The House Education Committee is set to expand its investigation into Harvard President Claudine Gay after receiving allegations that she committed plagiarism in academic work.
The news of the expanded investigation comes from North Carolina Rep. Virginia Foxx (R) and after Gay was heavily scrutinized for her testimony over antisemitism on her campus earlier this month.
In the letter, acquired by Bloomberg, Foxx said the committee would focus on whether or not Harvard holds its faculty to the same standard it does its students.
“Our concern is that standards are not being applied consistently, resulting in different rules for different members of the academic community,” she 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.”
Gay was accused of plagiarizing in multiple pieces of her academic works, but the Harvard Fellows, the university’s governing body, said the claims were not significant.
The Fellows received the allegations in October and launched an independent investigation, finding that the plagiarism consisted of “a few instances of inadequate citation.”
“While the analysis found no violation of Harvard’s standards for research misconduct, President Gay is proactively requesting four corrections in two articles to insert citations and quotation marks that were omitted from the original publications,” the group said in a statement.
The Fellows also reaffirmed its support for Gay amidst calls for her to resign from lawmakers after she struggled to denounce the genocide of Jewish people during her testimony alongside the presidents of UPenn and MIT.
When asked, Gay said it would depend on the context of calling for the genocide of Jewish people to determine whether or not it was harassment.
While UPenn President Liz Magill has resigned over the pressure, MIT and Harvard have not been quick to submit to the pressure.