CNN reporter Matt Egan blamed “sloppy attribution” for former Harvard President Claudine Gay’s resignation Tuesday, and argued she did not “steal anyone’s ideas.”
Gay resigned from her position Tuesday with a “heavy heart” following multiple allegations of plagiarism and backlash over her response to campus antisemitism.
“Now, we should note that Claudine Gay has not been accused of stealing anyone’s ideas in any of her writings,” Egan said. “She’s been accused of sort of more like, uh, copying other peoples writings without attribution. So it’s been more sloppy attribution than stealing anyone’s ideas.”
Two complaints filed with Harvard University outlined at least 40 specific allegations of plagiarism in eight of her publications and her dissertation. Throughout her academic career, Gay appears to have copied entire paragraphs and cited more than 20 authors without proper attribution. (RELATED: Harvard President’s ‘Flimsy’ Record And Plagiarism Allegations Set Her Apart From Her Prodigious Predecessors)
The first complaint, published Dec. 19 by the Washington Free Beacon, brought forth charges against seven of her works. A second complaint targeted an eighth work — a 2001 article that allegedly lifts almost half a page from University of Wisconsin political science professor David Cannon.
Harvard’s student newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, also found she may have violated the university’s plagiarism policies in her own academic works. She later issued two corrections to her articles in mid-December to provide proper “quotation marks and citations” in response to the student newspaper’s findings.
Gay also faced backlash after saying repeatedly during a Dec. 5 congressional hearing that calls for genocide against Jews did not necessarily violate Harvard’s code of conduct.
She later apologized for the remarks in a Dec. 9 statement to the Crimson.
“I am sorry,” Gay told the student paper. “Words matter. What I should have had the presence of mind to do in that moment was return to my guiding truth, which is that calls for violence against our Jewish community — threats to our Jewish students — have no place at Harvard, and will never go unchallenged.”