Ken Cedeno/Reuters
A high-profile conservative activist who almost single-handedly turned critical race theory into a national flashpoint has now accused embattled Harvard President Claudine Gay of plagiarizing “multiple sections” of her 1997 PhD thesis—a claim which Gay’s own thesis adviser called “absurd” in an interview with The Daily Beast on Monday.
“There’s not a conceivable case that this is plagiarism,” said Prof. Gary King, who explained that Gay’s work underwent extensive review and never provoked even a suggestion of paragraph-pinching in more than a quarter-century. “Her dissertation and every draft I read of it met the highest academic standards.”
On Sunday evening, Christopher Rufo of the right-wing Manhattan Institute took to social media with what he termed “bombshell” evidence that Gay had lifted others’ work as her own while a doctoral student at Harvard. Rufo posted a long thread of side-by-side screenshots on X, formerly Twitter, of the alleged copycat passages, flagging language he deemed problematic.