Harvard president’s corrections do not address her clearest instances of plagiarism, including as a student in the 1990s

Harvard’s recent correction of two academic papers written by Harvard’s president did not address even clearer examples of plagiarism from earlier in Claudine Gay’s academic history at the school, according to a CNN analysis of her writings.

Harvard President Claudine Gay recently requested corrections for two of her academic papers, but she did not address even clearer examples of plagiarism from earlier in her academic history at the school, according to a CNN analysis of her writings. In response to accusations of plagiarism, the embattled Harvard president recently submitted corrections to two papers she wrote as a professional academic in 2001 and 2017. But a CNN examination of Gay’s published works documented that Gay committed other, clearer examples of plagiarism while she was studying for her PhD at Harvard in the 1990s. Those include an instance in her dissertation where she copied lines verbatim from another source without citation. In addressing the allegations of plagiarism, neither Harvard nor Gay have corrected or acknowledged these earlier instances from when she was a student. The instances were first reported by the Washington Free Beacon. The Harvard Corporation, the university’s top governing body, said in a statement last week it became aware of plagiarism allegations against Gay in late October. At Gay’s request, it then conducted an “independent review” of Gay’s published works and found a few instances of missing citations but “no violation of Harvard’s standards for research misconduct.” However, it is unclear whether that review included Gay’s 1997 dissertation, in which she lifted one paragraph almost verbatim from a paper published in 1996 by scholars without citation and, in another instance, copied specific language without attribution.