There are more plagiarism charges afoot at Harvard, this time against the Ivy League school’s first-ever chief diversity officer.
According to a report in the Washington Free Beacon, a plagiarism and academic-fraud complaint has been filed against Sherri Ann Charleston that accuses her, among other things, of taking credit for work done by her husband.
The Free Beacon reported Tuesday that the complaint, filed anonymously this week, cites 40 examples of plagiarism, despite Mrs. Charleston’s not having an extensive publication record.
For example, the Free Beacon reported Tuesday citing the complaint, Mrs. Charleston’s 2009 dissertation “quotes or paraphrases nearly a dozen scholars without proper attribution.”
The complaint comes just a month after Claudine Gay, Harvard’s first Black female president, resigned over serial plagiarism charges.
Ms. Charleston was on an advisory committee that helped her Ms. Gay, the Harvard Crimson reported.
Perhaps most bizarrely, one of the claims of academic fraud against Mrs. Charleston says she repackaged earlier work by her husband in her sole peer-reviewed journal article.
A 2014 paper in the Journal of Negro Education, which Ms. Charleston co-authored with husband LaVar Charleston and Jerlando Jackson, “has the same methods, findings, and description of survey subjects as [Mr. Charleston’s] 2012 study, which involved interviews with black computer science students and was first published by the Journal of Diversity in Higher Education,” the Free Beacon wrote.
The conservative publication posted multiple graphics lining highlighted excerpts of the two articles side-by-side and cited academic-integrity experts as calling such similarity a serious ethical failure.
The Free Beacon said that while “duplicate publication” or “self-plagiarism” is often used to pad one’s own resume, it becomes a much more serious offense if, as here, the new piece adds authors “making them party to the con.”
“The 2014 paper appears to be entirely counterfeit,” Peter Wood, a former Boston University associate provost who led academic integrity probes there, told the publication. “This is research fraud pure and simple.”
Neither Charleston responded to the Free Beacon’s request for comment.