Embattled Harvard president Claudine Gay wouldn’t share research when academics questioned data in 2001 Stanford paper

Harvard University president Claudine Gay, who has come under fire over accusations of plagiarism and antisemitism, is now seeing her work further scrutinized after it was revealed two professors questioned a data method she used in a 2001 Stanford paper that often resulted in “logical inconsistencies” — and she refused to share her research with them.

The 2001 study, titled “The Effect of Black Congressional Representation on Political Participation,” was one of four peer-reviewed articles that helped land Gay tenure at Stanford University, but its merit could not be properly reviewed by everyone, according to a post on the Dossier by Christopher Brunet.

In 2002, Michael C. Herron, the Remsen 1943 professor of quantitative social science at Dartmouth, and Kenneth W. Shotts, the David S. and Ann M. Barlow professor of political economy at Stanford Graduate School of Business, claimed to debunk the very foundation of Gay’s research.

At a conference of the Society for Political Methodology (PolMeth) that year, Herron and Shotts presented their research, finding inconsistencies in Gay’s paper where she concluded that the election of black Americans to Congress negatively affects white political involvement and rarely increases political engagement among black people.

According to the two professors, Gay’s analysis and extrapolations were based on the statistical practice known as ecological regression (El-R), which Herron and Shotts have spent years demonstrating leads to “logical inconsistencies.”

While Herron and Shotts highlighted errors by other researchers using El-R, they noted that their probe into how Gay reached her conclusion and the stats she listed were limited because she refused to share her research with them.