In an exclusive excerpt from Rep. Elise Stefanik’s latest book, “Poisoned Ivies: The Inside Account of the Academic and Moral Rot at America’s Elite Universities,” the congresswoman offers a revealing look at recent controversies surrounding Harvard University.
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On December 10, 2023, the Harvard Corporation and the Harvard Board of Overseers were set to convene to deliberate on the future of Claudine Gay’s presidency, following her unsatisfactory performance at a congressional hearing. The Harvard Corporation, known for its secrecy, is dominated by key figures from the Obama administration. As reported by the New York Post, former President Obama personally reached out to the Harvard Corporation Board ahead of their meeting, advocating for Gay’s continued leadership to maintain stability within Harvard’s management, which largely comprises his former officials and supporters. According to a Harvard Corporation board member, Obama indicated his desire to deny me, Representative Elise Stefanik, any political victory. Notably absent from these discussions was any consideration for Jewish students or a commitment to addressing antisemitism, overshadowed by partisan tactics aimed at undermining an effective Republican voice on a critical moral issue.
The congressional investigation, led by the House Education Committee, reviewed notes and emails related to the Harvard Board of Overseers meeting. Despite Gay’s public display of cooperation during the hearing, the investigation uncovered that behind closed doors, she launched a personal attack against me, Representative Elise Stefanik, a Harvard alumna. Official notes revealed Gay’s admission that she should have stated that calls for violence against the Jewish community were unacceptable. However, she instead took aim at me, falsely accusing me of being a “purveyor of hate” and a “supporter of proudboys.” These baseless and defamatory claims had already been leaked to me in real-time from sources present at the meeting, even before the congressional documents confirmed them. The Harvard Corporation and Board of Overseers appeared to be leaking information directly to my office in the Capitol.
Despite the drama of SNL’s less-than-stellar cold open and the Harvard Board of Overseers grilling Claudine Gay, the most significant story of the weekend stemmed from another source.
On the same day Gay faced the board, independent journalists Christopher Rufo and Christopher Brunet dropped a bombshell on Substack, alleging that Gay had plagiarized substantial parts of her Ph.D. dissertation, “Taking Charge: Black Electoral Success and the Redefinition of American Policies.” The reporting gained over 100 million impressions on X, revealing full paragraphs allegedly copied from other scholars and writers, including an entire appendix. This discovery was merely the beginning, as nearly fifty instances of alleged plagiarism were identified across Gay’s academic work. Such offenses at Harvard typically result in severe disciplinary action for students, often including withdrawal from the university.
While the president of Harvard’s alleged serial plagiarism was shocking news to the general public, it became even more of a bombshell when it was later revealed by The Washington Free Beacon that, stunningly, this was already a well-known and well-kept secret by the Harvard Corporation. Even before the public reporting, the New York Post had reached out to Harvard in late October 2023 with credible allegations of twenty-five instances of Claudine Gay’s plagiarism. According to independent reporting by The Washington Free Beacon, when the Harvard Corporation learned about the accusations, “they responded by hiring the ‘leading defamation firm in the United States,’ which repped clients like the disgraced NBC News anchor Matt Lauer and Putin crony Oleg Deripaska, to threaten and intimidate the Post. (It worked.)”
Did Harvard follow established protocols for investigating academic misconduct? Of course not. That would be too honest and fair! Instead the Harvard Corporation fabricated a completely separate process by appointing a so-called independent panel of experts whose identities were never revealed to “review” the allegations. After a span of two weeks, by mid-November, the independent panel released a memo to the Harvard Corporation gushing that Claudine Gay’s works were “sophisticated and original” with “virtually no evidence of intentional claiming of findings that are not President Gay’s.” According to a report eventually released at a later date by Harvard, “the Independent Panel observed that certain allegations were ‘trivial,’ concerned ‘commonly used language’ or ‘sentence fragments,’ or arose from the 1993 publication to which they devoted ‘less attention.’” The Independent Panel identified nine of the twenty-five allegations presented by the Post as allegations “of principal concern,” which “paraphrased or reproduced the language of others without quotation marks and without sufficient and clear crediting of sources,” failing “on occasion” to “provide citations according to the highest established scientific practice.” It noted further that, with respect to one allegation, “fragments of duplicative language and paraphrasing . . . could be read as Gay claiming findings that are actually those of Schwartz,” although “there is no evidence that was her intention.” Moreover, the Harvard Corporation would use software to uncover even more instances of Claudine Gay’s alleged plagiarism than the original twenty-five. So what did the Harvard Corporation do? Of course, there would be no accountability or basic application of academic standards. They found that many of the allegations were “meritless,” and in the instances when they did not adhere to Harvard’s College Guide, Claudine Gay would be given a second chance that no other Harvard student or faculty was given; she would be allowed to make “corrections.”
This entire episode is the prime example of academic rot at the highest levels of the most elite higher education institution in the world. Mind you, this all happened before Claudine Gay’s Harvard plagiarism scandal even broke in public.
Rep. Elise Stefanik represents New York’s 21st Congressional District. Her new book, Poisoned Ivies: The Inside Account of the Academic and Moral Rot at America’s Elite Universities, is available now.
