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

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?