Harvard University has submitted a new set of documents to the House committee reviewing allegations of plagiarism from former President Claudine Gay, a committee representative confirmed to NBC10 Boston Friday.
The representative didn't provide the documents, but they include the most detailed account yet of how Harvard reviewed Gay's scholarly work, according to reports Friday in The Boston Globe and Harvard Crimson, which both reviewed the eight-page summary.
Harvard didn't respond to a request to share the summary document Friday night.
Gay stepped down earlier this month amid fallout from her testimony to the House Committee on Education and the Workforce on how the school had handled allegations of antisemitism on campus during the war between Israel and Hamas. The university also found several instances of "inadequate citation" in her academic work.
The Committee on Education and the Workforce first began investigating claims of antisemitism on campus but expanded the scope of its probe after conservative activists uncovered examples they said showed that Gay had plagiarized.
"Our concern is that standards are not being applied consistently, resulting in different rules for different members of the academic community," Committee Chairwoman Virginia Foxx, R-NC, wrote in a December letter requesting a slew of documents on how Harvard handled the allegations against Gay.
"If a university is willing to look the other way and not hold faculty accountable for engaging in academically dishonest behavior, it cheapens its mission and the value of its education. Students must be evaluated fairly, under known standards – and have a right to see that faculty are, too," the letter continued.
While the reviews of Gay's work found instances where she didn't properly cite others' work, leading to Gay requesting corrections be made on some of her writing, they did not find any instances where she misrepresented others' ideas as her own.
Gay, the first person of color and the second woman to be president of Harvard, has written that the campaign that led to her resignation emboldened people to harass her with "the N-word more times than I care to count" and is not just about Harvard.
"This was merely a single skirmish in a broader war to unravel public faith in pillars of American society," Gay wrote in The New York Times. "Those who had relentlessly campaigned to oust me since the fall often trafficked in lies and ad hominem insults."
Harvard has an interim president, Provost Alan Garber, during the search for Gay's full-time replacement; she has returned to the faculty.
On Friday, Harvard issued new guidance on protest and dissent, as well as announcing new task forces on combatting antisemitism and islamophobia and anti-Arab bias.
