From The Washington Free Beacon (owned by Elliot Management co-CEO Paul Singer so you don't know what sort of hedge fund motives might be attached to the story)
....The blowback [against Harvard] has been exacerbated by the Harvard Corporation’s feckless response to the allegations, which it initially tried to squash with a legal threat to the New York Post—and to the unnamed whistleblower who brought those allegations to the Post’s attention.
Through the bellicose litigation boutique Clare Locke, Harvard said in October that it would sue for “immense damages” if the Post published a story on the charges. It also “threatened to use legal means to out who had supplied the comparisons,” according to the paper’s reporting....
—"Harvard President Claudine Gay Hit With Six New Charges Of Plagiarism", January 1, 2024
Update—From The Harvard Crimson, December 25/29:
A Law Firm Said Plagiarism Allegations Against Harvard President Gay Were ‘Demonstrably False.’ Then She Submitted Corrections.
Updated: December 29, 2023, at 9:49 p.m.
Harvard threatened to sue the New York Post for defamation over accusations of plagiarism against President Claudine Gay in October, calling the claims “demonstrably false.” Then, the University’s own review found several instances of “duplicative language” in Gay’s work.
Now, the University is under fire for allegedly attempting to suppress claims of inadequate citation it later found were, at least in part, credible.
Harvard was first informed that the Post was pursuing a story about 27 “possible examples of plagiarism” against Gay through a press inquiry sent Oct. 24. At the time, the Post did not provide a source for the allegations, which had been circulating on anonymous chat forums since at least December 2022, accompanied by racial epithets and conspiracy theories.
In response, the University’s outside counsel, Clare Locke — a high-powered law firm specializing in defamation lawsuits — wrote in a letter to the Post that the alleged instances of plagiarism included in the media inquiry were “both cited and properly credited,” according to excerpts from the letter published Friday by the Post.
“These allegations of plagiarism are demonstrably false,” the letter says.
In the letter, Clare Locke also threatened future legal action against the New York Post.
“Why would someone making such a complaint be unwilling to attach their name to it?” the letter says.
On Oct. 29, five days after the New York Post’s initial comment request, Gay requested the Harvard Corporation — the University’s highest governing body — lead an independent review of the articles included in the publication’s media inquiry, according to a summary of the review released last week....
....MUCH MORE
Is the Harvard Corporation Board incompetent?
