Harvard University’s chief diversity and inclusion officer has been hit with dozens of plagiarism allegations tied to her academic work.
The university was handed an anonymous complaint on Monday, Jan. 29, listing at least 40 examples of alleged plagiarism by Sherri Ann Charleston dating back to 2009 — a decade before she joined Harvard, the Washington Free Beacon reported.
The allegations, which include failing to properly cite other scholars’ work and not referencing them in footnotes, come just weeks after Harvard University president Claudine Gay resigned from her top post after becoming embroiled in a scandal over charges that she plagiarized work and her handling of antisemitism on campus.
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.
