Harvard’s diversity chief hit with 40 plagiarism accusations weeks after Harvard University president Claudine Gay resigned over plagiarism accusations
Numerous accusations of plagiarism connected to the top diversity and inclusion officer of Harvard University have been made against her academic work.
On Monday, January 29, the university received an anonymous complaint that, according to the Washington Free Beacon, listed at least forty instances of purported plagiarism by Sherri Ann Charleston from 2009, a decade prior to her admission to Harvard.
The claims, which include failing to properly credit other academics’ work and neglecting to mention it in footnotes, were made only a few weeks after Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard University, resigned from her position of authority due to scandal surrounding her handling of antisemitism on campus and accusations that she had plagiarised work.
According to the Beacon, which conducted its own analysis of the complaint, Charleston allegedly quoted or paraphrased a dozen scholars without adequate attribution in her 2009 dissertation at the University of Michigan.
The complaint also alleges Charleston ultimately took credit for a study that her husband, LaVar Charleston — currently the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s deputy vice chancellor for diversity and inclusion — wrote in 2012.
That alleged instance of plagiarism came after Charleston rehashed large portions of her husband’s paper in a peer-reviewed article they co-authored in 2014, according to the complaint.
The 2014 article, published in the Journal of Negro Education, had the same findings, method and survey subject descriptions included in Charleston’s husband’s original paper, the complaint charges.
“You cannot just republish an old paper as if it is a new paper,” Lee Jussim, a social psychologist at Rutgers University, told the outlet. “If you do, that is not exactly plagiarism; it’s more like fraud.”
The fresh allegations are just the latest claims leveled against Harvard-affiliated researchers or employees after the Ivy League school’s president stepped down from her prestigious post following weeks of controversy over her own academic record.
Gay’s academic career came under intense scrutiny after she was hit with nearly 50 accusations of plagiarism or inadequate citation.