NEW YORK - Harvard University’s president was planning to submit three corrections to her 1997 dissertation after a committee investigating plagiarism allegations against her found that she had made citation errors, a university spokesperson said.

Professor Claudine Gay, who was inaugurated as Harvard’s president in September, has already submitted corrections to two published articles in recent weeks that were the focus of a review by the Harvard Corporation, the university’s governing board.

Questions about Prof Gay’s academic integrity have rocked her already tumultuous first semester as the university’s first Black president, as she faced a pressure campaign to resign over her congressional testimony about anti-Semitism on campus earlier in December.

The plagiarism allegations against Prof Gay were brought to the attention of the Harvard Corporation on Oct 24 through a media request by the New York Post newspaper, the university spokesperson said.

Investigators, including a sub-committee of the 11-member Corporation and a panel of independent political scientists, found Prof Gay’s work had “a few instances of inadequate citation” upon initial review but her work fell short of research misconduct, the Corporation said in a statement on Dec 12.

Subsequent allegations concerning Prof Gay’s 1997 Harvard PhD dissertation led to an additional review, the university spokesperson said on Dec 20, in which investigators found “duplicative language without appropriate attribution”.

Prof Gay will submit three citation corrections for her dissertation to the university’s Office of the Provost, the spokesperson said.

Prof Gay has faced intense pressure from Harvard donors and the Jewish community to resign after her testimony at a congressional hearing on Dec 5, where she declined to say outright that calling for the genocide of Jews on Harvard’s campus would violate the school’s code of conduct.

Prof Gay and the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania and Massachusetts Institute of Technology were called to testify as protests over the Israel-Hamas war have roiled their and other US colleges’ campuses.

Prof Gay later apologised for her remarks in an interview with the Harvard Crimson.

The University of Pennsylvania’s president Liz Magill resigned on Dec 9. AFP