Harvard employed regulation agency of ex board chief to analyze Claudine Homosexual
A brand new report back to Congress confirms that after The Submit reached out to Harvard College about plagiarism allegations in opposition to its former president final 12 months, the Ivy League college’s board retained a strong regulation agency — the place a longtime chief of the board is a senior accomplice.
William Lee, a accomplice at WilmerHale, was, till June 2022, the Senior Fellow of the Harvard Company.
Regardless of stepping down from the Harvard Company in 2022, Lee, who can be a regulation professor on the college, “has continued to exert important affect amongst Harvard’s high management, together with senior directors, members of the Company and his successor Senior Fellow Penny Pritzker,” based on the Harvard Crimson.
A outstanding regulation professor, who declined to be named, criticized Harvard’s option to retain Lee’s agency, telling The Submit that “it doesn't fulfill the looks of justice,” as a result of Lee’s function on the college gave his agency “an amazing benefit. He’s a significant determine within the regulation agency and was a significant determine within the company.”
“There was no battle,” Lee advised The Submit.
However that doesn’t fulfill New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik.
“The Harvard Company actively labored to cowl up the negligence and failures of Harvard College, doubling down in protection of its corrupt management,” Stefanik advised The Submit in an announcement. “Actually, as a substitute of defending Jewish college students and eradicating Claudine Homosexual, former Harvard Company Board senior fellow William Lee lined the pockets of his regulation agency WilmerHale, [hired] to defend the previous Harvard President’s historical past of serial plagiarism and antisemitism. A reckoning is happening; our sturdy congressional investigation will proceed to show the institutional issues plaguing our most ‘elite faculties and universities and ship wanted accountability to the American individuals.”
Neither Lee nor a spokesperson for WilmerHale responded to a query from The Submit about whether or not or not the agency was paid when, because the report mentioned, “retained … in reference to these [plagiarism] allegations.”
In line with an April 2022 article on his agency’s website online, Lee was “instrumental within the college’s previous two presidential searches.” He clarified to The Submit that it was a reference to previous Harvard presidents “Drew Faust and Larry Bacow. I used to be not concerned in the newest search.”
Lee, 74, was personally concerned, together with one other lawyer from his agency, in making ready Homosexual earlier than her disastrous testimony — led by Stefanik —about campus antisemitism to Congress final month. Earlier this month, the embattled president, who confronted a number of allegations of plagiarism, resigned.
“Harvard is enjoying video games with everybody,” mentioned Carol Swain, a former political science professor at Vanderbilt College and acclaimed African American scholar who has accused Homosexual of plagiarizing her work. “That is how they responded each step of the best way.”
Swain mentioned her lawyer despatched the Harvard Company a letter on Jan. 3, requesting to know what “treatments” the Ivy League establishment seeks to make for the unauthorized use of her work. Swain advised The Submit Wednesday that she has not heard again from the varsity’s governing physique.
“I don’t intend to desert this challenge,” she mentioned. “It’s deeply disturbing that Harvard College can ignore its personal tutorial pointers — guidelines that the remainder of us are anticipated to comply with.”
In its six-page report to the House Committee on Education and the Workforce made public final week, the Harvard Company admitted that “we perceive and acknowledge that many considered our efforts as insufficiently clear, elevating questions concerning our course of and customary of evaluation.”
The Company appointed a subcommittee of 4 fellows, who then named a evaluation panel of “three of the nation’s most outstanding political scientists” to conduct the evaluation of Homosexual’s work, the letter mentioned. The company refused to call the three students, citing their very own want to stay nameless.
“They’re nameless as a result of they knew what they have been doing was bogus,” mentioned Swain. “They need to have been prepared to place their title on it. It’s clearly somebody who needs one thing from Harvard and is afraid.”
The Company made all of those strikes following questions from The Submit in October over greater than two dozen alleged cases of plagiarism by Homosexual. Three days after The Submit submitted inquiries to the varsity’s public relations workplace on Oct. 24, we obtained a threatening 15-page letter that mentioned partially that the allegations in opposition to Homosexual have been “demonstrably false” even earlier than the Company had embarked by itself investigation.
Now a watchdog group is demanding that an accreditation establishment probe Harvard College over its dealing with of the plagiarism allegations in opposition to Homosexual — a transfer that might decide if the Ivy League college continues to obtain a whole bunch of tens of millions in federal funding, The Submit has discovered.
The American Council of Trustees and Alumni, a Washington, DC-based non-profit, despatched a proper criticism earlier this month to the New England Fee of Larger Schooling, a bunch that has been accrediting universities for the Division of Schooling since its founding in 1885.
A spokesman for the Harvard Company declined remark.