And there goes my head. I just painted the ceiling of my office, too.
Unbelievable! The Washington Free Beacon, in an exclusive (hey, you wouldn’t expect the New York Times, the Washington Post or the Boston Globe of “Spotlight” fame to do any investigative journalism that might embarrass a black, female DEI officer at Harvard, would you?), revealed that Harvard University’s 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 her own husband according to a complaint filed with the university yesterday. Charleston was the chief affirmative action officer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, then joined Harvard in August 2020 as its first chief diversity officer—you know, because the negligent death of an overdosing career crook in Minnesota meant that Harvard had to launch a new bureaucracy. And what to you know? Charleston contributed to the fateful selection of former Harvard president Claudine Gay!
Charleston’s Harvard bio describes her as “one of the nation’s leading experts in diversity,” whatever that means. Oh wait…it means that she’s aces at “translating diversity and inclusion research into practice for students, staff, researchers, postdoctoral fellows and faculty of color.”
The allegations against Charleston look irrefutable and damning. From the Free Beacon report:
The complaint makes 40 allegations of plagiarism that span the entirety of Charleston’s thin publication record. In her 2009 dissertation, submitted to the University of Michigan, Charleston quotes or paraphrases nearly a dozen scholars without proper attribution, the complaint alleges. 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. Through that sleight of hand, Sherri Ann Charleston effectively took credit for her husband’s work. The 2014 paper, which was also coauthored with Jerlando Jackson, now the dean of Michigan State University’s College of Education, and appeared in the Journal of Negro Education, has the same methods, findings, and description of survey subjects as the 2012 study, which involved interviews with black computer science students and was first published by the Journal of Diversity in Higher Education…
Here is one of several side-by-side graphics the Free Beacon includes:
“The two papers even report identical interview responses from those students,” the publication reports. “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….’
The Free Beacon’s experts were definitely not shy about condemning what they saw. “The 2014 paper appears to be entirely counterfeit,” said Peter Wood, the head of the National Association of Scholars and a former associate provost at Boston University, where he ran several academic integrity probes. “This is research fraud pure and simple.” Charleston appears to have stolen from Louis Pérez, a historian at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill; Alejandro de la Fuente, a historian at Harvard; Ada Ferrer, a historian at New York University, and, amazingly, her own thesis advisor, Rebecca Scott, among other scholars and researchers.
I can’t wait for Charleston to use the section of Claudine Gay’s recent op-ed where she blamed her demise on racism without giving Gay proper credit.
So far, Harvard hasn’t made any statement about its latest humiliation. Maybe it’s shopping for a brown paper bag that will fit over an entire university.
Ethics Alarms 
” you wouldn’t expect the New York Times, the Washington Post or the Boston Globe of “Spotlight” fame to do any investigative journalism that might embarrass a black, female DEI officer at Harvard, would you?”
Oddly enough, a google search for Sherri Ann Charleston plagiarism featured none of them, et al, yet features a Top Ten line-up of dastardly Righty Pounces sources.
PWS
There is a replication crisis happening across many fields of “science” (perhaps better called sciencism or pseudoscience).
Copying a study and presenting it as a new work sure accomplishes that repeatability objective of (pseudo)science(ism)!
Hmmm . . . maybe the study identifies as a new study confirming the original results, ¿no?
jvb
It replicates (heh) an observation I have heard about journalists. When someone consults a source and then reports on what he or she found out, that’s one story. Then other journalists will consult the same source and, surprise!, they get the same results. These other journalists will then state that the ‘independently verified’ the original story — by getting the original source to repeat the information provided.
It is not what ‘independently verified’ used to mean back on the bad old days when journalists used to actually research stories and double check their facts.
There is both a replication and a repeatability crisis. Not only can’t people repeat what has been published with the same results, they can’t even use the raw data from the first study to come up with the same results as that study. The causes are both fraud and incompetence. This one is definitely fraud, who wants to lay money that the data was interpreted properly?
I think a bigger scandal is the evidence of segregated, ‘diversity’ journals that (I suspect) only publish unpublishable garbage from ‘diverse’ faculty.
What is it with these academic AA/diversity hires…are they incapable of doing their own work? Can they not make it on their own merit without White Guilt suffocated Lefties putting a ham fist on the scale?
Whaddya bet there’s any number of seat-filling, deep six figure salaried, AA/diversity pedants, with tightening sphincters, currently sweating bullets while dreading that the fact-based Reality is on the trail and closing in?
PWS
Claudine Gay had the most important credential, she was from the right background. They don’t want highly qualified minority candidates that they can’t control. They need to take candidates with the ‘right’ background who are trustworthy, give them the credentials, and then put them in positions of power. Genuinely qualified people would be difficult to control.
Those most harmed by Gay and Charleston are the young Black PhD candidates and those newly minted. Like the Jackie Robinson analogy these high profile administrators had a duty to have unimpeachable qualifications.
Obviously, those selected to fill these diversity office positions are themselves diversity hires, which seems mandatory if the desired anti-White results are to be achieved.
I paraphrase Thomas More ” But for a quotation mark” you give up your integrity.
A number of my close friends are college professors and have been for some time. They tell me that it is virtually impossible for plagiarism like this to go unnoticed given the citation-checking software that has been in use for more than two decades. The Gay situation, and this one, immediately raise the question of how these papers made it through academic review. I think most of us know the answer.
Now, carry this same mindset into more dangerous regimes, such as aircraft maintenance or operation. I am aware of military pilots whose instructors were ordered to pass them on check rides after a failing performance. To paraphrase a movie about flying, “Our DEI policies are writing checks that our culture/economy can’t cover.”
Probably worth a separate essay. The DEI theology is forcing unqualified people to cheat in order to get the benefit of it, completing a vicious cycle.
And forcing the people evaluating them to ignore deficiencies in order to keep their jobs…
What hasn’t been widely noticed is that Charlston also put Jerlando Jackson as an author along with his wife on that 2014 paper. Jackson is now the Dean of the College of Education at Michigan State.