REVEALED: The 'better-qualified' applicants Claudine Gay beat to become president of Harvard...after under-fire board member Penny Pritzker DIDN'T bother to review work later revealed as plagiarized
- Harvard failed to conduct a review of Gay's plagiarized academic works before hiring her, a bombshell report has claimed
- The university allegedly felt her administrative experience was enough and brushed over two others with better scholarly credentials
- The search committee is facing scrutiny for its process in selecting Gay - with the hunt for a new president reportedly now including Barack Obama
By
Will Potter For Dailymail.Com
Published: 12:30 AEDT, 24 February 2024 | Updated: 12:57 AEDT, 24 February 2024
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Harvard officials failed to conduct a review of ousted president Claudine Gay's plagiarized academic works before hiring her, a bombshell report has claimed.
Gay, 54, was instead chosen to lead the prestigious university thanks to her administrative experience, beating out two other candidates with far more extensive scholarly credentials, according to the
Harvard Crimson.
While Gay's career as a political scientist and administrator won her plaudits, she had few published works behind her - raising eyebrows when Harvard picked her over Tomiko Brown-Nagin and John F. Manning in July 2023.
Brown-Nagin, the dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, is a recipient of the highest award in American History writing in the US, and is known as one of the top legal scholars in the nation.
The same is said of Manning, who leads Harvard's law school after a career that saw him argue nine cases before the US
Supreme Court and publish over 40 legal articles.
Claudine Gay, 54, resigned in January amid allegations of plagiarism and backlash to her disastrous Congressional hearing, where she failed to declare that calling for the genocide of Jews was a violation of Harvard's code of conduct
Harvard's vetting process is facing scrutiny as Gay was selected for her administrative experience, passing over other candidates with better scholarly credentials including legal expert Tomiko Brown-Nagin
John F. Manning (pictured), the dean of Harvard Law School, was also reportedly in the running before Harvard selected Gay as the new president
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The report comes just over a month after Gay dramatically
resigned as president of Harvard in January, just six months into her tenure as the first black person to lead the university.
She resigned following intense scrutiny over her past work, where she was accused of plagiarizing, or not properly citing, certain aspects of two published articles and her Ph.D dissertation.
The allegations were supported by billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, who shared his outrage at Gay's disastrous Congressional testimony in December over anti-Semitism on her campus.
She sparked backlash as she failed to declare that calling for the genocide of Jews was a violation of Harvard's code of conduct.
Gay subsequently resigned amid outrage over the two issues, with the plagiarism allegations raising questions as to how the scandal slipped under the radar before her appointment.
The answer, according to the Crimson, stems from a lack of any scholarly review into her work by Harvard Corporation Senior Fellow Penny S. Pritzker and the presidential search committee.
The outlet cited a person familiar with the vetting process that said the committee decided a thorough review wasn't necessary, due to Gay's experience as a successful administrator within the university.
She had served as the dean of the Social Sciences department for three years and had been the FAS dean for five years.
Harvard did not immediately respond to a request for comment when contacted by DailyMail.com.