Yet another diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucrat at a major university has perpetrated major academic fraud, a complaint has alleged.
An anonymous allegation and analysis by the Washington Free Beacon charges LaVar Charleston, head of diversity at the University of Wisconsin, with plagiarism and recycling previously published work.
The university is already investigating him in another recycling case involving his wife, Sherri Ann, Harvard University’s diversity chief, who is also accused of plagiarism.
The Fraud and Plagiarism
The award-winning Charleston “inflated” his credentials, the Free Beacon reported, by publishing the same work in different journals.
“In 2014, for example, he published a pair of papers in two separate journals — the Journal of Diversity in Higher Education and the Journal of Progressive Policy & Practice — that are near-verbatim copies of each other,” the website reported:
Both describe a 15-person focus group conducted by an African-American woman and feature identical quotes from participants, all of whom appear to have been recruited from the same academic conference.
Neither paper indicates the other was published elsewhere — a troubling omission, scholars who reviewed both studies said.
“It is academic misconduct to publish essentially the same paper twice with no acknowledgment of the duplication,” Alexander Riley, a sociologist at Bucknell University, told the Free Beacon. “It seems fairly clear that Charleston is gaming the system in order to get more on his CV than is merited by the amount of research he has actually done.” …
“The two 2014 papers do indeed appear to be two versions of the same paper,” Riley said. “I don’t see the two as distinct from one another in any substantive way.” …
Both papers also share a prominent coauthor: Jerlando Jackson, now the dean of the Michigan State University College of Education, who advised Charleston’s dissertation at UW-Madison and also coauthored one of the studies based on it. The overlap raises additional questions about norms of academic integrity at education schools and within the field of DEI scholarship, which has come under intense scrutiny in recent months amid a drip-drip of plagiarism scandals.
“Either [Charleston and Jackson] are ignorant of this principle of research publication ethics,” Riley said, referring to rules against duplicate publication, “or they were both aware of what they were doing.”
Charleston also used material from his doctoral dissertation “in four subsequent papers: the 2012 and 2014 studies that were the subject of the previous complaint, as well as two additional studies published in 2016 and 2022.”
Yet the studies are purported to be “novel” and don’t cite his dissertation.
Plagiarism, Criminal Charge
But Charleston also stands accused of plagiarizing material for his dissertation and academic papers, the Free Beacon reported. Indeed, Charleston’s work is a virtual farrago of academic fraud.
He stole material from two previously published dissertations and, amusingly enough, “by recycling a plagiarism-laden thesis, Charleston ensured his subsequent work would contain plagiarism,” the website observed:
“Much of LaVar’s scholarly work since the dissertation lifts language from the dissertation verbatim,” the complaint reads. “But the dissertation is full of plagiarism. So LaVar’s peer-reviewed work has plagiarism throughout.”
Nor is Charleston a stranger to the cops.
In 2011, he was charged with attempting to strangle a police officer, the website reported, citing the conservative MacIver Institute. Charleston skated free without a conviction because he did community service.
“Even with a PhD, I’m looked at as a criminal,” he lamented in 2020. “[I]t has to be because of my color.”
However people look at him, “the arrest didn’t stop Charleston from climbing the ranks of the school’s diversity bureaucracy,” the website reported:
Between 2010 and 2017, he helped to build Wisconsin’s Equity and Inclusion Laboratory, which conducts research on “inclusive learning.” He became assistant vice chancellor of student diversity at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater in 2017, then served as the inaugural dean of diversity, equity and inclusion at UW-Madison’s School of Education — the third-ranked education school in the country, according to US News and World Report. He became the chief diversity officer of the entire university in 2021.
Charleston earns $280,000 annually.
Another Case Involves Wife
Charleston’s other trouble, again, involves wife Sherri Ann.
In February, the Free Beacon reported about a complaint to her employer, Harvard, that alleged 40 plagiarized passages in her doctoral dissertation.
And she and LaVar also pulled a fast one on a peer-reviewed journal in 2014. Along with his dissertation adviser Jackson, they published a paper in The Journal of Negro Education that lifted passages verbatim from an article that LaVar Charleston published in the Journal of Diversity in Higher Education in 2012.
Just this week, the City Journal’s Christopher Rufo unmasked a fourth plagiarizer at Harvard.
