Harvard President Resigns: Plagiarism Allegations Followed Criticism of Response to Antisemitism (2024)

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Here’s what to know about Claudine Gay’s resignation.

Alan M. Garber, an economist and physician who is Harvard’s provost and chief academic officer, will serve as interim president. Dr. Gay will remain a tenured professor of government and African and African American studies.

Dr. Gay became the second university president to resign in recent weeks, after she and the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania and M.I.T. appeared in a Dec. 5 congressional hearing in which they appeared to evade the question of whether students who called for the genocide of Jews should be punished.

Penn’s president, M. Elizabeth Magill, resigned four days after that hearing. Sally Kornbluth, M.I.T.’s president, has also faced calls for her resignation.

In a letter announcing her decision, Dr. Gay said that after consulting with members of the university’s governing body, the Harvard Corporation, “it has become clear that it is in the best interests of Harvard for me to resign so that our community can navigate this moment of extraordinary challenge with a focus on the institution rather than any individual.”

At the same time, Dr. Gay, 53, defended her academic record and suggested that she was the target of highly personal and racist attacks.

“Amidst all of this, it has been distressing to have doubt cast on my commitments to confronting hate and to upholding scholarly rigor — two bedrock values that are fundamental to who I am — and frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus,” she wrote.

Last year, the news of Dr. Gay’s appointment was widely seen as a breakthrough moment for the university. The daughter of Haitian immigrants and an expert on minority representation and political participation in government, she took office just as the Supreme Court rejected the use of race-conscious admissions at Harvard and other universities.

She also became a major target of some powerful graduates like the billionaire investor William A. Ackman, who was concerned about antisemitism and suggested on social media last month that Harvard had only considered candidates for the presidency who met “the D.E.I. office’s criteria,” referring to diversity, equity and inclusion.

Dr. Gay’s resignation came after the latest plagiarism accusations against her were circulated in an unsigned complaint published on Monday in The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative online journal that has led a campaign against Dr. Gay over the past few weeks.

The complaint added to about 40 other plagiarism accusations that had already been circulated in the journal. The accusations raised questions about whether Harvard was holding its president to the same academic standards as its students.

Lawrence H. Summers, the former U.S. treasury secretary who resigned as Harvard president under pressure in 2006, suggested that Dr. Gay had made the right decision. “I admire Claudine Gay for putting Harvard’s interests first at what I know must be an agonizingly difficult moment,” he said in an email.

Representative Virginia Foxx, a North Carolina Republican who leads the House committee that is investigating Harvard and other universities, said the inquiry would continue despite Dr. Gay’s resignation.

“There has been a hostile takeover of postsecondary education by political activists, woke faculty and partisan administrators,” Ms. Foxx said in a statement, adding, “The problems at Harvard are much larger than one leader.”

On Harvard’s campus, some expressed deep dismay with what they described as a politically motivated campaign against Dr. Gay and higher education more broadly. Hundreds of faculty members had signed public letters asking Harvard’s governing board to resist pressure to remove Dr. Gay.

“This is a terrible moment,” said Khalil Gibran Muhammad, a professor of history, race and public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. “Republican congressional leaders have declared war on the independence of colleges and universities, just as Governor DeSantis has done in Florida. They will only be emboldened by Gay’s resignation.”

Some faculty members criticized how the secretive Harvard Corporation had handled the political onslaught and plagiarism allegations.

Alison Frank Johnson, a history professor, said she “couldn’t be more dismayed.”

“Instead of making a decision based on established scholarly principles, we had here a public hounding,” she said. “Instead of listening to voices of scholars in her field who could speak to the importance and originality of her research, we heard voices of derision and spite on social media. Instead of following established university procedure, we had a corporation granting access to self-appointed advisers and carrying out reviews using mysterious and undisclosed methods.”

Rumors about problems in Dr. Gay’s work had circulated for months on anonymous message boards. But the first widely publicized report came on Dec. 10, before Harvard’s board met to discuss Dr. Gay’s future, after her disastrous testimony in the congressional hearing.

That evening, the conservative activist Christopher Rufo published an essay in his Substack newsletter highlighting what he described as “problematic patterns of usage and citation” in Dr. Gay’s 1997 doctoral dissertation.

The Washington Free Beacon followed with several articles detailing allegations regarding her published scholarly articles, and reported two formal complaints submitted to the Research Integrity Office of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

In a statement on Dec. 12 saying that Dr. Gay would stay on, the board acknowledged the accusations and said it had been made aware of them in late October. The board said it had conducted an investigation and found “a few instances of inadequate citation” in two articles, which it said would be corrected. But the infractions, the board said, did not rise to the level of “research misconduct.”

Dr. Gay was already under pressure for what some had said was the university’s inadequate response to the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel.

After initially remaining silent after student groups wrote an open letter saying that Israel was “entirely responsible” for the violence, Dr. Gay and other officials released a letter to the university community acknowledging “feelings of fear, sadness, anger and more.” After an outcry over what some considered the tepid language, Dr. Gay issued a more forceful statement condemning Hamas for “terrorist atrocities,” while urging people to use words that “illuminate and not inflame.”

At the congressional hearing, Representative Elise Stefanik, Republican of New York, pelted Dr. Gay and the other university presidents with hypothetical questions.

“At Harvard,” Ms. Stefanik asked Dr. Gay, “does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules of bullying and harassment? Yes or no?”

“It can be, depending on the context,” Dr. Gay replied.

That exchange, and a similar back and forth between Ms. Stefanik and Ms. Magill, rocketed across social media and infuriated many people with close ties to the universities.

Dr. Gay moved to contain the fallout with an apology in an interview that was published in The Harvard Crimson, the campus newspaper. “When words amplify distress and pain, I don’t know how you could feel anything but regret,” she said.

One week after her testimony, the Harvard Corporation issued a unanimous statement of support — after meeting late into the night — saying that it stood firmly behind her.

But there were signs that controversy might have harmed Harvard’s reputation. The number of students who applied this fall under the university’s early action program — giving them the possibility of an admissions decision in December instead of March — fell about 17 percent, the university said last month.

Reporting was contributed by Dana Goldstein, Rob Copeland, Annie Karni and Vimal Patel. Kirsten Noyes contributed research.

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Harvard faced donor pressure and a drop in early admission applications.

The endowment is run as a nonprofit with its own board of directors, but its members are appointed by the Harvard Corporation, the same body that selected Dr. Gay as the university’s president.

Given the concerns, the ability of Harvard’s president to raise money became even more crucial. Yet Dr. Gay’s credibility eroded this fall among some powerful donors, who criticized what they saw as a sluggish response to the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel.

“There is a large number of alumni who are very upset about how the administration handled this fall, and really worry the university is not set up to take outside feedback,” said Sam Lessin, a Harvard graduate and tech investor.

Some alumni donors were also dismayed to learn in recent days that early action applications to Harvard, with a Nov. 1 deadline, had dropped by 17 percent this year to a four-year low.

On Tuesday, Mr. Lessin published a statement on social media reacting to Dr. Gay’s resignation. “I am happy to see Gay out,” he wrote.

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Alan M. Garber, Harvard’s provost and chief academic officer, will now serve as its interim president.

Dr. Garber, who was appointed provost in 2011, has a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard and an M.D. from Stanford. He is a member of the Association of American Physicians, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine.

Lawrence H. Summers, a former Harvard president and former Treasury secretary, said in an email that Dr. Garber, “who is universally liked, admired, and respected, is a superb choice as interim president.”

In an interview with The Harvard Crimson in November, Dr. Garber said that he regretted the university’s initial statement in response to the war in Israel and Gaza. The statement was denounced by politicians, academics and Jewish groups who said that it did not condemn Hamas strongly enough, and he spoke positively about a more forceful statement that followed from Dr. Gay, which condemned Hamas for “terrorist atrocities.”

Dr. Garber added that the crisis over the university’s response to the war has been the most serious that Harvard has faced during his tenure as provost.

“The community was immediately divided, and that is not true of every crisis that we face,” he told The Crimson. “It is a combustible situation, and one in which many people are grieving.”

Dr. Garber was reportedly considered a contender to become Harvard’s 29th president, but in 2018 the post went to Lawrence S. Bacow. In 2022, Dr. Garber told the Crimson that he was “very happy” serving as the provost, and last year Dr. Gay became the university’s 30th president.

According to the Harvard Corporation, Dr. Garber will serve as president “until a new leader for Harvard is identified and takes office.”

Anemona Hartocollis contributed reporting.

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The Israel-Hamas war has inflamed free speech skirmishes on college campuses.

If universities were engulfed before the Israel-Hamas war in debates over what kinds of speech were acceptable, now they are facing a crossroads, with many longtime observers of the campus speech skirmishes perceiving this moment as a dire one for freedom of expression.

The troubles of Ms. Magill and Dr. Gay, after all, did not start with the Dec. 5 congressional hearing, when they — as well as the president of M.I.T. — responded with what critics characterized as lawyerly answers when asked whether to punish students if they called for genocide.

For Ms. Magill, they began with a Palestinian writers’ conference that was held on campus in September. Donors to Penn asked her to cancel the event, which they said included antisemitic speakers, but she declined, citing the university’s commitment to free expression.

And Dr. Gay drew criticism barely two days after Hamas invaded Israel on Oct. 7, for not publicly condemning the attack or denouncing an open letter from student groups saying that they held “the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.”

Steven Pinker, a cognitive psychologist at Harvard who opposes cracking down on free expression, said that speech by itself, however ugly, should not be punished. But, he said, universities have not made the best case for themselves as champions of unfettered debate.

“The problem with the university presidents saying that calls for genocide are not punishable is that they have such a risible record of defending free speech in the past that they don’t have a leg to stand on,” Dr. Pinker said in an interview.

The question is what happens from here.

Stefanik, whose aggressive questioning of Gay went viral, claimed credit for her exit.

The contentious exchanges between Ms. Stefanik and all three university presidents came at the tail end of a five-hour congressional hearing called by House Republicans on the rise of antisemitism on college campuses. The moment went viral, forcing the trio of presidents, including Sally Kornbluth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to clarify their responses and leading to a period of intense scrutiny on all three.

In Ms. Gay’s case, that prompted an examination of her past work that fueled plagiarism charges, ultimately causing her to step down on Tuesday.

Ms. Stefanik, the No. 4 Republican in the House, has counted the resignations as a political win.

“I will always deliver results,” Ms. Stefanik, a Harvard alumna, said in a statement on Tuesday. “Claudine Gay’s morally bankrupt answers to my questions made history as the most viewed congressional testimony in the history of the U.S. Congress.” Ms. Stefanik added that “this is just the beginning of what will be the greatest scandal of any college or university in history.”

In an interview with Fox News Tuesday afternoon, Ms. Stefanik promised that an ongoing congressional investigation of the universities that she announced in the wake of the hearing would continue to uncover “institution rot.” And she again claimed credit for Dr. Gay’s resignation, arguing that “this accountability would not have happened were it not for the very clear moral questions at the hearing.”

Those questions almost did not happen. During the hearing, Ms. Stefanik had already tried four times to pin down the trio of administrators. She repeatedly tried and failed to get them to agree with her that calls for “intifada” and use of slogans such as “from the river to the sea” amounted to appeals for genocide against Jews that should not be tolerated on campuses.

They had parried her grilling with lawyerly answers that, on their own, might not have made international headlines. But then they fell into something of a prosecutorial trap laid by Ms. Stefanik, refusing to answer “yes” when she asked whether calling for the genocide of Jews violated their universities’ codes of conduct on bullying and harassment.

“I thought, ‘How can I drill down on this and ask this question in such a way that the answer is an easy ‘yes?’ ”Ms. Stefanik said in an interview last month. “And they blew it.”

Ms. Stefanik, who graduated from Harvard in 2006, has clashed with her alma mater in the past. After the Jan. 6, 2021, attack at the Capitol, Harvard’s Institute of Politics removed Ms. Stefanik from its advisory board, citing her “public assertions about voter fraud in November’s presidential election that have no basis in evidence.”

Ms. Stefanik, a onetime moderate Republican who more than any other lawmaker in Congress represents to Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans the worst of what happened to the G.O.P. under the sway of Mr. Trump, at the time called her removal “a rite of passage and badge of honor.”

On Tuesday, one of Ms. Stefanik’s top advisers, Garrett Ventry, joked on social media that Ms. Stefanik was now the de facto president of Harvard University.

But she was hardly the only House Republican vying on Tuesday to claim credit for Ms. Gay’s resignation.

Representative John James, Republican of Michigan, shared on social media a clip of his own line of questioning during the hearing and wrote that Dr. Gay’s resignation came “after I questioned her just last month about what actions she’d taken to combat anti Semitism.”

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Some of Gay’s faculty supporters have argued that the allegations against her hold less weight because they originated from ideologically motivated critics and outlets, and have argued that the type of plagiarism she is accused of largely involved language on research methodologies and reviews — not her core, original findings. Johnson rejected those defenses. “Harvard is welcome to come out and say, ‘Our standards for plagiarism don’t apply to quantitative scholars — they’re allowed to copy words and phrases.’ But those are not the standards they’ve chosen to articulate for students or uphold for students.”

At least one Harvard professor is already calling for a shakeup of the board. Frank Laukien, a visiting scholar of chemistry, said Pritzker should “share accountability and resign immediately.” He wrote in an email: “We need multiple new independent members on the Harvard Corporation that are not tainted by recent events and failures, and who are not part of the long-standing cronyism at the top of Harvard.”

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A history of the plagiarism allegations against Claudine Gay.

The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative news outlet, followed with several articles detailing numerous allegations regarding her published scholarly articles, and reported two formal complaints submitted to the Research Integrity Office of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, of which Dr. Gay, a political scientist, is a member.

In its statement on Dec. 12 saying Dr. Gay would stay on, the board acknowledged the allegations, which it said it had been made aware of in late October via an inquiry from The New York Post. The board said it had then conducted an investigation and found “a few instances of inadequate citation” in two articles, which it said would be corrected. But the infractions, the board said, did not rise to the level of “research misconduct.”

The plagiarism allegations blindsided many faculty, including some of the more than 700 who had signed a letter urging the Harvard Corporation, the university’s governing board, to “resist political pressures that are at odds with Harvard’s commitment to academic freedom,” including calls from external actors seeking Dr. Gay’s removal.

Initially, faculty reaction was mixed, with some saying the charges were serious and others calling the examples minor. Professors from both camps questioned the seemingly ideological nature of the effort to publicize them.

But as more allegations surfaced, faculty support for Dr. Gay began to erode, particularly as questions arose about what procedures the corporation — which normally has no involvement in scholarly matters — had used to investigate.

In a letter on Tuesday announcing her resignation, Dr. Gay, who remains a member of the faculty, defended her academic integrity, and said the campaign against her had been driven by “racial animus.”

“It has been distressing to have doubt cast on my commitments to confronting hate and to upholding scholarly rigor — two bedrock values that are fundamental to who I am,” she wrote.

It is unclear if her resignation will end any potential investigation into the complaints filed with the university.

Who is Claudine Gay?

Her career has mostly been in elite academia. Since the mid 2000s she has been a professor of government and African and African-American studies at Harvard, where her research interests have included minority representation and political participation in government.

Though allegations of plagiarism, dating back to her dissertation in 1997, surfaced publicly as Dr. Gay was engulfed in a political firestorm last month, she had in recent years moved away from academic research and into administration.

Before becoming president, she served in the high-profile role as dean of Harvard’s powerful Faculty of Arts and Sciences. The department, which includes both the university’s undergraduate program and its Ph.D. programs, is the largest of Harvard’s various divisions, with more than 1,000 faculty members.

Some colleagues saw her as a leader for the cultural moment: She helped drive a cluster of hires in ethnic studies, and oversaw several investigations into sexual harassment and misconduct allegations against faculty. She also led the department through the Covid-19 pandemic and remote learning.

But she was also seen as taking a hard line on matters of discipline, sometimes controversially.

In 2019, she issued a two-year, unpaid suspension to Roland G. Fryer, a star Black economist and recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant, who was accused of unwelcome sexual conduct toward employees. His education research lab was also disbanded.

She also spoke out against Ronald S. Sullivan Jr., a high-profile criminal defense attorney and Black law professor whose decision to represent the disgraced film producer Harvey Weinstein in 2019 stirred controversy on campus. Professor Sullivan, who said at the time that representing unpopular defendants was a key tenet of the legal profession and an opportunity for conversation with students, was later removed from the student residential house he oversaw after the university conducted a “climate review” of his leadership in the house.

Dr. Gay, a supporter of diversity in hiring and an expert on minority representation and political participation in government, took the reins just as the Supreme Court rejected the use of race-conscious admissions at Harvard and other universities around the nation.

She was selected from a pool of more than 600 nominations.

Penny Pritzker, the senior fellow of the Harvard Corporation who led the presidential search committee, praised Dr. Gay at the time for her “rare blend of incisiveness and inclusiveness,” bringing both a “bedrock commitment to free inquiry and expression, as well as a deep appreciation for the diverse voices and views that are the lifeblood of a university community.”

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Some faculty members were disappointed by Gay’s resignation.

Some faculty members criticized how the secretive Harvard Corporation, the university’s governing body, had handled the political onslaught and plagiarism allegations.

Alison Frank Johnson, a history professor, said she “couldn’t be more dismayed.”

“Instead of making a decision based on established scholarly principles, we had here a public hounding,” she said. “Instead of listening to voices of scholars in her field who could speak to the importance and originality of her research, we heard voices of derision and spite on social media. Instead of following established university procedure, we had a Corporation granting access to self-appointed advisers and carrying out reviews using mysterious and undisclosed methods.”

Melani Cammett, a professor of international relations, said she hoped “that Harvard can move forward in a way that limits politicized interference.”

“I also hope that we move towards a position of institutional neutrality that truly protects academic freedom and integrity,” she said.

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A statement from Harvard’s governing board.

With great sadness, we write in light of President Claudine Gay’s message announcing her intention to step down from the presidency and resume her faculty position at Harvard.

First and foremost, we thank President Gay for her deep and unwavering commitment to Harvard and to the pursuit of academic excellence. Throughout her long and distinguished leadership as Dean of Social Science then as Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences — where she skillfully led the F.A.S. through the Covid-19 pandemic and pursued ambitious new academic initiatives in areas such as quantum science and inequality — she demonstrated the insight, decisiveness, and empathy that are her hallmark. She believes passionately in Harvard’s mission of education and research, and she cares profoundly about the people whose talents, ideas, and energy drive Harvard. She has devoted her career to an institution whose ideals and priorities she has worked tirelessly to advance, and we are grateful for the extraordinary contributions she has made — and will continue to make — as a leader, a teacher, a scholar, a mentor, and an inspiration to many.

We are also grateful to Alan M. Garber, Provost and Chief Academic Officer, who has served with distinction in that role for the past 12 years — and who has agreed to serve as Interim President until a new leader for Harvard is identified and takes office. An economist and a physician, he is a distinguished and wide-ranging scholar with appointments at Harvard Medical School, Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. We are fortunate to have someone of Alan’s broad and deep experience, incisive judgment, collaborative style, and extraordinary institutional knowledge to carry forward key priorities and to guide the university through this interim period.

These past several months have seen Harvard and higher education face a series of sustained and unprecedented challenges. In the face of escalating controversy and conflict, President Gay and the Fellows have sought to be guided by the best interests of the institution whose future progress and well-being we are together committed to uphold. Her own message conveying her intention to step down eloquently underscores what those who have worked with her have long known — her commitment to the institution and its mission is deep and selfless. It is with that overarching consideration in mind that we have accepted her resignation.

We do so with sorrow. While President Gay has acknowledged missteps and has taken responsibility for them, it is also true that she has shown remarkable resilience in the face of deeply personal and sustained attacks. While some of this has played out in the public domain, much of it has taken the form of repugnant and in some cases racist vitriol directed at her through disgraceful emails and phone calls. We condemn such attacks in the strongest possible terms.

The search for a new president of the university will begin in due course. We will be in further touch about the process, which will include broad engagement and consultation with the Harvard community in the time ahead.

For today, we close by reiterating our gratitude to President Gay for her devoted service to Harvard, as well as to Provost Garber for his willingness to lead the university through the interim period to come. We also extend our thanks to all of you for your continuing commitment to Harvard’s vital educational and research mission — and to core values of excellence, inclusiveness, and free inquiry and expression. At a time when strife and division are so prevalent in our nation and our world, embracing and advancing that mission — in a spirit of common purpose — has never been more important. We live in difficult and troubling times, and formidable challenges lie ahead. May our community, with its long history of rising through change and through storm, find new ways to meet those challenges together, and to affirm Harvard’s commitment to generating knowledge, pursuing truth, and contributing through scholarship and education to a better world.

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Josh Kaplan, a sophom*ore majoring in computer science, welcomed Gay’s resignation. “It is the beginning of the rehabilitation our university needs. I, along with many other Harvard students, look forward to the next president working to repair the university’s image and combat the hateful antisemitism and bigotry we have seen on our campus.”

Read Claudine Gay’s resignation letter.

It is a singular honor to be a member of this university, which has been my home and my inspiration for most of my professional career. My deep sense of connection to Harvard and its people has made it all the more painful to witness the tensions and divisions that have riven our community in recent months, weakening the bonds of trust and reciprocity that should be our sources of strength and support in times of crisis. Amidst all of this, it has been distressing to have doubt cast on my commitments to confronting hate and to upholding scholarly rigor — two bedrock values that are fundamental to who I am — and frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus.

I believe in the people of Harvard because I see in you the possibility and the promise of a better future. These last weeks have helped make clear the work we need to do to build that future — to combat bias and hate in all its forms, to create a learning environment in which we respect each other’s dignity and treat one another with compassion, and to affirm our enduring commitment to open inquiry and free expression in the pursuit of truth. I believe we have within us all that we need to heal from this period of tension and division and to emerge stronger. I had hoped with all my heart to lead us on that journey, in partnership with all of you. As I now return to the faculty, and to the scholarship and teaching that are the lifeblood of what we do, I pledge to continue working alongside you to build the community we all deserve.

When I became president, I considered myself particularly blessed by the opportunity to serve people from around the world who saw in my presidency a vision of Harvard that affirmed their sense of belonging — their sense that Harvard welcomes people of talent and promise, from every background imaginable, to learn from and grow with one another. To all of you, please know that those doors remain open, and Harvard will be stronger and better because they do.

As we welcome a new year and a new semester, I hope we can all look forward to brighter days. Sad as I am to be sending this message, my hopes for Harvard remain undimmed. When my brief presidency is remembered, I hope it will be seen as a moment of reawakening to the importance of striving to find our common humanity — and of not allowing rancor and vituperation to undermine the vital process of education. I trust we will all find ways, in this time of intense challenge and controversy, to recommit ourselves to the excellence, the openness, and the independence that are crucial to what our university stands for — and to our capacity to serve the world.

Sincerely,
Claudine Gay

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What to know about the latest plagiarism accusations against Claudine Gay.

The new complaint added additional accusations of plagiarism to about 40 that had already been circulated in the same way, apparently by the same accuser.

Dr. Gay has strongly defended her work. “I stand by the integrity of my scholarship,” she said in a statement on Dec. 11, when the initial plagiarism charges were being circulated by conservative activists online and the Harvard Corporation was considering whether she should remain as president. “Throughout my career, I have worked to ensure my scholarship adheres to the highest academic standards,” Dr. Gay said.

The documents by the unnamed accuser that The Free Beacon links to on its website show 39 examples in the first complaint, rising to 47 in total in the second complaint. Separately, Harvard’s investigations have found instances of inadequate citation in her dissertation and at least two of her articles.

She has not been accused of stealing big ideas, but rather of copying language in the papers of other scholars, with small changes to substitute words or phrases or to arrange them differently. Often the language in question is technical boilerplate.

The new complaint against Dr. Gay is preceded by a five-page chronology, written in a tone ranging from somber to sarcastic — under the jaunty salutation, “Happy New Year!” The chronology notes that the unnamed accuser submitted the first batch of allegations to Harvard on Dec. 19.

In one paragraph, the accuser, who seems to be familiar with Harvard’s policies on plagiarism, explains why he or she was unwilling to be identified by name: “I feared that Gay and Harvard would violate their policies, behave more like a cartel with a hedge fund attached than a university, and try to seek ‘immense’ damages from me and who knows what else.”

The New York Post has reported that it approached Harvard with plagiarism accusations against Dr. Gay in October, and said that Harvard responded through a defamation lawyer.

The accuser goes on to wonder why Harvard was so intent on exposing him or her: “Did Gay wish to personally thank me for helping her to improve her work even if I drove her harder than she wanted to be driven?”

The sentence is an allusion to a phrase in the acknowledgments of Dr. Gay’s 1997 dissertation, where she says that her family “drove me harder than I sometimes wanted to be driven.”

It is one of the phrases she is accused of copying, from the acknowledgments of a 1996 book, “Facing Up to the American Dream: Race, Class, and the Soul of the Nation,” by the Harvard political scientist Jennifer L. Hochschild, who was thanking another academic.