Harvards students call Claudine Gay’s alleged plagiarism exaggerated

Harvard students are downplaying the severity of the plagiarism allegations against President Claudine Gay, with some shrugging off criticisms as “overblown” — and merely part of a pressure campaign to give her the boot.  

“While I think that properly citing your sources is important, I’m now at a point where I think it’s definitely been overblown and overstated,” university student Julia García Galindo told The Harvard Crimson, the school’s student newspaper. 

Owen Ebose sniffed that the allegations were a “distraction” for the university and ultimately being hyped up simply to get Gay fired. 

“Very loud people in business, politics and the media want her gone, and they’re digging up minor mistakes from up to decades ago to build momentum for her ouster,” Ebose told the outlet.

Gay, who just finished her first semester as Harvard’s president, came under fire earlier this month over bombshell allegations that she plagiarized other academics’ research in her 1997 doctoral dissertation, in addition to writing four papers between 1993 and 2017 without properly citing her sources. 

The Harvard Corporation, the school’s secretive governing board, later revealed it had looked into the plagiarism allegations against Gay and was issuing corrections in two academic journals to acknowledge her works’ sources. 

The school also announced last week Gay would also be issuing corrections to her dissertation to address “inadequate citation.”

Billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman questioned on X whether some students at his alma mater were holding back on calling for the president’s resignation over fears of retaliation. 

“Consider the risk to the student who publicly calls for her resignation,” wrote Ackman, who has repeatedly pushed for Gay’s removal following her disastrous Dec. 5 congressional testimony, where she evasive toward questions over whether students should be punished for antisemitic chants on campus.

Not all Harvard students are waving off the allegations, with some seething at the university’s leaders for seeming to holding its students to a higher standard than the school’s president.

Harvard undergrad Irati Egorho Diez said she believed Gay should resign after realizing the “breadth and depth” of the plagiarism allegations. 

“I do think that the role of the president should be an embodiment of the values of Harvard College,” Egorho Diez told the Crimson. “And this, to me, seems to be the opposite of that.”

Conservative activist Christopher Rufo, who earlier this month revealed allegations that Gay’s dissertation had plagiarized others’ work, warned the heat on Harvard’s president would persist in 2024.

“The Claudine Gay plagiarism scandal is not going away. After the New Year, expect another shoe to drop,” he wrote.

The House Education and Workforce Committee, which earlier this month began investigating Harvard over the plagiarism allegations against Gay, announced on Friday it was extending its deadline for Harvard to handover documents related to the probe.

“Given the holidays and office closures, we are working with Harvard on a prompt production of documents that takes that into account,” a committee spokesperson told CNN.