Gen Z Reporter Aaron Sibarium Stories, Harvard President Claudine Gay Resignation

Gen Z Reporter Aaron Sibarium Stories, Harvard President Claudine Gay Resignation


When the president of one of the world’s most prestigious universities stepped down, an opportunistic Republican lawmaker, Rep. Elise Stefanik, was quick to take credit.

“I will always deliver results,” Stefanik triumphantly tweeted after Harvard President Claudine Gay announced her resignation on Tuesday. Stefanik pointed to questions she asked about antisemitism on campus during a hearing with the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, and MIT. The answers the presidents gave sparked bipartisan backlash.

But far more credit was likely due to Aaron Sibarium — a Gen Z reporter trying to bring investigative journalism to conservative media. Sibarium, a writer at the conservative news site The Washington Free Beacon, broke many of the plagiarism accusations against Gay.

Gay resigned after months of controversy that started after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7 but ramped up after the Congressional hearing last month. In her tweet taking credit for the resignation, Stefanik cited Gay’s “morally bankrupt answers.”

But despite the criticism of Gay that followed the testimony, Harvard’s board stood by her. It wasn’t until the plagiarism accusations continued to pile up that she resigned.

In an email to Business Insider, Sibarium said he pursued the story because it was “in the public interest to know whether Harvard — a beacon of academic prestige that receives hundreds of millions in federal aid — is willing to tolerate serial plagiarism from its own president, even as it disciplines students for the same offense.”

Gay appeared to allude to the allegations in her resignation letter, writing that it was “distressing to have doubt cast on my commitments to confronting hate and to upholding scholarly rigor — two bedrock values that are fundamental to who I am — and frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus.”

When reached by email, a spokesperson for Gay declined to comment further.

In an op-ed for The New York Times published Wednesday, Gay strongly defended her scholarship but acknowledged she had made attribution mistakes and requested corrections in the relevant journals, which she said was consistent with how similar faculty cases had been handled at Harvard.

Others have also argued the attacks on Gay were made in bad faith.

The Harvard Corporation, the school’s governing body, said in a separate statement it accepted her resignation with “sorrow,” adding that Gay had “acknowledged missteps and has taken responsibility for them.”

Sibarium, a 27-year-old Yale University alumnus whom Politico profiled in November, has been making waves in conservative media for several years. But his author page shows how he spent the past month: breaking stories about plagiarism accusations against Gay.

His latest piece, published Monday, detailed six new allegations.

Gay resigned the following day.

Despite Sibarium’s conservative reporting chops, he told Politico that he’s not conservative himself — he just saw an opening and a need for legitimate, traditional journalism from a conservative perspective. (He’s described by a colleague in the Politico piece as “liberal, but.”)

He noted the Harvard students, liberal or conservative, who have meticulously checked their work out of fear of missing a footnote or those who have actually been punished for plagiarizing a term paper, let alone a dissertation or peer-reviewed article.

“When you fail to cite your sources, or when you cite them inadequately, you are plagiarizing, which is taken extremely seriously at Harvard,” the school warns students. “Plagiarism is defined as the act of either intentionally OR unintentionally submitting work that was written by someone else.”

The student handbook also says: “Students who, for whatever reason, submit work either not their own or without clear attribution to its sources will be subject to disciplinary action, up to and including requirement to withdraw from the College.”

Harvard also notes that professors are held to the same standards, telling students: “When you write papers in college, your work is held to the same standards of citation as the work of your professors.

Allegations against Gay range from inadequate citations to lifting nearly verbatim sections of copy from other academics’ papers or books.

“Such double standards are relevant to people of all political stripes — and perhaps to liberals most of all, since they are the ones who comprise the lion’s share of students and faculty at Harvard,” Sibarium told BI.

The seriousness of the accusations against Gay has been hotly debated, with some plagiarism experts calling the instances more nuanced than the outrage would suggest.

Even some scholars whom Gay has been accused of plagiarizing have dismissed the allegations, including David Canon, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Gay has been accused of using nearly verbatim language from Canon’s 1999 book in an article she published in 2001.

“I am not at all concerned about the passages,” Canon told the Washington Free Beacon in Sibarium’s latest story. “This isn’t even close to an example of academic plagiarism.”

But Sibarium said that’s not his call to make.

“One can, of course, debate the seriousness of Gay’s conduct and whether the rules on plagiarism are too strict,” he said. “My job as a reporter is to get the raw examples out there.”



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