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Editor’s Note: Below is an exclusive excerpt from Representative Elise Stefanik’s latest book, “Poisoned Ivies: The Inside Account of the Academic and Moral Rot at America’s Elite Universities.”
On December 10, 2023, following a pivotal congressional hearing, the Harvard Corporation and the Harvard Board of Overseers convened to decide the future of Claudine Gay’s presidency. Her testimony had been heavily criticized. Known for its secrecy, the Harvard Corporation includes numerous senior officials from the Obama administration. According to the New York Post, former President Barack Obama personally reached out to the Board ahead of their meeting, urging them to retain Gay and maintain stability within the administration. Many within this administration were either former Obama officials or prominent supporters and donors. A member of the Harvard Corporation reportedly disclosed that Obama had expressed his disapproval of giving Representative Elise Stefanik, a vocal Republican critic, any sort of victory. The focus, according to Stefanik, was not on addressing antisemitism or supporting Jewish students, but rather on partisan politics.
The House Education Committee, during its investigation, reviewed notes and emails from the December 10th meeting of the Harvard Board of Overseers. Publicly, Claudine Gay had expressed her respect for the congressional process and was agreeable to answering questions. However, during a private meeting with the Board of Overseers, she reportedly launched a personal attack on Representative Stefanik, who is also a Harvard alumna. Meeting notes revealed Gay acknowledged that she should have clearly stated that incitements to violence against the Jewish community are unacceptable. Instead, she allegedly mischaracterized Stefanik as a “purveyor of hate” and “supporter of Proud Boys,” comments that Stefanik claims were false and defamatory. Information from this meeting reached Stefanik in real-time through leaks, even before the congressional investigation confirmed these remarks. The flow of information from the Harvard Corporation and Board of Overseers to Stefanik’s office was continuous and unrestrained.
Despite the uproar from Gay’s contentious meeting with the Harvard Board of Overseers, it was not the only incident dominating headlines that weekend as Harvard faced escalating scandals.
But neither SNL’s worst cold open ever nor the Harvard Board of Overseers meeting with Claudine Gay on the hot seat was the biggest news of the weekend related to Harvard’s compounding self-inflicted scandals.
The same day that Claudine Gay was in front of the Harvard Board of Overseers, independent journalists Christopher Rufo and Christopher Brunet broke the bombshell news story published on Substack uncovering Gay’s alleged plagiarism of large portions of her Ph.D. dissertation, “Taking Charge: Black Electoral Success and the Redefinition of American Policies.” This intrepid reporting drew more than one hundred million impressions on X. Full paragraphs had allegedly been lifted from various scholars and writers, as well as an entire appendix copied in full. This was the tip of the iceberg. There would be nearly fifty instances of alleged plagiarism found in various Claudine Gay publications throughout her academic career. She seemed to be a serial plagiarist. Any one instance of plagiarism would have a student at Harvard facing stiff disciplinary action, often including a requirement to withdraw from the university.
While the president of Harvard’s alleged serial plagiarism was shocking news to the general public, it became even more of a bombshell when it was later revealed by The Washington Free Beacon that, stunningly, this was already a well-known and well-kept secret by the Harvard Corporation. Even before the public reporting, the New York Post had reached out to Harvard in late October 2023 with credible allegations of twenty-five instances of Claudine Gay’s plagiarism. According to independent reporting by The Washington Free Beacon, when the Harvard Corporation learned about the accusations, “they responded by hiring the ‘leading defamation firm in the United States,’ which repped clients like the disgraced NBC News anchor Matt Lauer and Putin crony Oleg Deripaska, to threaten and intimidate the Post. (It worked.)”
Did Harvard follow established protocols for investigating academic misconduct? Of course not. That would be too honest and fair! Instead the Harvard Corporation fabricated a completely separate process by appointing a so-called independent panel of experts whose identities were never revealed to “review” the allegations. After a span of two weeks, by mid-November, the independent panel released a memo to the Harvard Corporation gushing that Claudine Gay’s works were “sophisticated and original” with “virtually no evidence of intentional claiming of findings that are not President Gay’s.” According to a report eventually released at a later date by Harvard, “the Independent Panel observed that certain allegations were ‘trivial,’ concerned ‘commonly used language’ or ‘sentence fragments,’ or arose from the 1993 publication to which they devoted ‘less attention.’” The Independent Panel identified nine of the twenty-five allegations presented by the Post as allegations “of principal concern,” which “paraphrased or reproduced the language of others without quotation marks and without sufficient and clear crediting of sources,” failing “on occasion” to “provide citations according to the highest established scientific practice.” It noted further that, with respect to one allegation, “fragments of duplicative language and paraphrasing . . . could be read as Gay claiming findings that are actually those of Schwartz,” although “there is no evidence that was her intention.” Moreover, the Harvard Corporation would use software to uncover even more instances of Claudine Gay’s alleged plagiarism than the original twenty-five. So what did the Harvard Corporation do? Of course, there would be no accountability or basic application of academic standards. They found that many of the allegations were “meritless,” and in the instances when they did not adhere to Harvard’s College Guide, Claudine Gay would be given a second chance that no other Harvard student or faculty was given; she would be allowed to make “corrections.”
This entire episode is the prime example of academic rot at the highest levels of the most elite higher education institution in the world. Mind you, this all happened before Claudine Gay’s Harvard plagiarism scandal even broke in public.
Rep. Elise Stefanik represents New York’s 21st Congressional District. Her new book, Poisoned Ivies: The Inside Account of the Academic and Moral Rot at America’s Elite Universities, is available now.