New Plagiarism Charges Surface Against Harvard’s President Prompting CNN’s Tapper to Question School’s ‘Double Standards’

CNN’s Jake Tapper questioned whether Harvard University was promoting a plagiarism double standard after new allegations surfaced against President Claudine Gay regarding work she submitted in the 1990s.

The allegations first made national headlines after Gay and other university presidents testified before Congress about anti-Semitism on campus. Media and some right-wing activists put Gay’s career under the microscope and revealed the allegations of plagiarism in mid-December. Harvard was already investigating, however, and concluded soon after that there were some “inadequate citations by Dr. Gay” but “no violations” of the school’s plagiarism policy.

“Is Harvard University really holding its president, Dr. Claudine Gay to the same standards when it comes to plagiarism that they would assail for students committing the same offense?” Tapper asked as he introduced reporter Matt Egan.

“Gay submitted corrections to two papers that she wrote as a professional academic in 2001 and 2017,” Egan said. “However, there are clear examples of plagiarism that occurred in the 1990s when Gay was studying for her Ph.D. at Harvard.” Egan continued:

In one example, Gay’s 1997 dissertation, she lifted one paragraph almost verbatim from another source without citation, and that appears to go against Harvard’s current guide on plagiarism…Harvard’s plagiarism policy says that students who submit work without clear attribution to sources will be, quote, “subject to disciplinary action up to and including requirement to withdraw from the college.”

Egan said that another instance included a 1993 essay.

“These instances of plagiarism were first reported by The Washington Free Beacon and CNN’s analysis confirmed some of the main allegations in that reporting,” Egan said.

He added that Harvard is facing two major criticisms: “One is the lightning-fast speed that Harvard pulled off this independent review. These types of plagiarism reviews, they can take anywhere from six months to two years, and this one wasn’t even two months. Another criticism is that there’s a double standard; one set of rules for the students and another for the president of the university.”

“The big question, I think, in the future is, how will Harvard be able to punish any students found guilty of the same offense without inviting a lawsuit,” Tapper said. “Because if she gets away with something that students can’t then get away with, that could be messy, legally, for the school, which I’m sure Harvard’s lawyers have thought about way before I just said that.”

Neither Harvard nor Gay replied to CNN’s requests for comment on the allegations surrounding her work from the 1990s.

Watch the clip above via CNN.