Harvard University Chief Diversity Officer Sherri Ann Charleston has been accused of plagiarism in a new complaint, which alleges that Charleston claimed credit for her husband’s work.
Harvard has received a complaint claiming that its chief diversity and inclusion officer has plagiarized some of her academic works, lifting large portions of text from without including quotation marks, and even taking credit for a study conducted by her own husband, according to a report by the Washington Free Beacon.
Dr. Claudine Gay, President of Harvard University, testifies before the House Education and Workforce Committee at the Rayburn House Office Building on December 05, 2023, in Washington, DC. The Committee held a hearing to investigate antisemitism on college campuses. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty)
The complaint reportedly cites 40 separate instances of plagiarism that span the entirety of Charleston’s publication record.
In her 2009 dissertation for the University of Michigan, for example, Charleston is accused of quoting or paraphrasing nearly a dozen scholars without proper attribution.
The complaint claims, “Parts of Charleston’s dissertation were published previously, word for word, by her advisor, Rebecca Scott, and others,” adding, “Charleston will lift whole sentences and paragraphs from other scholars’ work without quotation marks, then add a correct reference somewhere in the footnote ending the long paragraph.”
Interestingly, one of the allegations involves Charleston’s sole peer-reviewed article from 2014 — co-authored by her husband, LaVar Charleston — who is the deputy vice chancellor for DEI at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The study, also co-authored by Jerlando Jackson, is accused of having the same methods, findings, and even interview subjects as a 2012 study written solely by Lavar Charleston.
“The 2014 paper appears to be entirely counterfeit,” Peter Wood, head of the National Association of Scholars and a former associate provost at Boston University, said. “This is research fraud pure and simple.”
Notably, the allegations against Charleston come after Harvard’s recently ousted president, Claudine Gay, resigned following her own plagiarism scandals — which came to light after her failure to address antisemitism on campus in the wake of the October 7 Hamas attack against Israel, as well as her disastrous testimony on antisemitism during a December congressional hearing.
These are not the only academic issues to have been exposed recently at the Ivy League university.
As Breitbart News reported last week, top cancer researchers at Harvard have been accused of scientific fraud affecting 37 studies. The researchers are also accused of manipulating data images with simple methods such as copy-and-paste and Adobe Photoshop.
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