Harvard’s Defense of Claudine Gay’s Plagiarism Exposes Campus Double Standard—Professors Hold Students to Higher Ethics Rules

Professors at Stanford, Baylor, Emory, U Penn, Brown have also been caught plagiarizing and their universities also looked the other way.

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UPDATE: Days after this article published, a student on the Harvard College Honor Council wrote in the student newspaper, “There is one standard for me and my peers and another, much lower standard for our University’s president. The Corporation should resolve the double standard by demanding her resignation.”

Harvard University’s plagiarism scandal is just the latest example of campus bureaucrats and professors protecting one of their own after outsiders expose unethical behavior. As is usual, the kids on the student newspaper end up reporting what professors and campus administrators seek to hide.

Harvard’s magazine promoted president Claudine Gay as a “scholar’s scholar” last September, but Harvard’s student newspaper then reported what was really happening. After the New York Post sent Harvard questions and examples of Gay’s plagiarism for an upcoming story, Harvard’s University Board hired a law firm that threatened to sue the newspaper. To get out in front of the scandal, Harvard’s Board then reviewed examples of Gay’s plagiarism, found them to be “demonstrably false” and Gay then submitted corrections for … plagiarism that she didn’t commit.

I’m not joking. This is how they “do the scholarship” in the Ivy League.

But wait. It gets better.

After Harvard’s Board tried to kill off the plagiarism news with a lawsuit threat and a review that found no plagiarism, followed by Gay’s corrections for plagiarism, brand new allegations that Gay had copy and pasted sentences in 7 of her 11 publications then came to light.

In one example Gay apparently plagiarized portions of the acknowledgements she wrote for her Harvard PhD dissertation from a book published by a Harvard political scientist.

I mean, what the hell is going on here? Who plagiarizes a thank you note?

While this scandal has made front page news across the country, professor plagiarism is really nothing new. Countless past examples of esteemed professors caught ripping off other people’s words litter the news. Stanford, Brown, Yale, U Penn, Emory, Baylor—the lists goes on and on—when professors get caught copying, administrators ignore campus ethics rules, and give professors a pass for behavior that would force these very same professors to give students a failing grade.

These incidents are much worse than what Gay did, as these professors signed their names to papers written by pharmaceutical companies that they then published in academic journals to promote drugs and medical products to the rest of America.

In one case, I found that a PR company called STI was working for GlaxoSmithKline and had written a paper for a Yale professor to promote Glaxo’s antidepressant, Paxil. To ensure the professor erased the PR company’s writing involvement, STI prompted her on the cover page: “STI Cover Page – To be removed before submission.”

That’s right. You may be smart enough to get into medical school, smart enough to become a professor of medicine at Yale. But for God’s sake, be smart enough to remove the cover page of your ghostwritten manuscript!

Harvard’s response mirrors how many of these universities handled past scandals, so let’s take a look at over a dozen of these examples I collected from universities in the US and Canada: