WE PROUDLY AWARD CLAUDINE GAY, HARVARD'S NEW
DIVERSITY HIRE PRESIDENT, OUR PRESTIGIOUS
MARTIN LUTHER KING, Jr.
PLAGIARISM IN A DISSERTATION PRIZE
FOR 2023.

Woman Who Harvard President Allegedly Plagiarized Says University Must Steer ‘Back Towards Sanity’

Former political science professor Dr. Carol Swain, whose work Harvard University President Dr. Claudine Gay allegedly plagiarized, is calling for her firing.

Swain wants Harvard to hire a new, qualified president who will “steer the university back towards sanity.”

Gay has been accused of lifting passages from multiple authors without attribution, including two instances from Swain’s seminal 1994 book, “Black Faces, Black Interests: The Representation of African Americans in Congress” for her 1997 Ph.D. dissertation at Harvard, according to The Harvard Crimson.

Incidentally, Swain’s book won multiple awards in the field including from the American Political Science Association and was originally published by Harvard University Press.

In a Thursday post on X, Swain wrote, “I have some free unsolicited advice for Harvard University.” Her suggestions included, “Stop listening to the apologists for plagiarism,” and “Fire Claudine Gay posthaste. She can be relieved of duties until the terms are negotiated.”

Swain continued advising, “Stop listening to the racist mob of whites and blacks who cry racism while being among the worst offenders,” then, “Hire the best man or woman who can steer the university back towards sanity. Appeasing the Marxist identity politics mob should not be a consideration.”

The former Vanderbilt University professor went on to suggest the hire could “be a middle to older age white Jewish man who believes in classical liberalism.”

The recent controversy regarding Gay stems from her unwillingness, while testifying before Congress earlier this month, to label students’ speech calling for the genocide of Jews to be in violation of Harvard’s rules of conduct.

I have some free unsolicited advice for Harvard University.

1. Stop listening to the apologists for plagiarism.
2. Fire Claudine Gay posthaste. She can be relieved of duties until the terms are negotiated.
3. Stop listening to the racist mob of whites and blacks who cry racism… pic.twitter.com/TggW9QzTkB

— Dr. Carol M. Swain (@carolmswain) December 21, 2023

GOP Rep. Elise Stefanik, a Harvard alumna, asked Gay, “At Harvard does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules of bullying and harassment? Yes or no.”

“It can be depending on the context,” the university president answered.

“Do you understand that your testimony is dehumanizing [Jewish students]? Do you understand that dehumanization is part of anti-Semitism?” Stefanik followed up.

Gay reiterated that if a student called for the genocide of Jews, it could be a violation of Harvard’s rules.

“Anti-Semite rhetoric, if it crosses into conduct that amounts to bullying, harassment intimidation, that is actionable conduct, and we do take action,” she said, but again testified that calling for genocide in-and-of itself may be permissible at Harvard, depending on the context.

“It does not depend on the context… and this is why you should resign,” Stefanik responded.

Elise Stefanik obliterates president Claudine Gay Harvard University & Liz Magill of Penn State University.

They refused to say that calling for the genocide of the Jews is against school policy, and they said that it “depends on the context”

Both should resign immediately! pic.twitter.com/iODkpubvJu

— Rabbi Shmuley (@RabbiShmuley) December 22, 2023

Swain told Real America’s Voice on Thursday that Gay should be fired based on her instances of alleged plagiarism alone.

“From all indications, she is a serial plagiarist, and she should be held accountable. She should not be the president of any college or university,” Swain said.

“If the president of Harvard University can get away with plagiarism, I think it will encourage a lot of people who otherwise wouldn’t do so to engage in the same type of behavior,” she added.

When asked specifically about the passages Gay took from her book “Black Faces, Black Interests,” Swain said her biggest problem with it was not acknowledging the former professor’s whole research agenda.

“She’s not letting anyone know that she’s building on research that someone else opened up that area. So normally you would cite the leading scholar and would affirm or challenge or expand that research,” Swain said. “I was the lead authority, and she was not acknowledging that she was following in my footsteps.”

What Gay did was take some of Swain’s work and not give her credit for it.

Swain argued that Gay robbing her and others out of citations hurts them.

“In academia, your stature depends on how many times people cite your work,” she said. “But I don’t just blame her. I blame her committee members, reviewers of her articles, people in the political science profession that decided to start canceling me before we even knew of the cancel culture because I was becoming increasingly conservative.”

“I was becoming a Christian. I became a Republican,” Swain continued. “And so what they did is they allowed people not to cite my work.”

Harvard’s dissertation committees are made up of academics who were charged with reviewing and challenging students’ work, which is to include original research in the field, according to the university’s website.

Presumably, the same basic practice was in place in the 1990s when Gay wrote her dissertation.

Gay should be removed as Harvard’s president both for violations of basic of academic standards and her refusal to take a strong stand to protect Jewish students on campus. (read more)

Harvard covered up secret plagiarism probe into president Claudine Gay during antisemitism storm — threatened The Post

Harvard University covered up a high-level investigation into whether its controversial president was a plagiarist — and used an expensive law firm to threaten The Post over our own probe.

The college announced Tuesday morning that it had investigated Claudine Gay over whether some of her academic work was plagiarized and had cleared her of breaching the college’s “standards for research misconduct.”

Instead, it said that she would request four corrections in two publications to insert citations and quotation marks that were originally “omitted.”

But The Post can disclose that Harvard spent weeks failing to come clean about Gay being under investigation — staying quiet even when she was hauled in front of Congress for disastrous testimony on how the Ivy League college is dealing with antisemitism on campus.

Harvard only disclosed the investigation when the university’s governing body, Harvard Corporation, said it unanimously stood behind her despite a firestorm of criticism for her evidence to Congress.

Harvard’s public statement on the allegations of plagiarism came a day after a conservative activist posted questions on X about citations in Gay’s 1997 PhD dissertation.

Gay had vigorously defended her academic record in comments to the Boston Globe after the dissertation questions were revealed, and said: “I stand by the integrity of my scholarship. Throughout my career, I have worked to ensure my scholarship adheres to the highest academic standards.”

Tuesday’s statement, issued to “members of the Harvard community” said that the probe began in late October, after Harvard “became aware” of allegations about Gay.

But the statement did not tell the full story — including how Harvard called in bulldog attorneys to protect Gay.

The Post contacted the university on October 24, asking for comment on more than two dozen instances in which Gay’s words appeared to closely parallel words, phrases or sentences in published works by other academics.

The 27 instances were in two academic papers published in two peer-reviewed journals between 2011 and 2017, and an article in an academic magazine in 1993.

The Post was sent the material anonymously and had conducted our own analysis before asking Harvard to comment on whether Gay had plagiarized or failed to properly cite other academics’ work.

We have continued to investigate since.

When The Post brought the allegations to Harvard, Jonathan Swain, its senior executive director of media relations and communications, asked for more time to review Gay’s work.

A day later Swain, who was part of the Biden-Harris transition team and a one-time Hillary Clinton aide, said he would “get back in touch over the next couple of days.”

But he did not.

And two days later, on Oct. 27, The Post was sent a 15-page letter by Thomas Clare, a high-powered Virginia-based attorney with the firm Clare-Locke who identified himself as defamation counsel for Harvard University and Gay.

The letter contained comments from academics whose work Gay was alleged to have improperly cited — even though the political scientists’ review could only just have begun.

Harvard has still not said what works Gay is seeking to have corrected, and whether her dissertation will be corrected.

It did not respond to a further set of questions from The Post Tuesday.

The dates on the three works reviewed by The Post ranged from 1993, when Gay was a post-graduate student, until 2017 when she was Dean of Social Science at the school’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

Gay, 53, assumed office as Harvard’s first black president earlier this year.

Jonathan Bailey, who heads up Plagiarism Now, and has worked as an expert witness involving plagiarism cases, reviewed the papers in question and said he believes that some of Gay’s work did violate Harvard’s own academic policy on citations.

“It is a violation of the policy and that alone should justify a thorough examination,” said Bailey in an email to The Post.

Academics whose work appeared startlingly similar to Gay’s differed in whether they felt she had appropriated their work without attribution.

George Reid Andrews, professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh, acknowledged that Gay “did borrow a few of my phrases” in her 1993 article “Between Black and White: The Complexity of Brazilian Race Relations” from Reid Andrews’s paper “Black Political Protest in Sao Paulo, 1888-1988,” which appeared in the Journal of Latin American Studies in 1992.

“But this happens fairly often in academic writing and for me does not rise to the level of plagiarism,” he said. “I am glad she read my work, learned from it, and recommended it to her readers.”

Jens Ludwig, an economist at the University of Chicago, had a similar response when contacted by The Post in October about similarities in a paper he co-authored in 2008 and Gay’s “Moving to Opportunity: The Political Effects of a Housing Mobility Experiment,” published in Urban Affairs Review in 2011.

“We partnered with Claudine on some work and my guess would be that it is the connection,” he said.

Among the papers under scrutiny are 2017’s “A Room for One’s Own? The Partisan Allocation of Affordable Housing,” published in Urban Affairs Review and written while Gay was dean of social science at Harvard.

In the paper, Gay uses phrases which closely parallel ones in a 2011 paper by Anne Williamson, a professor of political science at the University of Miami in Ohio.

Williamson told The Post she was “angry” when she read the excerpts.

“It does look like plagiarism to me,” she said.

“If they are going to do what they did, then I should be cited as a reference. My first reaction is shock. The second reaction is puzzlement. There was a way to draw from my paper. All she had to do is give me a credit.” (read more)

https://nypost.com/2023/12/24/news/harvard-slammed-for-threat-in-claudine-gay-plagiarism-scandal/

https://nypost.com/2023/12/23/opinion/harvard-university-must-force-claudine-gay-to-resign/

https://nypost.com/2023/12/24/opinion/heres-why-obama-stepped-in-to-save-harvard-prez-claudine-gay/

REPORT: Obama Quietly Intervened and Pushed Harvard to Keep Anti-Semitic Plagiarist President Claudine Gay

Former President Obama reportedly intervened in the battle over Harvard’s plagiarist President Claudine Gay, urging the school to keep her in place.

Obama was a law student at Harvard, so its easy to see how this issue would be personal to him.

Claudine Gay’s academic works continue to be scrutinized for acts of plagiarism and the list of examples just keeps growing, but Obama doesn’t seem to have a problem with that.

The New York Post reports:

Obama secretly pushed Harvard to keep president Claudine Gay despite campus antisemitism, plagiarism controversies: report

Former President Barack Obama has secretly lobbied Harvard University officials to stick by embattled President Claudine Gay as she faces pressure to resign for giving cover to antisemitism on campus and for committing plagiarism.

Obama, 62, a 1991 graduate of Harvard’s law school, privately urged the university to let Gay remain in office after she testified Dec. 5 before the House Education and Workforce Committee that calls for the genocide of Jews may be permissible under the school’s code of conduct, depending on “context,” according to a report out Friday.

“It sounded like people were being asked to close ranks to keep the broader administration stable — including its composition,” a source told Jewish Insider of the former president’s clandestine effort.

The report did not say whether that effort had continued after Gay’s scholarship was called into question following her testimony for dozens of instances of alleged plagiarism.

In case anyone has forgotten, Obama has had his own issues with plagiarism.

CBS News reported in 2008:

Obama Accused Of Plagiarism In Speech

Presidential candidate U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., has come under scrutiny for a speech he gave Saturday in Milwaukee and its similarities to a speech by Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick.

The website www.youtube.com has a video showing the similarities of the two speeches, and both campaigns, Obama’s and U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton’s, D-N.Y., have responded to the accusations of plagiarism.

Obama’s speech Saturday sounded similar to a speech given by Patrick in his 2006 campaign for governor, according to the video.

“Don’t tell me words don’t matter! ‘I have a dream.’ Just words. ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’ Just words. ‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself.’ Just words, just speeches,” Obama said in his speech.

Patrick used many of the same phrases in his speech.

David Axelrod managed the political campaigns of both Deval Patrick and Obama so it’s obvious how that happened. They even had similar campaign slogans. Obama’s was ‘Yes We Can’ and Deval Patrick’s was ‘Together We can.’  (read more)

Gay’s Scholarly Merit (or lack thereof)

Let’s travel back in time to the year 2005, when I was in grade 7, there were only 2 genders, and Claudine Gay was up for tenure at the Stanford department of political science. Her CV indicates that she had 4 peer-reviewed political science articles: 2001 APSR, 2002 AJPS, 2004 APSR, 2006 AJPS (assuming the 2006 one was forthcoming when they granted her tenure) and no book. When Claudine was approved tenure with this weak profile, it was so shocking that one Stanford faculty member reportedly said after the vote: “how can we ever turn someone down in the future after that vote?”

Here are what her other colleagues have to say:

I’m about Gay’s age. Her case was totally demotivating when I was younger. She is nice and she is smart, but my gosh this entire case is an embarassement. My record crushes her record in every way: citations, volume, and quality. But my pain is not considered as worthy of consideration as her pain. Now, she is deciding who gets to be a Harvard faculty member. Fun times in the twilight of American Empire.

— Anonymous

Mind-boggling. Does there exist a most egregious affirmative action case in political science? Extremely low productivity, combined with lack of methodological soundness, and replicability issues which may be due to incompetence, dishonesty, or both. Virtually her entire measly body of work is flawed. I couldn't find any other AA hire with such a dismal record at any top-50 place (and among non-AA hires no one would have survived with such a record). Most people in her situation would hide in a hole instead of seeking such high-visibility administrative appointments.

— Anonymous

She received all promotions and accolades because she was held to the much lower bar that REP scholars are being held to. That's discrimination on the basis of race, and it's plainly illegal. It's also the reason why Harvard is facing a lawsuit in a case that will likely go to the Supreme Court. Even in REP, it's hard to find an example of such a thin record of fatally flawed work that doesn't replicate, full of incompetent mistakes on basic methods, and such an abruptly declining trajectory post-tenure.

— Anonymous

CG is everything that is wrong with affirmative action. Haitian immigrant privileged for the wrong reasons, to the detriment of truly disadvantaged African Americans, yet still failing miserably in her academic career despite being gifted advantages that even few whites have. She is the bad example that the very few of my colleagues who openly oppose affirmative action tend to bring up: "we don't want to hire the next CG." As someone who grew up in a liberal household, I would still like to believe in the value of diversity. People like CG make it very hard though. Unfortunately she has undermined the credibility of minority candidates, and is a bad role model to them, since her case leads them to believe that you can climb the ladder by playing the race card no matter how flawed, and fraudulent your work is, and no matter how low your productivity is.

— Anonymous

It *would* be a great record if those publications weren't utterly flawed and dishonest. Even so, it would still be an inadequate record for tenure. Five articles and no book are simply insufficient for tenure at top-10. And if they're also flawed after years of Harvard and Stanford opportunities, then the person has no business being an academic. People have been denied tenure at lower ranked universities with much better records than CG. And she would have likely been denied at Stanford had King, her former advisor and author of the infamous EI disaster, not made her an external offer at Harvard, which she could shamelessly leverage at Stanford. I have seen many questionable affirmative action cases over the years, but the CG case takes the cake for the most ridiculous and corrupt one

— Anonymous

Virtually all of her meager body of work is flawed. As other people have pointed out, the errors are so readily apparent that a political theorist who has completed the quantitative requirement should be able to spot them. An obvious example is the incorrect specification, computation, and interpretation of interaction effects (this affects both the 2004 APSR and the 2007 JOP). So methodologists haven't bothered to write conference papers on that. Also, writing another critique of Gay's work after the devastating EI takedown would have felt like stomping on a corpse.

— Anonymous Political Scientist

Well, it's good to see Exeter kids can still get ahead at Harvard. It's rough for them these days.

— Anonymous

The NERVE it must take not to produce anything for a decade, after getting pity tenure on logically unsound work, and claim you got various deanship appointments as part of a meritocratic system, completely unrelated to affirmative action.

— Anonymous

Has there been a more egregious tenure case? No book, a handful of logically inconsistent articles that don't replicate?

— Anonymous

By the way, she still has no book. A chapter in an edited volume doesn't count. Show me another AA hire tenured at CHYMPS with 6 flawed articles and no book. There were people denied at Harvard with far superior records.

— Anonymous

Not only did she have so few papers, none of them can be replicated.

Where are her replication datasets and code? They don’t exist!

When people ask her for her code/data, it results in footnotes like this:

We were, however, unable to scrutinize Gay’s results because she would not release her dataset to us (personal communication with Claudine Gay, 2002).

Consider Gay’s (2001) EI–R analysis of the precinct-level socioeconomic covariates that affect black and white turnout. […] For Gay’s Michigan and Pennsylvania EI–R analyses to be logically consistent, it must be true that knowledge of a precinct’s percent black (Xi) tells us nothing about the precinct’s per capita income (an element of Gay’s Zi). This is untenable in light of contemporary American social realities: if a precinct has a large African-American population, then all things equal this precinct will have a relatively low per capita income. Nonetheless, without assuming that a precinct’s per capita income is not a function of its racial composition, and without making a host of similarly implausible assumptions for the other right hand side variables in her second stage regressions, Gay’s use of EI–R is logically inconsistent.

— the footnotes of a 2002 conference paper titled 'Logical Inconsistency in King-based Ecological Regressions.'

Let’s explore this footnote, shall we, because it is a scandal unto itself when put into proper context. Not only does this footnote totally debunk the faulty methodology of her 2001 APSR paper, which is now automatically trash, but it also provides further evidence of a coverup. You see, when this article Logical Inconsistency in King-based Ecological Regressions was published in the AJPS, the footnote was gone. Vanished.

Poof.

Instead of calling out Gay’s faulty paper, it now described "a hypothetical study.” The fact that CG's name was not explicitly mentioned and the study was called "hypothetical" in no way exonerates the fact that her research is fundamentally flawed. Gay’s footnote was removed because the Harvard mafia pressured the AJPS editors to remove it… or so the gossip goes.

This gets to a common theme in this story: AJPS seems to be the corrupt little lapdog of Harvard, as wherever the Harvard department of government is engaging in corruption, AJPS is surely there beside them. Gay served from 2015-2019 in the leadership team of MPSA, the organization which owns AJPS. In 2002 AJPS protected Claudine from a footnote that would’ve torpedoed her work, now, in 2022, AJPS are covering up for Enos and refusing to investigate his obvious research misconduct. If Kathleen Dolan and Jenniffer Lawless, the lead editors of the AJPS, don't start investigating soon, their tenure as editors will come to an abrupt end. Already, one of their board members leaked an internal email of their on poliscirumors. When you have members of your own editorial board leaking internal emails to a gossip site that the New Yorker referred to just yesterday as a cesspool of misogyny maybe it might be time to start questioning the leadership of that editorial board. Maybe there is a mutiny brewing.

So, right off the bat, Gay’s first major publication in her tenure case is non-replicable, and even if it could be replicated, it would be fatally flawed from a methodological standpoint. Predictably, the rest of her pre-tenure body of work is equally fatally flawed. As discussed in this 2006 article, Gay is making fatal mistakes in all her other articles in how she builds and interprets her interaction effects. Her only added value in the first place in these articles was taking other people’s work and then adding interaction effects into them, but, even then, her interaction effects are done incorrectly. Claudine doesn't understand how to correctly test and interpret interaction effects. Her usage of multiplicative coefficient as a test statistic to test an interaction effect is an incompetent choice. If the OLS coefficient can't be used as a test statistic, as she uses it, then three more of her articles are fatally flawed.

Thus, every single piece in her meagre and non-replicable tenure packet is utterly flawed. I wish I could FOIA her tenure packet to see what it says, but sadly Stanford is a private school, unlike Michigan State where Lisa Cook grifted her way to tenure. Gay’s fraudulent tenure case is arguably even more egregious than Cook’s fraudulent tenure case.

Fast forward 20 years and Gay has ~2,000 citations — less than 100 citations per year. This is because upon achieving tenure, she immediately went full deadwood (she lacked breadth in both theoretically and methodologically skills to keep up with people who actually have talent). She produced incompetent and logically inconsistent work a couple of decades ago, refused to share her data, went deadwood for 15 years, and then is rewarded with the most powerful Deanship at Harvard. Sometimes she will post an article here or there, such as one of her recent publications is in the "Journal of Race, Ethnicity and Politics" (with 2 co-authors) where she is a member of the Editorial Board (lol).

A prerequisite for being a Dean at Harvard is having a track record of research excellence, and Claudine Gay does not have this. Again: this points to the fact that she was only promoted to FAS Dean for nefarious/conspiratorial reasons. Not merit. I feel sorry for her, I can only imagine how devastating and stressful it must be to realize that everything you have ever published is flawed. (read more)

LEAKED DOCUMENTS:
The President of Harvard swept fabricated data under the rug
https://www.karlstack.com/p/leaked-documents-the-president-of