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The following is an exclusive excerpt from Rep. Elise Stefanik\u2019s new book, Poisoned Ivies: The Inside Account of the Academic and Moral Rot at America\u2019s Elite Universities<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n On Sunday after the hearing on December 10, 2023, the Harvard Corporation and the Harvard Board of Overseers were slated to meet to determine the fate of Claudine Gay\u2019s presidency after her atrocious testimony at our congressional hearing. The intensely secretive and opaque Harvard Corporation is chock-full of senior Obama administration officials. It was later reported by the New York Post<\/em> that President Obama called the Harvard Corporation Board before their meeting to directly lobby and pressure them to keep Claudine Gay as president, to \u201ckeep the broader[Harvard] administration stable\u2014including its composition.\u201d Many of that \u201cadministration\u201d were either former high-ranking Obama officials, including members of his cabinet, or prominent supporters and donors of President Obama. I was told directly from a Harvard Corporation board member that Obama shared that he felt it was important \u201cnot to give her [me] a win.\u201d Again, no concern about Jewish students or the importance of combatting antisemitism, but the typical partisan demagoguery against an effective elected Republican standing up on a moral issue.<\/p>\n After reviewing the notes and emails regarding the December 10th Harvard Board of Overseers meeting as part of the congressional investigation, the House Education Committee found that while Claudine Gay publicly \u201cprojected respect for the process by emphasizing that she had been pleased to appear before the Committee for questioning. . . . Behind closed doors in a formal meeting of the University\u2019s Board of Overseers . . . Gay launched into a stunning personal attack on the Member of Congress whose questioning yielded those damaging answers, Representative Elise Stefanik, herself a Harvard alumna.\u201d The official notes from the meeting revealed that Claudine Gay acknowledged \u201cher truth\u201d that should have been conveyed was \u201cthat calls for violence against the Jewish community shouldn\u2019t be allowed,\u201d before pivoting to lashing out with an apparent reference to me, whom she falsely smeared as a \u201cpurveyor of hate\u201d and \u201csupporter of proudboys.\u201d These offensive, wildly inaccurate, and arguably defamatory statements had already leaked out to me in real time from sources in the room, prior to the congressional investigation documents that confirmed them. The Harvard Corporation and Board of Overseers were leaking like a sieve straight to my office in the Capitol.<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n But neither SNL\u2019s<\/em> worst cold open ever nor the Harvard Board of Overseers meeting with Claudine Gay on the hot seat was the biggest news of the weekend related to Harvard\u2019s compounding self-inflicted scandals.<\/p>\n The same day that Claudine Gay was in front of the Harvard Board of Overseers, independent journalists Christopher Rufo and Christopher Brunet broke the bombshell news story published on Substack uncovering Gay\u2019s alleged plagiarism of large portions of her Ph.D. dissertation, \u201cTaking Charge: Black Electoral Success and the Redefinition of American Policies.\u201d This intrepid reporting drew more than one hundred million impressions on X. Full paragraphs had allegedly been lifted from various scholars and writers, as well as an entire appendix copied in full. This was the tip of the iceberg. There would be nearly fifty instances of alleged plagiarism found in various Claudine Gay publications throughout her academic career. She seemed to be a serial plagiarist. Any one instance of plagiarism would have a student at Harvard facing stiff disciplinary action, often including a requirement to withdraw from the university.<\/p>\n While the president of Harvard\u2019s alleged serial plagiarism was shocking news to the general public, it became even more of a bombshell when it was later revealed by The Washington Free Beacon<\/em> that, stunningly, this was already a well-known and well-kept secret by the Harvard Corporation. Even before the public reporting, the New York Post<\/em> had reached out to Harvard in late October 2023 with credible allegations of twenty-five instances of Claudine Gay\u2019s plagiarism. According to independent reporting by The Washington Free Beacon<\/em>, when the Harvard Corporation learned about the accusations, \u201cthey responded by hiring the \u2018leading defamation firm in the United States,\u2019 which repped clients like the disgraced NBC News anchor Matt Lauer and Putin crony Oleg Deripaska, to threaten and intimidate the Post<\/em>. (It worked.)\u201d<\/p>\n Did Harvard follow established protocols for investigating academic misconduct? Of course not. That would be too honest and fair! Instead the Harvard Corporation fabricated a completely separate process by appointing a so-called independent panel of experts whose identities were never revealed to \u201creview\u201d the allegations. After a span of two weeks, by mid-November, the independent panel released a memo to the Harvard Corporation gushing that Claudine Gay\u2019s works were \u201csophisticated and original\u201d with \u201cvirtually no evidence of intentional claiming of findings that are not President Gay\u2019s.\u201d According to a report eventually released at a later date by Harvard, \u201cthe Independent Panel observed that certain allegations were \u2018trivial,\u2019 concerned \u2018commonly used language\u2019 or \u2018sentence fragments,\u2019 or arose from the 1993 publication to which they devoted \u2018less attention.\u2019\u201d The Independent Panel identified nine of the twenty-five allegations presented by the Post<\/em> as allegations \u201cof principal concern,\u201d which \u201cparaphrased or reproduced the language of others without quotation marks and without sufficient and clear crediting of sources,\u201d failing \u201con occasion\u201d to \u201cprovide citations according to the highest established scientific practice.\u201d It noted further that, with respect to one allegation, \u201cfragments of duplicative language and paraphrasing . . . could be read as Gay claiming findings that are actually those of Schwartz,\u201d although \u201cthere is no evidence that was her intention.\u201d Moreover, the Harvard Corporation would use software to uncover even more instances of Claudine Gay\u2019s alleged plagiarism than the original twenty-five. So what did the Harvard Corporation do? Of course, there would be no accountability or basic application of academic standards. They found that many of the allegations were \u201cmeritless,\u201d and in the instances when they did not adhere to Harvard\u2019s College Guide, Claudine Gay would be given a second chance that no other Harvard student or faculty was given; she would be allowed to make \u201ccorrections.\u201d<\/p>\n This entire episode is the prime example of academic rot at the highest levels of the most elite higher education institution in the world. Mind you, this all happened before<\/em> Claudine Gay\u2019s Harvard plagiarism scandal even broke in public.<\/p>\n Rep. Elise Stefanik represents New York\u2019s 21st Congressional District. Her new book, Poisoned Ivies: The Inside Account of the Academic and Moral Rot at America\u2019s Elite Universities<\/a>, is available now. <\/em><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n