Complaint Filed Against Harvard Over Claudine Gay Investigation

A college watchdog group, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) have sent a formal complaint to the New England Commission of Higher Education (NECHE) seeking an investigation into Harvard’s handling of the Claudine Gay plagiarism allegations. 

According to the complaint, Harvard “appears to have willfully and persistently operated outside of Harvard’s established procedures” when dealing with Gay’s alleged plagiarism, representing a violation of both the school’s policies and NECHE’s standards.  

They further claim that the investigation into the allegations were both “irregular” and “opaque” and that “the Harvard Corporation and the former president seem to have established as a matter of public precedent that they can arbitrarily overrule and circumvent the established, faculty-approved policies and procedures governing allegations of research misconduct.” 

NECHE accreditation is required for the school to receive federal funding, including through student loan programs. ACTA claims this could jeopardize hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding for the school. 

The New York Post, who is reporting on the filing, said that they informed Harvard about the allegations on October 24, 2023, but quickly claimed that the allegations were without merit and threatened the paper with a lawsuit over the investigation.  

As such, ACTA claims that university deviated from both its own rules and NECHE standards for reporting and addressing allegations of research misconduct.  

While it is unlikely that NECHE will revoke Harvard’s accreditation, this will undoubtedly be an issue that many universities will be watching closely as they are trying to decide how the fallout of this scandal impacts them and what they should do to prevent it happening to them. 

A Missed Opportunity 

When I first examined the initial round of allegations in early November at the request of a reporter, I found them to be a mixed bag. Though some of the allegations were clearly problems, including whole paragraphs of near-verbatim copying, others were short passages or otherwise not evidence of copying or plagiarism. 

Ultimately, most of the alleged examples of plagiarism did not carry much weight though a handful did indicate problems that required some form of corrective action. 

At the time, I felt that there were enough issues that Harvard needed to conduct a thorough investigation of her work. However, as I noted when the allegations became public in December, it was unclear whether that investigation happened as the school was not being transparent about what they had done. 

But as additional allegations came out over the next couple of weeks, it became clear that Harvard had not performed a serious check beyond examining the allegations that were presented.  

When Gay announced her resignation in January, I lamented this lack of investigation, saying that they missed an opportunity to get ahead of this issue. While it is unlikely that performing such an investigation would have drastically altered the trajectory of Gay’s story, it might have saved Harvard a great deal of embarrassment.  

Now, it appears that this lack of an investigation may result in a pair of new investigations, one by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce and another by NECHE. Though Gay’s tenure as president may not have been salvageable since there were calls for her resignation well before the plagiarism allegations became public, these investigations likely could have been avoided. 

To that end, Harvard missed a clear opportunity to minimize the harm of the situation and it’s a lesson other schools would do well to learn from. 

Lessons for Other Schools 

If there is a lesson in this for other schools, it’s the need to be proactive. The weaponization of plagiarism is expanding and, while It’s unclear just how far this current wave will go, this is a playbook that will be repeated at some point. 

University presidents and other high-level administrators would be wise to make sure they don’t have any plagiarism or other academic/research integrity issues in their history. As we saw with Gay, if such an investigation becomes politically expedient, it will not necessarily be fair and it will go through the entirety of the target’s history, including their time as a student. 

However, the more important thing for schools is to ensure that their policies are prepared. Official polies on research integrity involving staff tend to be very opaque, slow-moving and wholly internal. 

These types of situations demand the opposite. There needs to be a path for expedient and transparent resolution of these cases, ideally with an independent investigation. While, admittedly, employment and privacy rules complicate this greatly, it’s what the public expects and wants. 

Harvard was caught flat footed in this regard, but there’s no reason for other schools to have the same issue. This case is a warning and one that schools would be wise to heed. 

Bottom Line 

For most of history, issues of academic/research plagiarism remained issues of academic/research integrity. The public did not get involved in the handling of such cases and had no interest in them.

First and foremost, this allowed schools the time to move slowly and follow their processes, no matter how complicated they might be. While this meant that they had the time to be thorough and collect evidence/hold hearings at a comfortable pace, it also meant that they were free to ignore or minimize cases that they didn’t want to touch or be involved in. 

The politicization of academic plagiarism has changed the game. It’s put academic and research integrity directly in the public eye and created a need to move more quickly, transparently and consistently on these issues. While none of those are bad things in and of themselves, the motives behind the push have nothing to do with academic integrity and everything to do with scoring political points. 

And that, ultimately, is my issue with this trend. While the systems in place for dealing with academic and research integrity are deeply flawed and in need of reworking, these political plagiarism investigations come at the issue not with the hopes of improving integrity, but with finding plagiarism.  

As we saw with Claudine Gay, this results in flawed investigations that call out non-issues and raise more alarm than necessary. While Gay did have some issues with her work, they are not as serious as many would lead you to believe. However, that kind of nuance is exactly what gets lost when politics mix with plagiarism. 

That said, universities need to be prepared for this new reality. The time to start planning and drafting new rules and systems is now. The new reality is here, for better or worse, and we don’t know what tomorrow’s headlines may bring.