Harvard President Resigns As New Plagiarism Allegations Surface

Harvard University President Claudine Gay is no longer at the head of the class. The plagiarizing professor quit her job today after an anonymous professor filed a new complaint that alleged another six instances of purloined prose.

The new complaint followed others that leveled more than 40 plagiarized passages in her doctoral dissertation and published works. More than two dozen stolen passages surfaced in just three articles.

But dishonest scholarship mightn’t be the only reason Gay resigned. She was also accused of not fighting campus “antisemitism” in the aftermath of the Hamas terror attack on Israel in October.

The Latest 

“Antisemitism” aside, the latest complaint, disclosed by the Washington Free Beacon, is definitive. The new complaint includes this stolen material from University of Wisconsin Professor David Canon’s book, Redistricting, and Representation: The Unintended Consequences of Black Majority Districts.

Here is Canon:

The VRA is often cited as one of the most significant pieces of civil rights legislation passed in our nation’s history (Days 1992, 52; Parker 1990, 1).…

The central parts of the VRA are Section 2 and Section 5. The former prohibits any state or political subdivision from imposing a voting practice that will “deny or abridge the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.” The latter was imposed only on “covered” jurisdictions with a history of past discrimination, which must submit changes in any electoral process or mechanism to the federal government for Approval.

Here is Gay in The Effect of Minority Districts and Minority Representation on Political Participation in California, published by the Public Policy Institute of California, 2001:

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is often cited as one of the most significant pieces of civil rights legislation passed in our nation’s history.…

The central parts of the measure are Section 2 and Section 5. Section 2 reiterates the guarantees of the 15th amendment, prohibiting any state or political subdivision from adopting voting practices that “deny or abridge the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.” Section 5, imposed only on “covered” jurisdictions with a history of past discrimination, requires Justice Department preclearance of changes in any electoral process or mechanism.

Canon:

The original “covered” jurisdictions were the six states of the Deep South, twenty-six counties in North Carolina, Alaska, and one county in Arizona. States in which less than 50 percent of the voting-age population either registered or voted in the 1964 presidential election and that had various discriminatory prerequisites for voting as of November 1, 1964 were subject to Section 5 preclearance. States and jurisdictions could “bail out” from coverage if they could prove the absence of discriminatory practices. The list of covered states has evolved with various bailouts and the addition of other jurisdictions in the 1970, 1975, and 1982 amendments.

Gay:

Last, the list of “covered” jurisdictions, at first narrowly targeted to include just the six states of the Deep South (Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Virginia), has continually evolved with various “bailouts” and additions.^2 Currently, 22 states have covered jurisdictions, including four counties in California (Merced, Yuba, Kings, and Monterey) with a history of low Latino registration. For these four counties, reapportionment of electoral districts after the 2000 Census will require Justice Department approval.

^1 “Covered” jurisdictions were originally defined as states in which less than 50 percent of the voting-age population either registered or voted in the 1964 presidential election and that had various discriminatory prerequisites for voting as of November 1, 1964.

^2 States or jurisdictions can “bail out” from coverage if they can prove the absence of discriminatory practices.

And those are just two examples in the complaint, which documented 47 instances of literary theft.

But Canon, who appears to have consumed too much soy, told the Free Beacon that the theft is nothing to worry about. He insisted that she had done nothing wrong: “I am not at all concerned about the passages. This isn’t even close to an example of academic plagiarism.”

A top professor at Harvard Medical School, Omar Haque, does not agree. The psychiatrist told the Free Beacon that the allegations against Gay are even more serious because she stole the material before computers increased the chances of inadvertently plagiarizing:

“Gay’s alleged plagiarism in the 1990s may be more serious than in recent years,” he told the Free Beacon, ”because prior to the use of computers to highlight and copy/paste text in seconds, plagiarism was more likely to be non-accidental and intentional and reckless.”

Haque, who said he was speaking only in a personal capacity, added that it took “greater effort” to plagiarize with a typewriter.

Panel Cleared Gay

In late December, the New York Post reported that Harvard cleared Gay of wrongdoing before it investigated her, and the school threatened the complainant and the New York Post with legal retaliation, the complaint observes. The university’s probe was a “sham,” the anonymous professor wrote, and “Gay and Harvard tried to silence the Post and by extension me by threatening to sue for ‘immense’ damages”:

Even worse, the New York Post reports that Gay and Harvard “threatened to use legal means to out who had supplied the comparisons,” a shocking admission that Gay and Harvard sought to retaliate against me personally. At one point Gay and Harvard asked the Post, “Why would someone making such a complaint be unwilling to attach their name to it?” I was unwilling because I feared that Gay and Harvard would violate their policies, behave more like a cartel with a hedge fund attached than a university, and try to seek “immense” damages from me and who knows what else. Since I’ve answered their lawyer’s stupid question, allow me to ask a reasonable question of my own. Why would an institution assessing allegations made in good faith, and ultimately substantiated, threaten to use its enormous resources to expose the identity of a whistleblower? Did Gay wish to personally thank me for helping her to improve her work even if I drove her harder than she wanted to be driven? Gay and Harvard sought to silence and retaliate against a journalist and a whistleblower.

The latest allegations needn’t be investigated. Gay is gone, possibly because of the brutal beating she received during testimony before a congressional committee hearing on campus antisemitism. 

Question is, will Harvard hire another dishonest scholar because of its anti-white, anti-Asian “diversity, equity, and inclusion” policy?