Academics in the Ivy League are falling like dominos since the plagiarism scandal helped take down Claudine Gay at Harvard. Now the Ivy League school has another high profile plagiarist allegedly in its midst.
This time, it's the person you'd most expect.
Who woulda thunk it? The DIVERSITY officer at Harvard, Sherrie Ann Charleston, apparently plagiarized and stole work to get her job.
Harvard University's chief diversity and inclusion officer, Sherri Ann Charleston, appears to have plagiarized extensively in her academic work, lifting large portions of text without quotation marks and even taking credit for a study done by another scholar — her own husband — according to a complaint filed with the university on Monday and a Washington Free Beacon analysis.
The complaint makes 40 allegations of plagiarism that span the entirety of Charleston's thin publication record
She hasn't written much. But what she has written ... well, she didn't even write much of that, according to this report.
Her 2009 dissertation at Michigan includes work from at least a dozen scholars who she quotes or paraphrases without proper attribution.
And then there's this laziness:
And in her sole peer-reviewed journal article — coauthored with her husband, LaVar Charleston, in 2014 — the couple recycle much of a 2012 study published by LaVar Charleston, the deputy vice chancellor for diversity and inclusion at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, framing the old material as new research.
She has one peer-reviewed work. Her husband worked on it with her, and they apparently attempted to pass it off as new work even though it was just recycled from her husband's previous work.
The two papers even report identical interview responses from those students. The overlap suggests that the authors did not conduct new interviews for the 2014 study but instead relied on LaVar Charleston's interviews from 2012 — a severe breach of research ethics, according to experts who reviewed the allegations.
They couldn't even conduct new interviews? They apparently repurposed them and lied about them.
Because they figured she wouldn't get caught?
Sherri Ann Charleston was the chief affirmative action officer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison before she joined Harvard in August 2020 as its first-ever chief diversity officer. In that capacity, Charleston served on the staff advisory committee that helped guide the university's presidential search process that resulted in the selection of former Harvard president Claudine Gay in December 2022, according to the Harvard Crimson.
Yeah, this is the lady that was on the committee that hired Gay the plagiarist.
It all makes perfect sense.
As for the severity of Charleston's plagiarism, it might be even more serious than Gay's.
Experts who reviewed the allegations against Charleston said that they ranged from minor plagiarism to possible data fraud and warrant an investigation. Some also argued that Charleston had committed a more serious scholarly sin than Gay, Harvard's former president, who resigned in January after she was accused of lifting long passages from other authors without proper attribution.
Papers that omit a few citations or quotation marks rarely receive more than a correction, experts said. But when scholars recycle large chunks of a previous study — especially its data or conclusions — without attribution, the duplicate paper is often retracted and can even violate copyright law.
The plagiarism scandal continues. And it's not slowing down anytime soon.
Call me what you will, but I am enjoying the fall from grace of American Academia.
It's so glorious to see.
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