Fresh off the Claudine Gay scandal, an even more obvious plagiarist seems to be embedded in the ranks of Harvard University. Sherri Ann Charleston is the storied university’s chief diversity officer. She was hired by the school in 2020 and was partially responsible for Gay’s ascension to the presidency. Charleston previously held a similar position at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where her title was chief affirmative action officer.

So you’re starting to get a picture already of what sort of academic Charleston is. She is ideologically focused on Racial Marxism initiatives, much like Claudine Gay. The next question is, how is her body of scholarly work? Is she actually an academic, or is she riding on the coattails of other people’s work and her own intersectional status?

An anonymous complaint has been filed against her alleging 40 examples of plagiarism in her body of academic work. Her dissertation, like Gay’s, was riddled with lack of attribution or proper use of quotation marks when referencing others.

Charleston’s worst offense, though, involved a 2014 paper (her only peer-reviewed work) in which she apparently plagiarized her husband. LaVar Charleston, a fellow academic of the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) infrastructure at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, wrote a 2012 study for the Journal of Diversity in Higher Education. He then teamed up with his wife and another academic, Jerlando Jackson, and basically republished the 2012 study through the Journal of Negro Education in 2014.

The 2014 study quoted the same interviewees as the original, and it even included the same findings. All in all, about 20% of the 2014 paper was ripped straight from the original 2012 study conducted by LaVar. What makes it worse is they cited the 2012 paper in the writings to undergird that paper’s main theory.

This type of academic fraud is called “duplicate publication” and is “typically a form of self-plagiarism in which authors republish old work in a bid to pad their résumés,” according to The Washington Free Beacon. “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.”

If these allegations are true, then not only Sherri Charleston but also her husband and Jerlando Jackson all enjoyed career boosts based on this fraudulent paper. However, holding academics to account is more than just calling out their academic malfeasance. One could perhaps start to conclude that intellectual dishonesty is rife throughout the DEI infrastructure within the higher education system.

The diversity, equity, and inclusion grift is a cancer on our academic institutions, though hardly the only one. There are several insidious aspects to DEI. First, it creates a culture within academia that lets DEI adherents get away with any and every intellectual malpractice and not be held to account. This has largely proven true until this point because DEI aligns politically with the rest of higher ed’s left-leaning agendas. Second, DEIers have a built-in get-out-of-jail-free card. If anyone calls them out, they can cry racism and accusers will usually back down. Third, and finally, DEI is a disservice to those academics of color who are in university positions because of their stellar academic work and incredible teaching.

DEI isn’t about merit but about making sure the playing field is equal. If individuals have to cheat to make the playing field “equal,” it’s justified in their minds. However, to the public at large, as well as to the scholars who didn’t take the racist DEI shortcut, this is a bad look.

Harvard is once again showing just how much it has fallen from its former academic glory by those it chooses to promote to leadership.