Allegations of plagiarism have been made against another Harvard administrator, following not long after the Ivy League school’s president resigned amid a similar controversy.
An anonymous complaint made against Harvard University’s chief diversity and inclusion officer (CDO), Sherri Ann Charleston, claims that she has committed roughly 40 acts of plagiarism over the course of her academic career. Charleston came on as the institution’s very first CDO in 2020 after serving as the chief affirmative action officer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UWM).
The letter sent to Harvard, UWM, and the University of Michigan (UM), Charleston’s alma mater, claimed that her 2009 dissertation failed to cite around a dozen scholars whose works appear verbatim or paraphrased. Meanwhile, a peer-reviewed journal article she coauthored with Jerlando F.L. Jackson and her husband, LaVar Charleston, in 2014 allegedly passed off interviews conducted by the latter in 2012 as new material.
Neither Charleston nor Harvard’s Office for Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging, where she is employed, has responded publicly to the allegations.
Colleen Mastony, a UM spokesperson responded to a request for comment from The Harvard Crimson, a newspaper run by Harvard undergraduates, saying, “The university is committed to fostering and upholding the highest ethical standards in research and scholarship” and could not comment on the allegations of misconduct in accordance with school policy.
Academic integrity at Harvard University has been called into question several times of late.
The school’s former president, Claudine Gay, stepped down in early January after being accused of inadequately citing sources in her 1997 dissertation as well as allegedly minimizing antisemitism on campus in the aftermath of Hamas’ attack on Israel in October 2023, as previously covered in The Dallas Express.
Just a few weeks later, four top researchers at Harvard’s teaching hospital, the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, were called out for allegedly falsifying data, as reported in The Dallas Express. The allegations could affect dozens of papers, with six already being retracted and another 31 being corrected.
