With the world on the brink of all-out war in the Middle East and the 2024 election off to a rocky start with core constituencies in the Democratic Party more than unpleased with Joe Biden, it’s easy for us to overlook the insanity on college campuses. It’s received special attention since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war, where American academia got exposed for the radical, unspooled, and antisemitic facelift it’s undergone since the Obama presidency. Elite institutions, like MIT and Harvard, got engulfed by rabid antisemitism that would make Nazis blush.
We now know that calling for the genocide against Jews isn’t necessarily against the code against bullying and harassment at @Harvard and @Penn
— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) December 6, 2023
Let’s see how things are at MIT…
Turns lot that calling for genocide of Jews is OK as long as it’s only “public statements” pic.twitter.com/SY2cdEuhmC
To be a fully credentialed member of the Left, hating Jews and supporting the destruction of Israel is a requirement that reared its ugly head last October. Harvard’s now ex-president, Claudine Gay, was one of the three heads who couldn’t condemn calls for Jewish genocide on her campus last December. She couldn’t even say that it constituted harassment. Yet, that’s not what led to her resignation: her serial plagiarism marked her academic career. After dozens of examples were exposed in the media, Gay left the presidency. But she wasn’t the only one. Harvard now has another alleged plagiarist on campus: the university’s diversity officer (via Washington Free Beacon):
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 two papers even report identical interview responses from those students. 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 Harvard Crimson also covered the story. And yes, the same tired talking points were trotted again to defend these people who might have dabbled in academic fraud (via NBC News):
“The people behind these attacks have no interest in plagiarism,” said Erica Foldy, a professor at New York University’s Wagner Graduate School of Public Service who focuses on race and racism in organizations. Foldy added that conservative activists and groups attacking DEI efforts “have a political agenda.”
“It’s, sadly, kind of predictable. When there is progress toward equity and justice, then there are reactions against that. There’s always going to be a backlash, and that’s what we’re seeing.”
These people just don’t get it. First, it’s clear liberals don’t care about plagiarists infesting their ranks at Harvard or any school. When you pick this field as a career, you cannot plagiarize—it’s pretty simple. It is and should be a death sentence to any who commits it. You cannot become a police officer with a criminal record. This concept isn’t complex; the “equity and justice” talking points to defend this behavior only make you sound out of touch and deranged.
Will Charleston resign or get fired? She’s not the president, so maybe she can’t wait this out, but no top officer at a higher learning institution should remain at their post when busted for something like this.
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