The following is an exclusive excerpt from Rep. Elise Stefanik’s new book, Poisoned Ivies: The Inside Account of the Academic and Moral Rot at America’s Elite Universities.
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On Sunday after the hearing on December 10, 2023, the Harvard Corporation and the Harvard Board of Overseers were slated to meet to determine the fate of Claudine Gay’s presidency after her atrocious testimony at our congressional hearing. The intensely secretive and opaque Harvard Corporation is chock-full of senior Obama administration officials. It was later reported by the New York Post that President Obama called the Harvard Corporation Board before their meeting to directly lobby and pressure them to keep Claudine Gay as president, to “keep the broader[Harvard] administration stable—including its composition.” Many of that “administration” were either former high-ranking Obama officials, including members of his cabinet, or prominent supporters and donors of President Obama. I was told directly from a Harvard Corporation board member that Obama shared that he felt it was important “not to give her [me] a win.” Again, no concern about Jewish students or the importance of combatting antisemitism, but the typical partisan demagoguery against an effective elected Republican standing up on a moral issue.
After reviewing the notes and emails regarding the December 10th Harvard Board of Overseers meeting as part of the congressional investigation, the House Education Committee found that while Claudine Gay publicly “projected respect for the process by emphasizing that she had been pleased to appear before the Committee for questioning. . . . Behind closed doors in a formal meeting of the University’s Board of Overseers . . . Gay launched into a stunning personal attack on the Member of Congress whose questioning yielded those damaging answers, Representative Elise Stefanik, herself a Harvard alumna.” The official notes from the meeting revealed that Claudine Gay acknowledged “her truth” that should have been conveyed was “that calls for violence against the Jewish community shouldn’t be allowed,” before pivoting to lashing out with an apparent reference to me, whom she falsely smeared as a “purveyor of hate” and “supporter of proudboys.” These offensive, wildly inaccurate, and arguably defamatory statements had already leaked out to me in real time from sources in the room, prior to the congressional investigation documents that confirmed them. The Harvard Corporation and Board of Overseers were leaking like a sieve straight to my office in the Capitol.
But neither SNL’s worst cold open ever nor the Harvard Board of Overseers meeting with Claudine Gay on the hot seat was the biggest news of the weekend related to Harvard’s compounding self-inflicted scandals.
The same day that Claudine Gay was in front of the Harvard Board of Overseers, independent journalists Christopher Rufo and Christopher Brunet broke the bombshell news story published on Substack uncovering Gay’s alleged plagiarism of large portions of her Ph.D. dissertation, “Taking Charge: Black Electoral Success and the Redefinition of American Policies.” This intrepid reporting drew more than one hundred million impressions on X. Full paragraphs had allegedly been lifted from various scholars and writers, as well as an entire appendix copied in full. This was the tip of the iceberg. There would be nearly fifty instances of alleged plagiarism found in various Claudine Gay publications throughout her academic career. She seemed to be a serial plagiarist. Any one instance of plagiarism would have a student at Harvard facing stiff disciplinary action, often including a requirement to withdraw 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.
