What on earth has been going on at Harvard University? Apparently while their faculty gatekeeps who gets the credentials to be considered part of Haaaaahvud, that same faculty is busy copying other people’s work and lying their asses off.

The rise and fall of former Harvard president Claudine Gay had the effect of not just pushing for some accounting for academia’s anti-Semitism, but also for a more thorough examination of all of the published works and scholarship of these august leaders of academia. It turns out that Harvard has problems. It had already announced that one of its teaching hospitals, the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, would be retracting SIX papers, just last week.

The Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston has already initiated six retractions to papers and 31 others are in the process of being corrected, the hospital’s research integrity officer, Dr. Barrett Rollins, confirmed to the Harvard Crimson.

The corrections follow claims of data falsification leveled against the cancer institute’s CEO, Dr. Laurie Glimcher, chief operating officer Dr. William Hahn, director of the Clinical Investigator Research Program Dr. Irene Ghobrial and Jerome Lipper Multiple Myeloma Center program director Dr. Kenneth Anderson.

All four of the Dana-Farber researchers have faculty appointments with the Harvard Medical School.

News of the probe surfaced after a data sleuth, Sholto David, published a blog post earlier this month alleging irregularities in a total of 57 papers.

The exact nature of the retractions or corrections wasn’t immediately known, but the online sleuth had previously alleged elements of “data forgery” tied to discrepancies in images, including duplications of blots, bands and plots.

It seems that the powers-that-be reading these papers are suffering from terminal incuriosity, and holding undergrad students to a higher standards than the people they actually PAY TO TEACH. And now, thanks to an anonymous complaint, the next Harvard plagiarist appears to be their “Chief Diversity Officer,” Sherri Ann Charleston, who apparently wholesale lifted her own husband’s work in order to create a new paper – with the husband and another person as co-authors – and passed off the research done for the first paper as entirely new research for the second paper.

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.

Aaron Sibarium of the Washington Free Beacon, who was one of the journalists who delved into Claudine Gay’s academic scholarship and found multiple examples of plagiarism, got his hands on the anonymous complaint and then did a deep dive into the papers in question. It’s not looking good for Charleston.

“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.”

Experts who reviewed the allegations against Charleston said that they ranged from minor plagiarism to possible data fraud and warrant an investigation. Some also argued that Charleston had committed a more serious scholarly sin than Gay, Harvard’s former president, who resigned in January after she was accused of lifting long passages from other authors without proper attribution.

Papers that omit a few citations or quotation marks rarely receive more than a correction, experts said. But when scholars recycle large chunks of a previous study—especially its data or conclusions—without attribution, the duplicate paper is often retracted and can even violate copyright law.

That offense, known as duplicate publication, is typically a form of self-plagiarism in which authors republish old work in a bid to pad their résumés. Here, though, the duplicate paper added two new authors, Sherri Ann Charleston and Jerlando Jackson, who had no involvement in the original, letting them claim credit for the research and making them party to the con.

One-fifth of the 2014 paper, including two-thirds of its "findings" section, was published in the 2012 study, according to the complaint, and three interview responses are identical in both articles, suggesting they come from the same survey. pic.twitter.com/lJ8PHSqmCf

— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) January 30, 2024

Charleston is also accused of plagiarizing her thesis advisor, and at least three other historians. Remember, all of these violations would have gotten an undergraduate hauled in front of the Harvard College Honor Council, but apparently if you are a paid faculty member at Harvard, plagiarism is TOTALLY OKAY! At least, until you get caught by someone who is not Harvard affiliated and publishes your sins all over the internet.

The best part is that Sherri Ann Charleston, in her role as “chief diversity officer,” was on the Harvard search committee that eventually picked Claudine Gay. Imagine that.

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. https://t.co/ELkt86s7R3

— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) January 30, 2024

I’m thinking that maybe Harvard needs to change the college motto from “Veritas” – Latin for “truth” – to something that can reflect the modern attitudes of the faculty. Perhaps “mi trabajo es tu trabajo” – “my work is your work.” Or maybe if they wish to stick to Latin, they can go with “Decipiat” – which means “cheat.” Apparently, that is an acceptable way to push academic scholarship at Haaaahvud these days.

With this new revelation of academic fraud, one thing seems inescapable. The entire “DEI” structure is built on a house of cards, with one or two people conducting real research, and everyone else lifting it wholesale without any attribution. Is cheating okay in DEI, so long as the “right” people get to cheat? If so, places like Harvard are going to end up being sued by a lot of angry undergrads and happy lawyers.

Featured image via Ingfbruno on Wikimedia Commons, cropped, Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0 DEED)