A new complaint has been filed against Sherri Ann Charleston, the Chief Diversity Officer of Harvard University, alleging that she engaged in plagiarism. The complaint claims that Charleston plagiarized portions of her academic works by using text without proper quotation marks and even took credit for a study conducted by her husband.
According to the Washington Free Beacon, the complaint highlights 40 instances of plagiarism throughout Charleston’s publication record. One example cited is her 2009 dissertation for the University of Michigan, where she is accused of quoting or paraphrasing multiple scholars without giving them proper attribution.
The complaint claims, “Parts of Charleston’s dissertation were published previously, word for word, by her advisor, Rebecca Scott, and others,” adding, “Charleston will lift whole sentences and paragraphs from other scholars’ work without quotation marks, then add a correct reference somewhere in the footnote ending the long paragraph.”
It is worth noting that an intriguing accusation has been made regarding Charleston’s only peer-reviewed article from 2014. This article was co-authored by her husband, LaVar Charleston, who holds the position of deputy vice chancellor for DEI at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The allegation suggests that the study, which was also co-authored by Jerlando Jackson, shares identical research methods, outcomes, and even interview participants with a 2012 study solely authored by Lavar Charleston.
“The 2014 paper appears to be entirely counterfeit,” Peter Wood, head of the National Association of Scholars and a former associate provost at Boston University, said. “This is research fraud pure and simple.”
Significantly, Charleston is facing allegations following the resignation of Harvard’s former president, Claudine Gay, who stepped down amidst her own plagiarism scandals. These scandals were brought to light after her failure to address antisemitism on campus following the October 7 Hamas attack against Israel, as well as her problematic testimony on antisemitism during a congressional hearing in December.
It is important to note that these academic issues are not the only ones that have recently come to the forefront at the prestigious Ivy League university.
Just last week, it was reported that esteemed cancer researchers at Harvard have been accused of engaging in scientific fraud that has impacted 37 studies. These researchers are also alleged to have manipulated data images using simple techniques such as copy-and-paste and Adobe Photoshop.