Sherri Ann Charleston, Harvard University’s chief diversity officer, is at the center of a fresh scandal. Examining Charleston’s 2009 dissertation in detail turns up several suspected instances of plagiarism, compounding the problems the school has just faced when previous President Claudine Gay resigned over identical charges.
Forty charges of plagiarism are listed in the lawsuit against Charleston for all of her published works. It claims that she improperly cited or paraphrased the work of almost a dozen professors in her 2009 dissertation at the University of Michigan, failing to provide due credit. Charleston, who was named the inaugural Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer (CDIO) of Harvard University in August 2020, is now under investigation in relation to these claims.
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The paper contains examples of how Charleston appears to have taken straight quotes from other academics’ writings without properly citing them, raising questions about the validity of her scholarly contributions.
Charleston is accused of major plagiarism since significant chunks of the material were taken without the required acknowledgment. In addition, a complaint filed with the institution and published by the Washington Free Beacon states that she has claimed ownership of studies that her husband has done.
Sherri Ann Charleston and her husband LaVar Charleston presented data from his 2012 study as fresh research in their combined peer-reviewed paper from 2014. As so, Sherri Ann was given credit for her husband’s contributions.
Charleston’s dissertation had another portion that lacked correct reference or quote marks and bore a strong resemblance to the work of her adviser, Rebecca Scott, and others. Again, without the proper quotation marks, a section on the Spanish Civil Code and its implementation in Cuba had striking parallels to a paper by Scott and Michael Zeuske.
The claims cover many paragraphs and words from Charleston’s dissertation that seem to have been copied verbatim from other academics.
Charleston is both an attorney with a concentration on constitutional and employment law and a historian who specializes in American history with an emphasis on race, gender, citizenship, and the law. She was the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Chief Affirmative Action Officer and Assistant Vice Provost for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion before.
Charleston managed the Office of Employee Disability Resources, evaluated the strategic diversity strategy, and assisted with underrepresented community scholarship programs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her activities are concentrated on integrating diversity and inclusion research in academia, drawing on her experience with Title IX, ADA compliance, and affirmative action.
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She also taught in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In 2019, Diverse Issues in Higher Education magazine named her one of the “Top 35 Women in Higher Education.”
The latest charges come after former Harvard President Claudine Gay faced backlash for her lack of vehement condemnation of the attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, which was led by Hamas. Gay and the presidents of MIT and the University of Pennsylvania were questioned by lawmakers in December over how to deal with antisemitism on college campuses.
Simultaneously, Gay faced allegations of plagiarism about around fifty occasions in her scholarly writings. Allegations ranging from paraphrasing paragraphs barely slightly to utilizing content without appropriate attribution were reported by The New York Times.
Harvard first refuted the accusations, but then admitted that Gay’s paper had citation errors, which she eventually fixed. Following these concerns and the decision of a Congressional committee to investigate her work, Gay tendered her resignation as president of Harvard University.
