Well, Harvard
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Not Just Claudine Gay. Harvard's Chief Diversity Officer Plagiarized and Claimed Credit for Husband's Work, Complaint Alleges
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.
C’mon, Man, what’s a husband for?
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 2014 paper appears to be entirely counterfeit," said Peter Wood, the head of the National Association of Scholars and a former associate provost at Boston University, where he ran several academic integrity probes. "This is research fraud pure and simple."
Sherri Ann Charleston was the chief affirmative action officer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison before she joined Harvard in August 2020 as its first-ever chief diversity officer. In that capacity, Charleston served on the staff advisory committee that helped guide the university's presidential search process that resulted in the selection of former Harvard president Claudine Gay in December 2022, according to the Harvard Crimson.
A historian and attorney by training, Charleston has taught courses on gender studies at the University of Wisconsin, according to her Harvard bio, which describes her as "one of the nation's leading experts in diversity."
Prediction: Harvard won’t dare to fire two affirmative action hires in a row, so this will blow over.
