Duke senior's commencement speech accused of being plagiarized from Harvard student's 2014 address

A graduating student at Duke University faced heavy criticism after delivering a commencement address that shared “striking similarities” with a Harvard University graduation speech from 2014.

During her commencement ceremony on May 8, speaker Priya Parkash called her school “the Duke nation” and said it could become its own country due to its various associations and landmarks.

Parkash, who is originally from Pakistan, said that “if Duke were to dig a moat around its perimeter and fill that with water, it could be its own tiny island nation, like Cuba or maybe even Sri Lanka.”

More from NextShark: Chinese-Australian Family's Home Vandalized By Racists for Second Day in a Row

Duke’s student newspaper The Chronicle would later point out that several metaphors and rhetoric from Parkash’s speech have similarities to those from a previous commencement address at Harvard.

During her speech for Harvard’s Class of 2014, Sarah Abushaar mentioned “the Harvard nation” and declared that her university could be its own country if it “shut its gates.”

The Chronicle highlighted other lines from the two speeches that are seemingly too identical to be mere coincidence.

More from NextShark: ‘She Had the Biggest Heart’: NYC Nurse Killed By Motorcycle While Biking Home

Abushaar, who was raised in Kuwait, said that her campus’ statue of John Harvard is Harvard’s own Statue of Liberty, while the Harvard Alumni Association is its tax collection agency. Abushaar also noted that her university’s endowment is “larger than more than half of the world's countries' GDPs.”

Meanwhile, Parkash compared Duke’s statue of James Buchanan Duke to Christ the Redeemer, the iconic statue of Jesus Christ in Rio de Janeiro. She also compared the Duke Alumni Association to a tax collection agency, noting that Duke’s endowment is “larger than the GDP of one third of the countries in the world.”

In both speeches, the speakers said their time at their respective universities gave them “diplomatic passports,” which helped them pass through U.S. immigration without any issues. Additionally, wearing university gear no longer made them a “national security threat” at the airport.