Harvard DEI Chief Accused of Plagiarism

People walk through Harvard Yard at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts on December 12, 2023. Harvard University's president, under fire over testimony she gave about anti-Semitism on campus, will remain in her job after a meeting of the institution's governing body issued a statement backing her on December 12, 2023. Photo by Joseph Prezioso / AFP

Harvard University could be facing a fresh plagiarism scandal after an earlier one led to the resignation of the institution’s president.

A new complaint against the university’s chief diversity and inclusion officer alleges she lifted significant portions of text in her academic work without quotation marks.

Sherri Ann Charleston, a historian, was named Harvard’s chief diversity and inclusion officer in 2020. A complaint obtained by the Washington Free Beacon alleges that her doctoral dissertation contains “a lot of other scholars’ language verbatim” with no quotation marks, only references in footnotes.

“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,” the complaint reads.

The 37-page complaint compares passages from Ms. Charleston’s 2009 doctoral dissertation at the University of Michigan, entitled “The Fruits of Citizenship: African Americans, Military Service, and the Cause of Cuba Libre, 1868-1920,” to the original passages from reference texts used in the paper.

While the dissertation passages highlighted in the complaint are rarely identical to the reference texts, they do bear a striking similarity—and some sentence fragments are exactly the same.

Harvard University did not return a request for confirmation of receipt of the complaint. The university did not comment on the allegations nor its planned response to them.

Ms. Charleston’s Harvard biography describes her as “one of the nation’s leading experts in diversity and higher education.”

More Details

The complaint makes about 40 comparisons between Ms. Charleston’s dissertation and reference texts. The comparisons suggest that the lack of quotation marks applied to very similarly-worded passages between the dissertation and reference texts may amount to plagiarism.

For example, the first comparison cited in the complaint compares a passage written by Ms. Charleston in her dissertation to a referenced—but not quoted—fragment from the book “Degrees of Freedom,” written by Rebecca J. Scott, Ms. Charleston’s thesis adviser, who’s listed on the title page of the dissertation as one of the members of Ms. Charleston’s doctoral committee.

“Ten days before, Ferrer and his men had also set up camp at the Santa Ursula plantation, east of the city of Santiago. Almost immediately the owner expressed outrage at what he saw as their taking his property and Ferrer’s abuse of his employees. *94,” reads the passage from Ms. Charleston’s dissertation. The “94” reference at the end of the fragment points to a footnote, “*94 Scott, Degrees, 175.”

The complaint then cites the reference passage from “Degrees” that is marked by footnote 94.

“Ferrer and his men set up camp on November 4 on the Santa Ursula plantation east of the city of Santiago. Almost immediately the owner expressed outrage at what he saw as their taking of his property and Ferrer’s abuse of his employees,” reads the reference passage, per the complaint.

While not identical word-for-word, there’s significant overlap in the two texts. The remaining 40 or so comparisons made in the complaint are similar in nature.

Harvard’s plagiarism policy states that students “should always take great care to distinguish their own ideas and knowledge from information derived from sources” and that “quotations must be placed properly within quotation marks and must be cited fully. In addition, all paraphrased material must be acknowledged completely.”

The latest development comes after former Harvard President Claudine Gay resigned after being accused of plagiarism.

Claudine Gay, president of Harvard University, testifies before the House Education and Workforce Committee at the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington on Dec. 5, 2023. Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

Claudine Gay Resignation

Ms. Gay, who was Harvard’s shortest-serving president, resigned on Jan. 2 after mounting plagiarism allegations.

Harvard acknowledged that she plagiarized in her dissertation and other papers, though the university said in a Dec. 12 statement that its analysis found “no violation of Harvard’s standards for research misconduct” and reaffirmed its confidence that Ms. Gay “is the right leader.”

Ms. Gay said in a letter that she had made the decision the quit because it had become “clear that it is in the best interests of Harvard for me to resign so that our community can navigate this moment of extraordinary challenge with a focus on the institution rather than any individual.”

She did not take responsibility for the plagiarism allegations and, despite the resignation, Ms. Gay remains a Harvard faculty member.

Besides plagiarism allegations, Ms. Gay also faced criticism for a spate of alleged anti-Semitic incidents on campus in the wake of Israel’s military operation in Gaza after operatives of the Hamas terror group killed hundreds of Israelis in border communities.

On Oct. 8, the day after the Hamas attack, dozens of student groups at Harvard co-signed a controversial letter that accused the Israeli government of being responsible for “all unfolding violence.”

Hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman, a Harvard graduate, criticized the way Ms. Gay handled the student groups’ letter and what he described in a Nov. 4 letter to Ms. Gay was a “growing number of anti-Semitic incidents on campus, as we wait for you and the University to act.”

“For the past four weeks since the horrors of October 7th, I have been in dialogue with members of the corporation board, other alumni, as well as students and faculty sharing and comparing our concerns about the growing number of anti-Semitic incidents on campus,” Mr. Ackman wrote

“Four weeks after the barbaric terrorist acts of October 7th, I have lost confidence that you and the University will do what is required,” he continued.

“Jewish students are being bullied, physically intimidated, spat on, and in several widely-disseminated videos of one such incident, physically assaulted,” he added.

DEI in Focus

Mr. Ackman also argued that the problem went beyond anti-Semitism.

In a Jan. 4 post on X, where he has 1.1 million followers, Mr. Ackman said he had concluded that anti-Semitism was not the core of the problem but the “canary in the coal mine” at Harvard and other academic institutions, where there have been reports of a rise in anti-Jewish sentiment in recent months.

“I came to learn that the root cause of antisemitism at Harvard was an ideology that had been promulgated on campus, an oppressor/oppressed framework, that provided the intellectual bulwark behind the protests, helping to generate anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hate speech and harassment,” he said, adding that he had been “ignorant” about the true nature of DEI, “a powerful movement that has not only pervaded Harvard, but the educational system at large.”

DEI stands for diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Mr. Ackman said he had come to understand through research that DEI “was not what I had naively thought these words meant.”

“According to DEI, capitalism is racist, Advanced Placement exams are racist, IQ tests are racist, corporations are racist, or in other words, any merit-based program, system, or organization which has or generates outcomes for different races that are at variance with the proportion these different races represent in the population at large is by definition racist under DEI’s ideology,” he wrote.

Bill Ackman, CEO of Pershing Square Capital, speaks at the Wall Street Journal Digital Conference in Laguna Beach, Calif., on Oct. 17, 2017. Mike Blake/Reuters

He then called on members of Harvard’s governing board to step down, saying it “should not be principally comprised of individuals who share the same politics and views about DEI.”

Mr. Ackman also called on Harvard’s Office of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging (OEDIB) to be dissolved.

“The [OEDIB] should be shut down, and the staff should be terminated,” he said, noting in his Nov. 4 letter that several members of Harvard told him that OEDIB was “an important contributing factor to the problem.”

Harvard did not respond to a request for comment on Mr. Ackman’s remarks.