Posted on 03/20/2024 11:56:05 AM PDT by Red Badger
Harvard professor Christina Cross is a rising star in the field of critical race studies. She earned a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, secured the support of the National Science Foundation, and garnered attention from the New York Times, where she published an influential article title “The Myth of the Two-Parent Home.”
Cross’s 2019 dissertation, “The Color, Class, and Context of Family Structure and Its Association with Children’s Educational Performance,” won a slate of awards, including the American Sociological Association Dissertation Award and the ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award, and helped catapult her onto the Harvard faculty.
According to a new complaint filed with Harvard’s office of research integrity, however, Cross’s work is compromised by multiple instances of plagiarism, including “verbatim plagiarism, mosaic plagiarism, uncited paraphrasing, and uncited quotations from other sources.”
I have obtained a copy of the complaint, which documents a pattern of misappropriation in Cross’s dissertation and one other academic paper. The complaint begins with a dozen allegations of plagiarism related to the dissertation that range in severity from small bits of “duplicative language,” which may not constitute an offense, to multiple passages heavily plagiarized from other sources without proper attribution. (Cross did not respond to a request for comment.)
The most serious allegation is that Cross lifted an entire paragraph nearly verbatim from a paper by Stacey Bosick and Paula Fomby titled “Family Instability in Childhood and Criminal Offending During the Transition Into Adulthood” without citing the source or placing verbatim language in quotations. Here is the paragraph from Bosick and Fomby:
We use data from the PSID and two of its supplemental studies, the Child Development Supplement (CDS) and the Transition into Adulthood Supplement (TAS). PSID began in 1968 as a nationally representative sample of approximately 4,800 households. Original respondents and their descendants have been followed annually until 1997 and biennially since then. To maintain population representativeness, a sample refresher in 1997 added approximately 500 households headed by immigrants who had entered the United States since 1968. At each wave, the household head or the spouse or cohabiting partner of the head reports on family household composition, employment, earned and unearned income, assets, debt, educational attainment, expenditures, housing characteristics, and health and health care in the household. In 2015 (the most recent wave available), the study collected information on almost 25,000 individuals in approximately 9,000 households.
And here is the paragraph from Cross, with identical language italicized:
This study draws on data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (1985-2015) and its two youth-centered supplements, the Child Development Supplement (CDS) (1997-2007) and the Transition into Adulthood Supplement (TAS) (2005-2015). The PSID began in 1968 as a nationally-representative sample of nearly 5,000 U.S. households. Original sample members and their descendants were followed annually until 1997 and have been followed biennially since then. To maintain population representativeness, in 1997, a sample refresher added approximately 500 households headed by immigrants who had entered the United States since 1968. At each wave, the household head or the spouse or cohabiting partner of the head reports on household composition, and household members’ employment, income, educational attainment, and health status. In 2015, the study collected information on nearly 25,000 individuals in approximately 9,000 households.
This was not a one-off error. Later in the paper, Cross lifts another full paragraph from Bosick and Fomby, with minor word substitutions, without placing the copied language in quotation marks or properly citing the authors. Cross cannot plead unfamiliarity with the source: Fomby served on Cross’s dissertation committee, making the offense even more egregious.
Elsewhere in the paper, Cross borrows language from other academic sources, sometimes citing the authors but failing to place the verbatim language in quotations, and other times failing to cite the source at all, creating the false impression that it was her own work. For example, Cross lifts verbatim language from “Examining the Antecedents of U.S. Nonmarital Fatherhood,” by Marcia Carlson, Alicia VanOrman, and Natasha Pilkauskas—the last of whom also served on Cross’s dissertation committee—without the use of direct quotations, as required. Here is the paragraph from Carlson et al.:
To adjust for biennial interviewing starting in 1994, we assign the previous year’s reported values (adjusting earnings for inflation) as the missing year’s values for the time-varying covariates during noninterview (i.e., odd) years in the 1994–2006 period.
Cross directly copies this language, including the idiosyncratic use of parentheticals, with minor word substitutions, suggesting a certain amount of deliberateness. Cross writes, again with identical language italicized:
To adjust for biennial interviewing starting in 1997, I assign the previous year’s reported values (adjusting income for inflation) as the missing year’s values for the time-varying covariates during noninterview (i.e., even) years in the 1998-2012 period.
According to the complaint, Cross repeats this pattern of plagiarism in at least one other paper, “Extended family households among children in the United States: Differences by race/ethnicity and socio-economic status,” published in the academic journal Population Studies in 2018. The complaint alleges that Cross again uses material from others, including the same passages from her dissertation advisors, without proper attribution.
This complaint raises a number of pertinent questions. First, do the allegations rise to the level of “plagiarism”? To answer that question, one might turn to Harvard’s own 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.”
Second, what is happening at Harvard? We have seen an explosion of plagiarism allegations against prominent scholars and administrators in recent months, all associated with critical race studies and “diversity and inclusion” programs. Former president Claudine Gay, chief diversity officer Sherri Ann Charleston, DEI administrator Shirley Greene, and now star professor Christina Cross have each come under fire for alleged plagiarism.
This raises several additional questions. Did these scholars manage to earn positions at Harvard without a comprehensive review of their work? Why are Gay, Charleston, and Greene, in particular, still employed at Harvard, given the seriousness of the questions raised about their academic integrity? Harvard’s own policy recommends serious consequences for students who have committed plagiarism. Are professors held to a lesser standard?
Finally, given Harvard’s long-standing support for DEI policies and affirmative action programs, it is reasonable to ask whether scholars such as Gay, Charleston, Greene, and Cross rose through the ranks on their merits or, at least in part, on their identity and their politics.
Further investigation is needed. Independent researchers currently looking into plagiarism at Harvard should scrutinize not only these programs but also a control group in other, more substantive disciplines to determine whether plagiarism correlates with left-wing racial disciplines or is widespread throughout the university.
Time will tell. My sources say that more allegations are coming.
Christopher F. Rufo is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of America’s Cultural Revolution.
Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right - here I am........
Plagiarism....I guess since MLK,Jr., was a master plagiarizer then it has become fashionable for all other leftists to do so. After all we made a National holiday and named thousands of streets after him.
paging Bill Ackman ...
Perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise. Neo-Marxist intersectional, DEI studies are pure “group think.”
An adherent creating original or different analysis thus faces a huge sub-conscious psychological barrier. Or even if conscious of it, they may have real fears of falling outside of “correct” opinion on it.
Why is there so much interest in trying to make black people live up to the same legal, moral and ethical standards as white people? Is climate change causing this desire to hold everyone to the same standards?
Harvard, we have a problem.
Why?
Because everything the white man has (or claims to have done), he stole from others. So taking it back--by plagiarism or reparations or shoplifting--is just taking back what was originally yours.
DEI, ESG, political correctness, identity politics, and outright discrimination is not producing the best…dumbing down of all aspects of contemporary society…
Any time a retard tries to say single parent homes, 2 mommy or 2 daddy homes are just as good; you know they are retarded and should immediately be ignored.
The DIE hire had to cheat to get a sociology degree.
I wonder if they regret going after Bill Ackman’s wife yet?
To be honest, it is hard to publish anything new in DEI area.
DEI is an area of several, widely repeated phrases. Hardly anything new can be discovered, so they just regurgitate the old.
Basically anybody in this area is plagiarist!
“Racial Justics Scholar” has risen to the top tier of oxymorons because, obviously, the profession is inhabited only by morons.
Lemon says: "I don't understand what you are saying...do you have any evidence for this." (paraphrased).
Elon Musk schools Don Lemon on DEII hate to say it, but Don Lemon must be dumb as a post if he can't understand what Musk is saying.
Now where does Harvard go to get its reputation back?
Coming from Medicine to aviation, especially Boeing’s problems.
I was born at the end of 1942 (yes, 1942) and began to get aware of things like aviation disasters and technology in general by 1950, when I turned eight. One of the things I most clearly remember is the amount of trouble the British had when they introduced their Comet passenger jet, the world’s first jet passenger aircraft. It seemed the thing was had a tendency to fall out of the sky and there were at least three major crashes that killed everyone aboard. Research revealed that the cause was metal fatigue resulting from repeated pressure pressurization and depressurization. About a year or two later Boeing came out with the 707, its first jet passenger aircraft, an aircraft that was designed by a bunch of old white guys using nothing but their knowledge of aircraft construction and design along with slide rules, laughably primitive computers, and manual calculators. In spite of all that primitivity, Boeing went on brilliantly producing thousands of passenger jets that became the safest form of transportation in the world.
Then came the 737 Max, which has shown almost as alarming a tendency to fall out of the sky as the old British Commets. What could be the reason for all of this since modern aircraft designers have excellent access to all kinds of superb digital equipment that should enable them to do a much better job of designing aircraft like the 737 Max than the old slide rules, laughably primitive computers, and manual calculators gave their predecessors?
Funny thing, isn’t it, that all the 737 Max problems coincide quite nicely with Boeing going woke and making major DEI efforts in its employment and personnel areas to avoid accusations of horrible sins like racism, sexism, and ableism.
So many truly sick people will get exposed this way.
She is a truly sick person.
Well, they are almost all of the same liberal mind, so why not use the same material? It keeps the preferred stance on all things leftist well in order.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.