In a town hall held over Zoom on Tuesday with several hundred members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Dr. Gay focused on how to bridge the deep divides that had emerged on campus as a result of the war, according to two people who attended and asked for confidentiality because of the sensitivity of the situation.
Faculty members who spoke up in the meeting were largely positive, and there were no questions about Dr. Gay’s academic record after public allegations of plagiarism. The matter wasn’t even raised, one professor said.
But by Thursday, new questions surrounding Dr. Gay’s scholarship had shifted to the forefront, after the university said late Wednesday that it had identified two more instances of what it called “duplicative language without appropriate attribution,” from her 1997 doctoral dissertation.
The examples were part of a wave of plagiarism allegations that had surfaced against Dr. Gay over the past two weeks, driven by conservative activists and news outlets, just as she was under fire for failing to take a tougher stand against antisemitism during a tense congressional hearing convened by House Republicans this month.
The latest round of allegations have given strength to Dr. Gay’s critics and strained her supporters, while leaving some students and faculty members perplexed just as the campus empties for winter break.
“As a Harvard student, the whole scandal from beginning to end has been pretty embarrassing,” David Vega, a Harvard senior, said on Thursday. “I just think it’s a bit of a rough look for us.”
Mr. Vega, a classics and philosophy major in the midst of writing his thesis, said that he and his classmates had been closely watching the accusations of plagiarism against Dr. Gay, as well as the handling of antisemitism. Still, he said, it did not escape him that the accusations were being pressed by right-wing agitators.
The latest developments also raise questions about the Harvard Corporation, the insular governing board that hired Dr. Gay — a professor of government and African and African American studies, former dean and the first Black president of the university — after a relatively fast search last year. The board had just days ago cleared Dr. Gay of “research misconduct.”