Democrat Says Elise Stefanik Plagiarized Her Letter To Universities

Democratic Rep. Kathy Manning (N.C.) on Monday accused Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) of plagiarizing her staff’s work and undermining a bipartisan effort to pressure universities to make policy changes to combat antisemitism on their campuses to “score political points.”

In the wake of last week’s widely criticized hearing that saw the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology appear evasive in response to a question on whether calls for the genocide of Jews would violate their policies, Manning said she approached Stefanik to contribute to a letter that would call on the boards of those three universities to update their policies to protect Jewish students.

Both women are Harvard graduates and sit on the Education and Workforce Committee, which hosted the hearing.

“When I shared my letter with @RepStefanik to try to make this a bipartisan effort, she made it clear with her ‘edits’ that she didn’t care about protecting Jewish students,” Manning wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. “All she cared about was calling for the resignation of university presidents to score political points.”

Gia Scirrotto, a spokesperson for Manning, told Politico that Stefanik then pulled entire passages from the letter drafted by Manning’s office and included those in a separate letter published by her office without including Manning as a signatory. Stefanik’s letter explicitly called for the ouster of the three presidents.

“Stefanik chose to take our language and use it as her own,” Scirrotto told the outlet.

Stefanik disputed the allegations in a post on X, which Politico said was published after they contacted her office about Manning’s claims. Stefanik accused Manning of staying “radio silent” after she submitted her changes.

“Our offices then decided to go in different directions with two separate versions of the letter when Rep. Manning did not want to call for the firing of the presidents, among other significant edits she refused to accept,” Stefanik wrote. “This is something that happens everyday on Capitol Hill.”

She then went on to blame Manning for trying to do what she described as “a hit piece to help panicked Democrats who are clearly on the wrong side of history protecting these university presidents” because her own letter was “weaker.”

Stefanik wrote on X, “Our updated version of the stronger letter with significant edits got much more bipartisan support because it was right thing to do.”

The top three paragraphs of both letters are nearly identical, and other similarities exist throughout the copy of both texts.

Over the weekend, UPenn president Liz Magill resigned just days after the hearing.

Stefanik celebrated Magill’s departure, writing: “One down. Two to go.”

Harvard’s governing board on Tuesday announced that Claudine Gay will stay on as president, while MIT’s board has stood behind its own president Sally Kornbluth.

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