Yet again, another plagiarism complaint has exposed Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion as an academic fraud racket.
This time, the plagiarists are at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which like the rest of academia, packed administration with DEI hires after the George Floyd Hoax.
Of six new DEI deans hired in June 2021 — one for each of the university’s main schools, the Washington Free Beacon reported yesterday— two plagiarized their doctoral dissertations.
The Complaint
The half-dozen deans were hired to meet criteria in MIT’s “DEI Strategic Action Plan” that was supposed to “‘make equity central’ to the university ‘while ensuring the highest standards of excellence,’” the website noted.
It didn’t quite work out that way. The “highest standards of excellence” were not “ensured.”
Instead, the university hired two “serial plagiarists,” a 71-page complaint alleges. Tracie Jones-Barrett and Alana Anderson copied “entire pages of text without attribution and riding roughshod over MIT’s academic integrity policies,” the website reported, citing the complaint:
In her 2023 dissertation titled “Cite a Sista,” which explored how black women in the Ivy League “make meaning of thriving,” Jones-Barrett, MIT’s deputy “equity officer,” lifts a whole section on “ethical considerations” from Emmitt Wyche III, her classmate in Northeastern University’s Graduate School of Education, without any sort of citation.
The section is one of several long passages taken from Wyche’s 2020 thesis, “Boyz in the Hoods: (Re) Defining the Narratives of Black Male Doctoral Degree Completers,” which does not appear in Jones-Barrett’s bibliography. Wyche and Jones-Barrett did not respond to requests for comment.
Anderson left MIT last year to work for the Boston Beer Company, maker of Samuel Adams beer. Equally hornswoggled by the Floyd Hoax, the company decided it needed an “inclusion and belonging program manager” to brew suds.
“Her 2017 dissertation, “#BLACKONCAMPUS: A Critical Examination of Racial and Gender Performances of Black College Women on Social Media,” the Free Beacon reported, “lifts over a page of material from Mark Chae, a professor of counseling at Pillar College, who is not cited anywhere in her dissertation.”
Chae was none too happy about it.
“It would have been nice to at least get a citation!” he told the website. “Anderson seems quite comfortable in taking credit for large portions of another writer’s scholarly work.”
Anderson also lifted material from Professor Jarvis Givens at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and Khalilah Shabazz, a DEI official at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. She is apparently a DEI careerist. She held similar jobs at Boston University and Babson College before landing at MIT.
“In total, the two diversity deans lifted about 10 full pages of material without attribution, according to the complaint, as well as dozens of shorter passages sprinkled throughout their theses,” the website noted.
Amusingly, Anderson’s dissertation is riddled with “missing words and commas” and has a problem with “subject-verb agreement.”
And it doesn’t appear that the two attempted to write anything original.
“The two dissertations at issue are strikingly derivative, cobbled together from classmates, online sources, and even a book’s dust jacket, and at times read like replicas of their unattributed source material,” the Free Beacon continued.
And this nonsense — the opening sentence of Jones-Barrett’s dissertation — is what now passes for scholarship:
This study, the first of its kind[,] uses Black Feminist Thought as a framework to explore and investigate how Black women at Ivy League graduate schools of education make meaning of thriving.
Anderson even ripped off material from the leftist Think Progress website.
Neither MIT nor Anderson and Jones Barrett commented to the Free Beacon on the findings.
No Punishment
Anderson and Jones-Barrett are just the latest two DEI hires among more than a half-dozen, including four at Harvard, revealed to have plagiarized. One of them was former president of Harvard, Claudine Gay. She was forced out of office after the revelation, which coincided with a campus dust-up over “antisemitism.”
DEI administrators at UCLA Medical School and the University of Wisconsin were also caught.
“The accused administrators have not been publicly sanctioned by their universities, which have either declined to comment on the allegations or issued statements in support of the officials,” the Free Beacon observed. Indeed, Harvard not only didn’t fire Gay but also kept her on as a professor at the same salary, the New York Post revealed.
But “the complaint against Anderson and Jones-Barrett may be harder for MIT to brush aside, however, given the school’s high-profile efforts to distance itself from DEI in the post-October 7 era.”
Hamas terrorists launched a murder raid on Israel that day.
MIT has abandoned silly “diversity statements” for faculty applicants and also reversed its position on SAT tests. They are now required.
Now maybe it will stop hiring candidates who write doctoral dissertations titled “Cite a Sista” and “Boyz in the Hoods.”
