Harvard's embattled president is facing yet further questions about her
academic record, after a statistics expert challenged the data used in a
report which helped win her tenure at Stanford.

Claudine Gay, who took over as president in July, has been at the center
of a firestorm since the October 7 Hamas attacks. She was seemingly slow
to condemn students who justified the terrorist violence, and slow to
speak out against antisemitism on campus.

The harsh spotlight has spread to her academic record, with accusations of
plagiarism - and on Tuesday, a data scientist challenged her analytical
methods. It was then revealed that she had refused to share her data,
raising eyebrows in academia.

Jonatan Pallesen, a Copenhagen-based data scientist working for the
Confederation of Danish Industry, tweeted that he had examined her use of
data in her PhD thesis, and a 2001 American Political Science Review
(APSR) paper.

The 2001 paper - 'The Effect of Black Congressional Representation on
Political Participation' - was one of four peer-reviewed political science
articles which secured her 2005 tenure at Stanford.

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Gay had received an undergraduate degree in economics from Stanford
University and a Ph.D. in government from Harvard, before returning to
Stanford to teach.

In 2006, she joined Harvard's faculty, serving as a professor of
government and of African and African American studies. She became dean of
Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences in 2018.

Pallesen found that the 2001 paper was misleading, and incomplete.

'I am not a political scientist, but I am pondering about the whole
approach of her study,' he said.

Christopher Brunet, a contributing editor at The American Conservative,
then followed up on Pallesen's concerns in The Dossier, and found that Gay
had refused to share the data which informed her conclusions.

Two professors - Michael C. Herron, a quantitative social science
professor at Dartmouth, and Kenneth W. Shotts, a professor of political
economy at Stanford Graduate School of Business - told a 2002 conference
of The Society for Political Methodology that she would not share her data
or code with them.

'We were, however, unable to scrutinize Gay's results because she would
not release her dataset to us (personal communication with Claudine Gay,
2002),' they noted.

The professors said the statistical practice Gay used in her research
often leads 'logical inconsistencies.'

But, Brunet finds, their criticism of Gay was removed from the website.

Brunet said that Gay's refusal to share her data was 'shameful'.

Herron, the professor who in 2002 criticized her, told The New York Post
that Gay was just one person they looked at when discussing data analysis.

Also on Tuesday, it emerged that two Harvard board members and four
faculty held a private dinner where they reportedly discussed a culture of
'self-censorship' on campus, amid growing outrage over the school's
response to the Israel-Hamas conflict.

The four professors in attendance on Tuesday said they didn't address the
elephant in the room for the Ivy League institution - Gay's uncertain
future as president - despite reports stating otherwise.

Harvard Law School professor Jeannie Suk Gersen, Psychology professor
Steven A. Pinker, lecturer Flynn J. Cratty, and former Harvard Medical
School Dean Jeffrey S. Flier were present along with board members Tracy
Palandjian and Paul J Finnegan.

The dinner at Bar Enza in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was first reported by
the New York Times, - and it sparked rumors that Palandjian and Finnegan
could be breaking ranks with the Harvard Corporation's decision to stand
by the beleaguered president.

Gay, who took office in July this year, sparked fury during a
congressional hearing after she said that it depended on context whether
calls for the genocide of Jews at Harvard constituted harassment and
violated the rules.

According to the Times, Palandjian said that 'replacing the university's
president might not be going far enough to get Harvard back on course' -
but each of the professors who were at the dinner told the Harvard Crimson
the topic did not even come up.

Pinker told the Crimson he had 'no memory of Palandjian saying she
supported Gay's resignation.'

'That would have been a bombshell I could not possibly have forgotten,' he
said.

Cratty described the dinner as a 'very frank and friendly conversation
about ways Harvard can grow in its commitment to civil discourse and
diversity of thought'.

'We did not discuss or request President Gay's removal,' he added.

According to the Times, Palandjian also said Harvard needed 'generational
change' - but Gersen wrote in a statement to The Crimson that she didn't
'specifically recall Tracy Palandjian using the language of 'generational'
change at Harvard.'

'But if she did, it was not about possibly replacing the President or
members of the Corporation, as that was not the conversation we were
having,' Gersen said.

Harvard spokesman Jonathan L Swain said the dinner was 'a constructive and
positive conversation about the importance of academic freedom, civil
discourse and intellectual diversity.'

'The discussion of 'generational change' occurred in that context; that
addressing such a vital and complex societal issue would not happen
overnight, but would take time,' Swain said. 'It was not related to any
individual at Harvard.'

Meanwhile, Flier previously told the Times and the Wall Street Journal he
urged Palandjian and Finnegan to do more to address the anti-Semitism
furor threatening to envelop the Ivy League school.

'You need to be more out front of this,' Flier recalled telling the execs,
as he spoke with the New York Times. 'If people are saying the university
is making mistakes, they are talking about you!'

Finnegan and Palandjian did not immediately respond to requests for
comment from DailyMail.com.

Danielle Rhoades Ha, a spokesperson for the New York Times, wrote in a
statement that the publication is 'confident in the accuracy of our
reporting and stand by the story.'

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