, Black Interests,' without providing a citation of any kind.

Gay's use of Swain's material is a straightforward violation of the university's rules, which state that one "must give credit to the author of the source material, either by placing the source material in quotation marks and providing a clear citation, or by paraphrasing the source material and providing a clear citation"—neither of which Gay followed.

Later in the paper, Gay also uses identical language to Swain, without adding quotation marks, as required. "Since the 1950s the reelection rate for House members has rarely dipped below 90 percent," reads Swain’s book, which is the same, excepting an added comma, to the language in Gay’s dissertation: "Since the 1950s, the reelection rate for incumbent House members has rarely dipped below 90%."

According to Harvard’s rules, this would be a violation of the policy on "inadequate paraphrase," which requires that verbatim language be placed in quotations.

Third, Gay composes an entire appendix in the dissertation directly taken from Gary King's book, 'A Solution to the Ecological Inference Problem.' While she cites King’s book later in the appendix—in fact, King was her dissertation advisor—Gay does not explicitly acknowledge that Appendix B is entirely grounded in King’s concepts and language, instead passing it off as her own original work.

These are flagrant violations of Harvard's plagiarism policy, which states that students who commit plagiarism will suffer "disciplinary action, up to and including requirement to withdraw from the College." The same standard should apply to the university president.

I earned a master's degree from Harvard's night school—not nearly as prestigious as the graduate school—but, if I had committed these kinds of violations, I would have been expelled. As an alumnus, I am calling on Claudine Gay to immediately resign from her position. 

Here is the full story, co-authored with @RealChrisBrunet, about Claudine Gay's plagiarism scandal. More reporting tomorrow morning for City Journal.

@realChrisBrunet P.S. I highly recommend that you follow @realChrisBrunet and subscribe to his Substack, which exposes fraud and manipulation in academia:

I have sent repeated emails to President Gay's office and she has not responded. If she does, I will update the story with her comments. 

Here's Harvard's guidelines on "what constitutes plagiarism." Our claim is that Gay's dissertation violates Harvard's stated principles on academic integrity. The university set the standard; the university president should be held accountable to it.