(This article has been updated to include a new case of plagiarism at another elite university.)
The problems in the academy are deep and wide. By now everyone knows that when it comes to ideological diversity, secular colleges and universities dictatorially run by leftists want none of it.
Out of one side of their mouths they proclaim, inauthentically but ear-piercingly, their fealty to diversity, inclusivity, and tolerance, while out of the other side they whisper to each other in their offices during their many non-working hours that they must keep control of faculty. No dissenters included or tolerated. Leftists in the secular academy grip their ideological monopoly with white knuckles—er I mean bloodless knuckles—knuckles bedecked in brass for clobbering dissenters.
Their deceitful inauthenticity extends beyond protestations of love for the marginalized (well, except for those pesky conservative Christians) and faux-commitments to “honor all voices.” As academic scandal after scandal has revealed, their ideological tomfoolery leads ineluctably to academic fakery. In other words, dumb ideas bear rotten, maggoty fruit.
The ideological tomfoolery du jour relates to skin color, sex, and “gender,” as manifest in an obsession with Critical Race Theory, the diversion of funds to create offices of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), and in hiring practices shaped by affirmative action, all of which purport to solve diverse social ills via racist practices packaged as anti-racist practices.
In saner times, the phenomenon now redefined by leftists in Orwellian fashion as a commitment to “diversity” was known by the less benign term “tokenism.” Prior to our post-sanity era, tokenism was terrible, horrible, no good, and very bad. Today tokenism is the way to go. Merit? Pish Posh. Merit is a meritless concept socially constructed by privileged racists with waaay too little melanin. Or so the people in power now say.
DEI scamsters both promote and profit professionally from DEI snake oil as they sail uncritically through the tokenism hiring process, but almost daily their deceptions are being exposed. The most recent scamster to be exposed is Columbia University Irving Medical Center’s (CUIMC) chief DEI officer Alade McKen.
The Washington Free Beacon reports that “approximately a fifth of McKen’s 163-page dissertation” was plagiarized. Perhaps most hilariously, in addition to cribbing from scholars, McKen allegedly cribbed from Wikipedia. According to the Free Beacon, “McKen plagiarized over 30 authors total, not including Wikipedia.”
Hiding kinda, sorta in plain sight on CUIMC website is a paragraph that may explain how McKen’s plagiarism was not discovered prior to his hiring:
While Departments/Schools will normally use the procedures described in its Standard Search and Evaluation Procedures to recruit faculty members, a hiring unit may seek a waiver from these procedures for some types of recruitments. If the candidate in question is an outstanding woman or minority scholar, whose successful recruitment would bring the composition of the unit’s faculty into closer alignment with the composition of the national pool of qualified candidates, then the unit may apply for a waiver, and also seek funds from CUIMC. (emphasis added)
Academia is learning the hard way that bad ideas have bad consequences.
Like the inept and decrepit Biden administration, it appears that Harvard University reached the zenith of tokenism by promoting to president a person with an undistinguished academic career but who is female (cha-ching) and black (cha-ching, cha-ching). If only Claudine Gay were a lesbian, she would have been ideal.
Unfortunately for Harvard and Gay, she was also a plagiarist, whose resignation letter provided further evidence of her lack of integrity: She neither admitted her plagiarism, nor apologized for it.
Au contraire, she feigned distress that doubt has been “cast” on her commitment to “upholding scholarly rigor” which she describes as among the “bedrock values that are fundamental to who” she is.
Another of her bedrock values seems to be targeting black male professors for career destruction, most notably the brilliant economist Ronald Fryer. In a short documentary about the attempted professional lynching of Fryer, Gay is described as a “silky smooth corporate operator” whose “signature accomplishment” was a “Harvard-wide inequality initiative.”
In an opinion piece in Newsweek, author, former law school professor, and Harvard law school graduate W. F. Twyman Jr. wrote that when analyzing “research into the killings of unarmed Black men in Houston, Fryer’s research found no racial disparities.” Academic honesty that defies leftist dogma inevitably incurs the wrath of the tolerant:
He made the mistake of undercutting the racial narrative that the Left has adopted, and as a result, Gay did her best to remove all of his academic privileges, coordinating a witch hunt against him. Fryer survived Gay’s crusade of discharge but Fryer’s lab was shut down, his reputation tarnished.”
One month after Gay resigned, Harvard’s Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer Sherri A. Charleston was alleged to have committed dozens of acts of plagiarism. According to the Harvard Crimson,
The complaint … alleged 28 instances of plagiarism in Charleston’s doctoral dissertation at the University of Michigan and 12 allegations against a 2014 article in the Journal of Negro Education, co-authored with her husband LaVar J. Charleston and Michigan State University College of Education Dean Jerlando F.L. Jackson.
Two weeks after the Charleston kerfuffle, on Feb. 13, 2024, the Harvard Crimson reported that a third Harvard administrator, Title IX Coordinator Shirley Greene in Harvard’s Office for Gender Equity, was “accused of 42 instances of plagiarism in her 2008 University of Michigan dissertation.”
Apparently, in Harvard’s mad scramble to diversify, the administration realized the school had a gaping hole it needed to fill. Historically, the school hadn’t hired nearly enough plagiarists. No worries. Problem has now been solved.
But since leftists are practiced at the wily art of Newspeak, when they plagiarize, it’s described as “inartful or incomplete paraphrasing,” “generic expressions and wordings frequently used,” “duplicative language,” “sloppiness,” “technical attribution issues,” “careless cutting and pasting” and “repeating banal phrases.”
Of course, plagiarism in higher education is not a new problem, but many believe it has been exacerbated by the DEI movement that values skin color, sex, and “gender” above all more academically relevant criteria.
In a myopic and frantic quest to hire and promote the “right” people—namely, black, brown, female, cross-dressing, and homosexual people–criteria like academic achievement, rigor, and honesty have been shoved to the back of the school bus.
While leftists in the academy and elsewhere self-righteously lecture Americans on what constitutes the good, the true, the beautiful, and the just, the malignancy of their ideas and the destructiveness of their actions are almost daily exposed.
When will parents stop coveting diplomas from institutions run by elitists with hubris but lacking in wisdom and integrity? Leftists who judge people by the color of their skin cannot cultivate character in young men and women. Heck, leftists don’t even know what men and women are.