Calls are growing on the left for Harvard President Claudine Gay to step down after she was accused of dozens of instances of plagiarism in her past scholarly writings.
Liberal Washington Post columnist and associate editor Ruth Marcus added to the pile up with her opinion column Saturday entitled, "Harvard’s Claudine Gay should resign."
In it, the columnist said she had initially dismissed Gay's critics, believing they were motivated by politics and "no small dose of racism." While she still felt this to be true, Marcus begrudgingly acknowledged the academic's problematic "track record."
"She plagiarized her acknowledgments. I take no joy in saying this, but Harvard President Claudine Gay ought to resign," she wrote. "Her track record is unbefitting the president of the country’s premier university. Remaining on the job would send a bad signal to students about the gravity of her conduct."
"The instances of problematic citation in the work of Gay, a political scientist, have become too many to ignore," she wrote.
Marcus cited the Washington Free Beacon's reporting finding that Gay had copied full sentences and entire paragraphs with just one or two words changed in "at least 10" of the instances of alleged plagiarism. Over 40 additional charges of alleged plagiarism were dropped against the school leader the Free Beacon reported on December 20.
"The full list of examples spans seven of Gay's publications — two more than previously reported — which comprise almost half of her scholarly output," the outlet said.
Gay also stands accused of copying her colleagues' work for her 1997 doctoral dissertation without attribution, Marcus wrote.
"That’s not sloppiness. That’s plagiarism," the columnist argued. She pointed to the elite university's own strict guidelines on plagiarism to conclude that Gay was not being held to the same standards that students are expected to follow.
Under a section entitled, "What Constitutes Plagiarism?," Harvard's website says "it is considered plagiarism to draw any idea or any language from someone else without adequately crediting that source in your paper."
The university goes on to call this "unacceptable" act, "stealing" someone else's work, whether "intentionally or by accident."
Despite the growing calls for Gay to resign, Harvard has thus far backed the embattled president.
In a statement published on December 12, the Harvard Corporation "reaffirmed" its "support for President Gay’s continued leadership of Harvard University."
Harvard acknowledged that an independent probe found "a few instances of inadequate citation" in Gay's past academic work.
"While the analysis found no violation of Harvard’s standards for research misconduct, President Gay is proactively requesting four corrections in two articles to insert citations and quotation marks that were omitted from the original publications," the statement added.
