The Plagiarism War Has Begun

Updated at 4:10 p.m. ET on January 4, 2024.

When the conservative authors Christopher Rufo and Christopher Brunet accused Harvard’s Claudine Gay last month of having committed plagiarism in her dissertation, they were clearly motivated by a culture-war opportunity. Gay, the school’s first Black president—and, for some critics, an avatar of the identity-politics bureaucracy on college campuses—had just flubbed testimony before Congress about anti-Semitism on campus. She was already under pressure to resign. Evidence of scholarly misconduct was just the parsley decorating an anti-wokeness blue-plate special.

But soon enough, the integrity of Gay’s research became the central issue in a scandal that appears to have led to her resignation on Tuesday. It turned out that the New York Post had gone to Harvard in October with separate allegations of plagiarism in her published articles; and then, earlier this week, still more examples were produced. “My critics found instances in my academic writings where some material duplicated other scholars’ language, without proper attribution,” Gay wrote in a New York Times shortly after she’d stepped down. She acknowledged having made “citation errors,” and has in recent weeks requested a handful of formal corrections to published works. Still, she avowed in her op-ed, “I have never misrepresented my research findings, nor have I ever claimed credit for the research of others.”