The House plans to expand its probe into Harvard University President Claudine Gay to include allegations of plagiarism. Photo by Will Oliver/EPA-EFE
Dec. 21 (UPI) -- The U.S. House plans to expand its probe into Harvard University President Claudine Gay to include allegations of plagiarism in her academic work.
House Education and Workforce Committee Chair Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., sent a letter to Harvard Corporation Senior Fellow Penny Pritzker, announcing it had begun a review of Harvard's handling of "credible allegations of plagiarism" by Gay spanning 24 years.
"An allegation of plagiarism by a top school official at any university would be reason for concern, but Harvard is not just any university," Foxx wrote. "It styles itself as one of the top educational institutions in the country."
The letter requested documents and communications from the university regarding allegations of plagiarism against Gay, a list of disciplinary actions taken against Harvard faculty or students for academic integrity violations and "any non-public guidelines or policies" regarding how the university deals with allegations of plagiarism.
"Our concern is that standards are not being applied consistently, resulting in different rules for different members of the academic community," Foxx wrote. "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."
The investigation comes after new allegations of plagiarism surfaced Wednesday as the Harvard Corporation announced Gay would request three additional corrections to her 1997 Ph.D. dissertation.
The corrections were announced as part of a summary of an independent review by the Harvard Corporation, the university's highest governing body, which found that while Gay failed to properly cite in some instances she was not guilty of further misdeeds.
The Harvard Corporation launched the investigation as Gay faced calls to resign after she took part in a House panel on anti-Semitism, where she Massachusetts Institute of Technology President Sally Kornbluth and then-University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill declined to confirm that calls for genocide against Jews were against their universities' codes of conduct.
In the statement, however, Harvard Corporation said Gay would remain in place but that it had launched its own independent review into allegations of plagiarism against her and found "a few instances of inadequate citation" in three articles.
At the time it said Gay had "proactively" requested four corrections in two articles to insert the necessary citation and quotation marks that were left out.
Following the panel, the House launched an investigation into the disciplinary procedures at all three institutions.
Magill resigned shortly after the testimony but Kornbluth has remained in her post.