The DEI police and the cheaters

Pardon the redundancy

As math, English and history get pushed out the door in academia, DEI in all its forms is being welcomed in. Often the welcome takes the form of overt administrative bullying (“Cut out your racist/sexist microaggressions or face DEI court”), but other times it presents itself as “scholarship.” Last time I looked, scholarship was original research and thinking designed to increase the sum of human knowledge.

What this tells you is that the last time I looked was about 1959.

The City Journal has a depressing story about the intersection of DEI and “scholarship” at one of America’s leading universities, Harvard. Let me get right to the point: Harvard’s DEI “scholarship” turns out to be plagiarism, that is, copying someone else’s work without attribution. Obviously this does not add to the sum of human knowledge. It does, however, add to the sum of elite university cheating.

Is anyone still wondering why more and more serious people are questioning the value of sending their kids to college? It’s not just the cost. Indeed, for some of us, it’s not mainly the cost. It’s the garbage being dumped into their minds.

For those of you thinking that the problem was just Claudine Gay — copying other people’s stuff in between her attempts to “contextualize” murdering Jews — read on.

At the beginning of the year, [Ms.] Gay resigned as university president following a plagiarism scandal. Weeks later, the Washington Free Beacon published a report indicating that Harvard’s chief diversity officer, Sherri Ann Charleston, apparently plagiarized passages in multiple academic papers.

Now allegations have emerged that another Harvard DEI administrator, Shirley Greene, of Harvard Extension School, plagiarized more than 40 passages of her 2008 dissertation, “Converging Frameworks: Examining the Impact of Diversity-Related College Experiences on Racial/Ethnic Identity Development.” According to the Harvard directory, Greene is a Title IX coordinator affiliated with the Office for Gender Equity. She has worked to advance “Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging,” and hosted a panel on “The Past, Present, and Future of Juneteenth” in conjunction with the DEI department. (Harvard did not respond to an emailed request for comment.)

What? No comment? Goodness gracious. Still, to be honest, I doubt that Ms. Greene is the problem. The root of the problem is more visible in the fact that Harvard spends its students’ time and money on, “The Past, Present, and Future of Juneteenth.”

The Harvard Crimson previously reported on the allegations against Greene, which a whistleblower lodged anonymously.

The reason it has to be done anonymously is that, if you put your name to it, you risk a “mostly peaceful” confrontation with the “By Any Means Necessary” crowd. This is at a university, mind you.

I have obtained the full complaint, which paints a much more damning indictment of Greene’s scholarship than the student newspaper had let on. Seen in its entirety, the complaint raises serious questions about Greene’s scholarship and academic integrity.

In the most serious instance, Greene lifts directly from Janelle Lee Woo’s 2004 dissertation, “Chinese American Female Identity.” In two significant sections, Greene copied words, phrases, passages, and almost entire paragraphs verbatim, without proper attribution or quotation. She also copies most of an entire table on “Racial/Ethnic Identity Development Models,” a foundational concept in the paper, without acknowledging the source.

Q: What allows you to be that blatant when you’re plagiarizing? A: The understandable belief that you’ll get away with it by being a member of The Correct Race. Did I mention that the black university president was up to her ears in the same thing?

We can examine one representative paragraph that illustrates the brazen nature of this adaptation. In her paper, Woo writes:

Stage 2, White Identification (WI), is a direct consequence of the increase in significant contact between the individual and white society. This stage entails the sense of being different from other people and not belonging anywhere. The individual’s self-perception changes from neutral/positive to negative, and she begins to internalize the belief systems of white society. Consequently, the individual does not question what it means to be Asian American. The individual alienates herself from other Asian Americans, while simultaneously experiencing social alienation from her white peers. Only when the individual seeks to “acquire a political understanding of [her] social status” (Kim 1981: 138) does she enter into the next stage.

Here is Ms. Greene’s version, with the duplicated portions of Woo and Woo’s citations italicized:

White Identification (WI), is a direct consequence of the increase in significant contact between the individual and white society. Individuals in this stage have the sense of being different from other people and not belonging anywhere. Their self-perception changes from neutral/positive to negative and they begin to internalize the belief systems of white society. Consequently, the individual fails to question what it means to be Asian American and alienates themselves from other Asian Americans, while simultaneously experiencing social alienation from their white peers. In order to move to the next stage, the individual must acquire a political understanding of social status.

Case closed, although not surprisingly there’s more of it:

In total, the complaint identifies dozens of such passages in Greene’s dissertation, ranging from minor infringements to what appears to be outright theft of concepts and language. Most of these instances would appear to violate Harvard’s own plagiarism policy, which states: “If you copy language word for word from another source and use that language in your paper, you are plagiarizing verbatim … you must give credit to the author of the source material, either by placing the source material in quotation marks and providing a clear citation, or by paraphrasing the source material and providing a clear citation.”

In other words, both the rule and its violation are clear. Still, as we’ll see, one thing that’s still being taught in the robustly Wokey precincts of Harvard is the Fine Art of Spinning:

In its initial report, the Crimson chose to downplay these violations and focus on the fact that the complaint against Greene “marks the third set of anonymous plagiarism allegations against Black women who hold or held leadership positions at Harvard.” The implication, of course, is that the anonymous critics are motivated by racism—which other commentators have made explicit in defending Gay, Charleston, and Greene.

I saw the same thing over and over in my career as a federal prosecutor. The defendant isn’t in court, so the yarn went, because of his behavior (which his lawyer makes Herculean efforts never to mention). He’s in court because he’s a minority and you’re a racist.

It was bad enough in criminal court, where we expect the defendant routinely to lie. In a university?

I won’t attempt to improve on the article’s closing observations.

For years, America’s elite institutions have maintained the convenient fiction that all racial disparities can be explained by racism, not disparities in behavior. For the subjects of Harvard’s plagiarism scandal, however, another plausible explanation exists: namely, that academics who focus on DEI and advocate lower standards for “oppressed” racial groups might hold themselves to lower standards of academic integrity than academics in more legitimate disciplines.

Regardless of the cause, Harvard should ask itself a simple question: how did so many alleged plagiarists rise to positions of power at the nation’s most prestigious university?