Harvard is now back on hot water just a few weeks after the disgraceful exit of Harvard President Claudine Gay over a plagiarism issue.
The Washington Free Beacon earlier reported that Harvard University’s DEI Chief Sherri A. Charleston is now facing 40 counts of plagiarism complaint on her academic work.
The anonymous complaint cites 28 instances of plagiarism on Charleston’s doctoral dissertation at the University of Michigan and 12 allegations against a 2014 article she wrote in the Journal of Negro Education, which she co-wrote with her husband LaBar J. Charleston and Michigan State University College of Education Dean Jerlando F.L. Jackson.
The complaint goes back a decade before she became Harvard’s officer, citing that the “results” in the 2014 article she co-wrote with her husband are “practically identical” to the “major findings” of a 2012 article made by LaVar Charleston, who serves as University of Wisconsin-Madison’s DEI deputy vice-chancellor, in the Journal of Diversity of Higher Education.
“The two articles contained almost identical descriptions of interviewee demographics,” reported Harvard Crimson.
Additionally, according to the complaint, Harvard’s Charleston failed to attribute the interviews in her article to the 2012 article of her husband.
Furthermore, the 2014 article lifted more phrases from the 2012 article “without proper attribution,” as stated in the complaint.
The Free Beacon also found the DEI chief to quote or paraphrase scholars without crediting them in her 2009 dissertation at the University of Michigan.
According to Lee Jusim, a social psychologist at Rutgers University, “You cannot just republish an old paper as if it is a new paper. If you do, that is not exactly plagiarism; it’s more like fraud.”
Steve McGuire, a former political theory professor at Villanova University affirmed that Charleston’s action did qualify as plagiarism.
Her 2009 thesis is outright plagiarism, as she copied a sentence from Eric Arnesen’s 1991 book Waterfront Workers of New Orleans: Race, Class, and Politics, 1863-1923, without citing Arnesen’s work or using quotation marks.
She also replicated words from Louis Perez, a historian at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Alejandro de la Fuente, a Harvard historian, and Ada Ferrer, a historian at New York University.
This latest development follows recent news that a Harvard University-affiliated teaching hospital seeks to retract or edit dozens of papers written by its top researchers, including its CEO, after a probe on data falsification.
The investigation comes just weeks after the Ivy League’s president stepped down after being exposed as a plagiarist.
