There was Claudine Gay, the onetime Harvard President, who was a serial plagiarist, beginning with her dissertation and extending through seven of her eleven brief papers (she has no book), only one of which was peer-reviewed, that make up her scandalously small list of publications. Her extensive plagiarism was the main reason she was forced to resign her position. For reasons that remain unknown, she continues to be paid her her former presidential salary of $900,000; possibly those now in charge at Harvard wanted to keep her from accusing the university of “racism,” and letting her keep that preposterous salary was the best way to keep her quiet. More on Gay’s plagiarism can be found here, here and here.
There was Sherri Ann Charleston, the chief diversity officer at Harvard, who was discovered to have plagiarized extensively in her dissertation and handful of academic papers. So far she has managed to hold onto her job. I suspect Harvard administrators do not want to force the resignation of a second black woman found to be a serial plagiarist so soon after Gay’s demotion. More on Charleston’s plagiarism can be found here.
And now a third serial plagiarist in the Harvard administration has just been found. She is Shirley Greene, a Title IX coordinator affiliated with the Office for Gender Equity. According to the indefatigable Christopher Rufo, Greene claims to have worked to advance “Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging,” without any evidence of how she has been doing this, and once led a panel on “The Past, Present, and Future of Juneteenth” with the DEI department. Hmm. There doesn’t seem to be much there there. She has just been found to have plagiarized at least 40 passages in her dissertation. More on Shirley Greene, the latest — but almost certainly not the last — serial plagiarist to be uncovered at Harvard, can be found here: “Harvard’s Plagiarism Problem Multiplies,” by Christopher F. Rufo, City Journal, February 22, 2024:
…Now allegations have emerged that another Harvard DEI [Diversity, Equity, Inclusion] 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.)…
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.
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 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.
The complaint, which has been sent to Harvard’s research-integrity officials, features more than three dozen other examples of Greene allegedly lifting language from other scholars, without proper attribution or quotations….
What will Harvard do? Does it want to uphold its own rules on plagiarism or ignore them?
No Harvard student who was found to be guilty of as much plagiarism as Gay, Charleston, and Greene have been would be allowed to remain at the university. More than a month after her plagiarism was laid bare, why hasn’t Charleston been fired? And what will happen to Shirley Greene? Anything? Nothing?
Mad Max says
What,a fraud, con artist and scum bag…
maria says
Yes but we must do something against these fraudsters.
First all they should kicked out of the Harvard.
Then Harvard must be closed, all these fraudster put in jail . And new staff must be introduced .
The new staff must be really examined and interviewed before they can started.
Then Harvard can be opened again
Mad Max says
What,a fraud, con artist and scum bag…
Keith O says
Two things with this case.
One, if this was a white male, they would have been sacked by now and forced to give a grovelling apology, lost all pay and benefits as well as being black listed across the country.
Two, If even a quarter of these claims are true and these people have been put into these high paying do nothing jobs, then how far up the food chain does this rot really go at Harvard?
OLD GUY says
No wonder student tuition is so high we have to pay for these high paid do nothings.
Rarely says
I doubt very much that Harvard is having any worse problem with plagiarism than other universities. That the theses of these particular people were so carefully examined leads me to wonder.
RICHARD DARRELL KOETHE III says
And yet, unsurprisingly, they get to keep (as the “Gov” in “Blazing Saddles” said – “their phony baloney jobs. Including Gay’s most hideous example of a $900K/year paycheck.
Wow, reality, what a concept.
Ray Graf says
Absolutely scandalous
I’m sure those people with a hard degree are ashamed of that degree and who would want a degree from such a university
As I’ve reiterated before, Harvard is probably missing out on a golden opportunity
They should establish a department of plagiarism certainly it could be chaired by Claudine Gay, and appears to have enough faculty members to substantially support it.
The course would be elementary meeting only to know how to cut and paste
Knowing the current state of affairs, I’m sure they can get grants from the federal government to fund their department
Jayell1 says
So now, with three disgraceful impostors exposed like this (four, if you include Martin Luther King whose parents even plagiarised his name for him – plus God knows how many more we’re apparently not allowed to know about yet) we begin to understand how this demographic wasn’t even able to invent the wheel, let alone anything else much, in all those millennia that they had that huge dark continent all to themselves. And no doubt we’re still supposed to ‘celebrate diversity’ and show such deference to those people who tell us ad nauseam that their ‘lives matter’ (but they never say why and to whom exactly).
Isabella van der westhuizen says
All that DEI research is just a tedious repetition of tired old themes and hackneyed phrases. It might have been original when Foucault wrote it back in the day but now it is all just a bit repetitious. So plagiarism for these pseudo scholars truly is meaningless as a concept.
Buzzy says
Harvard itself is a scam a fraud and a Ponzi scheme paid for with our taxes…….
David Cooper says
Unless there is a Senate Enquirey into this institutionalised academic rot,nothing will happen. The question is,will we have to wait for a ‘Trump’ to act?
Mick says
Well done Hugh, skewering these bores in the dense jungle of their Latin-based academe speak.
I gave up the chase after line 3.
Mick says
I hear that the Bavarian Werner Herzog uses the Laitn based word “obscene”, as his go-to word for expressing contempt, eg for anthropomorphic nature docs.. Sometimes with an Anglo Saxon intensifier.