Just weeks after former Harvard President Claudine Gay resigned in the face of plagiarism allegations, another Black woman at the Massachusetts-based university is allegedly in the hot seat.
On Monday, an anonymous complaint was reportedly filed against Harvard’s Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer Sherri A. Charleston, claiming to cite 40 separate counts of plagiarism on her part. The 37-page complaint cites 28 instances of plagiarism in Charleston’s 2009 University of Michigan doctoral dissertation, accusing her of lifting “whole sentences and paragraphs from other scholars’ work without quotation marks.”
The complaint also claims Charleston committed 12 counts of plagiarism in a peer-reviewed article for the Journal of Negro Education that she co-authored with her husband, LaVar, who is deputy vice chancellor for diversity and inclusion at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Jerlando F.L. Jackson, Dean of Michigan State University’s College of Education, in 2014.
Furthermore, the complaint alleged that Charleston used findings from her husband’s research in 2012 and presented it as new.
According to U.S. Dept of Health and Human Services Office of Research Integrity, Charleston’s failure to credit the 2012 study is an example of duplicate publication, “when a student submits a whole paper, or a substantial portion of a paper that had been previously submitted and graded in another course to fulfill a requirement of a new course,” and those actions can be a violation of copyright law.
“The 2014 paper appears to be entirely counterfeit,” said Peter Wood, head of the National Association of Scholars, in an interview the Washington Free Beacon. He added, “This is research fraud, pure and simple.”
Charleston came to Harvard in August 2020 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she was assistant vice provost for diversity, equity, and inclusion and chief affirmative action officer. She is Harvard’s first chief diversity officer and was a member of the committee that tapped Claudine Gay for her position as president of the university.