Harvard‘s Chief Diversity Officer Sherri Ann Charleston has been accused of plagiarism in her dissertation less than a month after former university President Claudine Gay resigned amid backlash over her response to antisemitism on campus and plagiarism allegations.
Charleston has been accused of lifting other scholars’ language without proper attribution in her 2009 dissertation, according to a Washington Free Beacon investigation based on an anonymous complaint filed to Harvard recently. The complaint also accuses Charleston of lifting work from her husband’s academic study. The Washington Examiner has not been able to investigate the claims independently.
The complaint contains 40 examples of plagiarism, accusing her of lifting text that was previously published by her adviser, Rebecca Scott, word for word. The complaint accuses Charleston of plagiarizing Scott’s “Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery” in her dissertation from 2009, “The Fruits of Citizenship: African Americans, Military Service, and the Cause of Cuba Libre,” which was submitted to the University of Michigan.
The complaint includes the following passage of Charleston’s dissertation: “On July 10, 1901, David J. Ryanes, a former slave born in Tennessee and long registered voter in New Orleans, presented himself to the supervisor of registration for the parish of Orleans, Jeremiah Gleason. Gleason blocked Ryanes from registering, invoking Article 197 of the 1898 constitution, which permitted registration only by those who could meet property or educational requirements, and those who had entered their names on the permanent registration books in 1898.”
Scott’s 2005 academic work reads: “On July 10, 1901, David J. Ryanes, a former slave born in Tennessee and long a registered voter in New Orleans, presented himself to the supervisor of registration for the parish of Orleans, Jeremiah Gleason. Gleason blocked Ryanes from registering, invoking Article 197 of the 1898 constitution, which permitted registration only by those who could meet property or educational requirements and those who had entered their names during 1898 on the ‘permanent’ registration list.”
Scott is a professor of history and law at the University of Michigan. While Charleston includes a footnote to Scott at the end of the passages, Jonathan Bailey, the founder of the website Plagiarism Today, told the Washington Free Beacon that the text needs to be paraphrased or placed in quotations.
In another instance, the complaint accuses Charleston of reusing her husband’s 2012 study, which was initially published by the Journal of Diversity in Higher Education, in her 2014 work published in the Journal of Negro Education, co-authored with her husband, LaVar Charleston. Her husband is the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s deputy vice chancellor for diversity and inclusion.
Peter Wood, who is the president of the National Association of Scholars, told the Washington Free Beacon that Charleston committed “research fraud.” The 2014 paper, also co-authored by Jerlando Jackson, allegedly includes “the same methods, findings, and description of survey subjects as the 2012 study,” according to the Washington Free Beacon.
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Charleston was named Harvard’s CDIO in 2020, becoming the first person to serve in the role. The allegations come after Gay resigned from her post on Jan. 2 after the Washington Free Beacon reported new plagiarism examples. Calls for Gay to resign were also based on her congressional testimony in December, in which three presidents of elite institutions (Gay, Sally Kornbluth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Liz Magill of the University of Pennsylvania) refused to say whether calls for genocide against Jewish people on campus violated the schools’ code of conduct.
The Washington Examiner reached out to Harvard, Harvard’s EDIB Office, Scott at the University of Michigan, and the University of Wisconsin–Madison for comment.
