Category: Plagiarist

At Harvard, Another Case of Plagiarism

No Harvard student so guilty of plagiarism would be allowed to remain.

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SEE: https://www.frontpagemag.com/at-harvard-another-case-of-plagiarism; republished below in full, unedited, for informational, educational, & research purposes:


There was Claudine Gay, the onetime Harvard President, who was a serial plagiarist, beginning with her dissertation and extending through seven of her eleven brief papers (she has no book), only one of which was peer-reviewed, that make up her scandalously small list of publications. Her extensive plagiarism was the main reason she was forced to resign her position. For reasons that remain unknown, she continues to be paid her her former presidential salary of $900,000; possibly those now in charge at Harvard wanted to keep her from accusing the university of “racism,” and letting her keep that preposterous salary was the best way to keep her quiet. More on Gay’s plagiarism can be found here, here and here.

There was Sherri Ann Charleston, the chief diversity officer at Harvard, who was discovered to have plagiarized extensively in her dissertation and handful of academic papers. So far she has managed to hold onto her job. I suspect Harvard administrators do not want to force the resignation of a second black woman found to be a serial plagiarist so soon after Gay’s demotion. More on Charleston’s plagiarism can be found here.

And now a third serial plagiarist in the Harvard administration has just been found. She is Shirley Greene, a Title IX coordinator affiliated with the Office for Gender Equity. According to the indefatigable Christopher Rufo, Greene claims to have worked to advance “Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging,” without any evidence of how she has been doing this, and once led a panel on “The Past, Present, and Future of Juneteenth” with the DEI department. Hmm. There doesn’t seem to be much there there. She has just been found to have plagiarized at least 40 passages in her dissertation. More on Shirley Greene, the latest — but almost certainly not the last — serial plagiarist to be uncovered at Harvard, can be found here: “Harvard’s Plagiarism Problem Multiplies,” by Christopher F. Rufo, City Journal, February 22, 2024:

…Now allegations have emerged that another Harvard DEI [Diversity, Equity, Inclusion] administrator, Shirley Greene, of Harvard Extension School, plagiarized more than 40 passages of her 2008 dissertation, “Converging Frameworks: Examining the Impact of Diversity-Related College Experiences on Racial/Ethnic Identity Development.” According to the Harvard directory, Greene is a Title IX coordinator affiliated with the Office for Gender Equity. She has worked to advance “Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging,” and hosted a panel on “The Past, Present, and Future of Juneteenth” in conjunction with the DEI department. (Harvard did not respond to an emailed request for comment.)…

In the most serious instance, Greene lifts directly from Janelle Lee Woo’s 2004 dissertation, “Chinese American Female Identity.” In two significant sections, Greene copied words, phrases, passages, and almost entire paragraphs verbatim, without proper attribution or quotation. She also copies most of an entire table on “Racial/Ethnic Identity Development Models,” a foundational concept in the paper, without acknowledging the source.

We can examine one representative paragraph that illustrates the brazen nature of this adaptation. In her paper, Woo writes:

Stage 2, White Identification (WI), is a direct consequence of the increase in significant contact between the individual and white society. This stage entails the sense of being different from other people and not belonging anywhere. The individual’s self-perception changes from neutral/positive to negative, and she begins to internalize the belief systems of white society. Consequently, the individual does not question what it means to be Asian American. The individual alienates herself from other Asian Americans, while simultaneously experiencing social alienation from her white peers. Only when the individual seeks to “acquire a political understanding of [her] social status” (Kim 1981: 138) does she enter into the next stage.

Here is Greene’s version, with the duplicated portions of Woo and Woo’s citations italicized:

White Identification (WI), is a direct consequence of the increase in significant contact between the individual and white society. Individuals in this stage have the sense of being different from other people and not belonging anywhere. Their self-perception changes from neutral/positive to negative and they begin to internalize the belief systems of white society. Consequently, the individual fails to question what it means to be Asian American and alienates themselves from other Asian Americans, while simultaneously experiencing social alienation from their white peers. In order to move to the next stage, the individual must acquire a political understanding of social status.

The complaint, which has been sent to Harvard’s research-integrity officials, features more than three dozen other examples of Greene allegedly lifting language from other scholars, without proper attribution or quotations….

What will Harvard do? Does it want to uphold its own rules on plagiarism or ignore them?

No Harvard student who was found to be guilty of as much plagiarism as Gay, Charleston, and Greene have been would be allowed to remain at the university. More than a month after her plagiarism was laid bare, why hasn’t Charleston been fired? And what will happen to Shirley Greene? Anything? Nothing?

Sherri Ann Charleston, Diversity and Inclusion Head at Harvard, and Plagiarist

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SEE: https://www.jihadwatch.org/2024/02/sherri-ann-charleston-diversity-and-inclusion-head-at-harvard-and-plagiarist#; republished below in full, unedited, for informational, educational, & research purposes:

Did Sherri Ann Charleston really think she would get away with it? After the plagiarism scandal brought down her friend and protector Claudine Gay, she must have wondered if anyone would start to look into her own “scholarship.” And now the Washington Free Beacon, that samaritan organization, has done exactly that. Sherri Ann Charleston turns out to be even more of a plagiarist than Claudine Gay. Will Harvard do the right thing, and fire her for her violation of the most basic of academic norms, or brazen it out, and hope that eventually people will lose interest? What the academic world most needs now is a a dozen Journals of Plagiarism Research, that will investigate complaints made by those who claim their work has been plagiarized, and publish its findings, a sure way to terrify into silence would-be plagiarists incapable of doing their own work.

More on Sherri Ann Charleston, the Head of Diversity and Inclusion at Harvard, can be found here: “Not Just Claudine Gay. Harvard’s Chief Diversity Officer Plagiarized and Claimed Credit for Husband’s Work, Complaint Alleges,” by Aaron Sibarium, Washington Free Beacon, January 30, 2024:

It’s not just Claudine Gay. 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. 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….

The school is also facing an ongoing congressional probe over its handling of antisemitism and its response to the plagiarism allegations against Gay, which Harvard initially sought to suppress with legal saber-rattling. Half of Gay’s published work contained plagiarized material, ranging from single sentences to entire paragraphs, with some of the most severe lifts coming in her dissertation. Though Gay stepped down as president on January 2, she remains a tenured faculty member drawing a $900,000 annual salary….

It is enraging that Gay continues to receive that huge presidential salary. No one has offered an explanation as to why that was done. Was it a bribe, to keep Gay from claiming some kind of “racism” was involved in her forced resignation? And how long will she continue to be paid such a grotesque and unmerited sum?

Charleston also lifted language from Louis Pérez, an historian at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill; Alejandro de la Fuente, an historian at Harvard; and Ada Ferrer, an historian at New York University, among other scholars.

Charleston cites each source in a footnote but omits quotation marks around language copied verbatim. The omissions violate Harvard’s Guide to Using Sources, a document produced for incoming students, which states that quotation marks are required when “you copy language word for word.”…

The main difference between the papers is a long section in the 2014 article about “culturally responsive pedagogy theory,” which the authors say their findings support. Both articles are littered with the tropes of progressive scholarship, including a disclaimer about “positionality”—the authors assure readers that they reflected on their own “racial, gender, and socioeconomic status”—and a lament that computer science is a “White male-dominated field.”

Both also criticize the idea that “computing sciences is for nerds, only for White people, [and] only for geniuses.”

Such language is typical of the diversity initiatives Charleston oversees. Since 2020, her office has pumped out a stream of materials that bemoan the “weaponization of whiteness,” discuss the ins and outs of “white fragility,” and urge students to “call out” their peers for “harmful words.” One message, signed by Charleston herself, was titled “A Call to Dismantle Intersecting Oppressions.”

“We must continue to work against systematic oppression in all its forms—racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, and more,” she wrote….

How appropriately diverse and inclusive this Head of Diversity and Inclusivity turns out to be, save for whites, of course, whose mere being creates “systematic oppression in all its forms.”

But let’s not lose sight of the main problem: will Sherri Ann Charleston get away with her many examples of plagiarism? Will her recycling of her husband’s paper of 2012, presenting it as new research — which goes beyond plagiarism but, as Peter Wood says, constitutes academic fraud — be enough to sink her career at Harvard, or will Harvard itself insist on keeping her on, and becoming, even more than it has already, the laughingstock of the academic world?