Free Republic

Recent headlines about UCLA School of Medicine suggest that the institution has lost its focus. Instead of brushing up on organic chemistry, its students were subjected to lessons on “Indigenous womxn” and “two-spirits.” Future doctors had to take a class on “structural racism” and were led in a “Free Palestine” chant by a Hamas-praising guest speaker. The school made plans to segregate students by race for courses on left-wing ideology, and two of its psychiatry residents championed “revolutionary suicide.” Why has the school charted this course? One reason is its commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion ideology. UCLA has a...

@amuse @amuse DEI: In another case of ‘Didn’t Earn It’ Biden-appointed Federal Reserve Board member Lisa DeNell Cook’s entire academic career has been found to be fraudulent. From faking research data, to outright plagiarism, to lying on her resume - Cook is in charge of our monetary policy.

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...

Alade McKen plagiarized pages of material from Wikipedia.. The chief diversity, equity, and inclusion officer of Columbia University's medical school, Alade McKen, plagiarized extensively in his doctoral dissertation, lifting entire pages of material, without attribution, from sources that include Wikipedia, according to a complaint submitted to the university on Wednesday. The allegations implicate approximately a fifth of McKen's 163-page dissertation, "'UBUNTU' I am because we are: A case study examining the experiences of an African-centered Rites of Passage program within a community-based organization," submitted to Iowa State University's School of Education in 2021. More than two of those pages are...

Allegations of research fakery at a leading cancer center have turned a spotlight on scientific integrity and the amateur sleuths uncovering image manipulation in published research. Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, a Harvard Medical School affiliate, announced Jan. 22 it’s requesting retractions and corrections of scientific papers after a British blogger flagged problems in early January. The blogger, 32-year-old Sholto David, of Pontypridd, Wales, is a scientist-sleuth who detects cut-and-paste image manipulation in published scientific papers. He’s not the only hobbyist poking through pixels. Other champions of scientific integrity are keeping researchers and science journals on their toes. They use special software,...

Harvard University’s chief diversity and inclusion officer has been hit with dozens of plagiarism allegations tied to her academic work — including one claim she failed to properly cite her own husband’s study. The Ivy League school was handed an anonymous complaint on Monday listing at least 40 examples of alleged plagiarism by Sherri Ann Charleston dating back to 2009 — a decade before she joined Harvard, the Washington Free Beacon reported. The allegations, which include failing to properly cite other scholars’ work and not referencing them in footnotes, come just weeks after Harvard University president Claudine Gay resigned from...

Harvard University’s chief diversity and inclusion officer has been hit with dozens of plagiarism allegations tied to her academic work — including one claim she failed to properly cite her own husband’s study. The Ivy League school was handed an anonymous complaint on Monday listing at least 40 examples of alleged plagiarism by Sherri Ann Charleston dating back to 2009 — a decade before she joined Harvard, the Washington Free Beacon reported. The allegations, which include failing to properly cite other scholars’ work and not referencing them in footnotes, come just weeks after Harvard University president Claudine Gay resigned from...

It's not just Claudine Gay. Harvard University's chief diversity and inclusion officer, Sherri Ann Charleston, appears to have plagiarized extensively in her academic work, lifting large portions of text without quotation marks and even taking credit for a study done by another scholar—her own husband—according to a complaint filed with the university on Monday and a Washington Free Beacon analysis. The complaint makes 40 allegations of plagiarism that span the entirety of Charleston's thin publication record. In her 2009 dissertation, submitted to the University of Michigan, Charleston quotes or paraphrases nearly a dozen scholars without proper attribution, the complaint alleges....

A Harvard University-affiliated teaching hospital is seeking to retract or correct dozens of papers authored by four of its top researchers — including the hospital’s CEO — following a probe into allegations of data falsification. The Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston has already initiated six retractions to papers and 31 others are in the process of being corrected, the hospital’s research integrity officer, Dr. Barrett Rollins, confirmed to the Harvard Crimson. The corrections follow claims of data falsification leveled against the cancer institute’s CEO, Dr. Laurie Glimcher, chief operating officer Dr. William Hahn, director of the Clinical Investigator Research Program...

BOSTON (AP) — Harvard University has shed fresh light on the ongoing investigation into plagiarism accusations against former president Claudine Gay, including that an independent body recommended a broader review after substantiating some of the complaints. In a letter Friday to a congressional committee, Harvard said it learned of the plagiarism allegations against its first Black female president on Oct. 24 from a New York Post reporter. The school reached out to several authors whom Gay is accused of plagiarizing and none objected to her language, it said. Harvard then appointed the independent body, which focused on two of Gay’s...

Here’s another good reason not to plunk down $126,584 (that’s the total for four years of tuition unless it goes up between now and 2027) to send your kid to Rutgers. Long considered to be one of America’s premier universities, the beloved alma mater of Mr. Magoo is now a sinkhole of woke indoctrination, with academic standards sinking lower than Old Joe Biden’s ethics. A professor at Rutgers Law School has lied openly in an academic paper and has refused to back down, knowing that she will face no consequences from an administration that is as corrupt and compromised as...

The timeline of what happened to the DEI-intoxicated Harvard president is well-known. However, the question of why it happened somehow eluded the commentariat. To answer the “why” question requires a deep dive into the fundamental issue of private property and its theft. While conservatism and leftism do not touch the subject (it is considered a secondary, not a primary dispute), for the proletarianized strain of leftism – Marxism -- it is a fundamental, existential core belief. Since the Marxists’ takeover of the Ivy League institutions at the end of the last century, detailed analysis is impossible without an excursion into...

There’s a documentary called “Behind the Curve” in which a group of people who think the Earth is flat decided to test their hypothesis. They spend something like $20,000 on a laser gyroscope, and run some tests, and lo and behold, they learn that the Earth, contrary to their assumptions, is in fact round. Their response was exactly what you’d expect. At first they didn’t want to believe it, they started rationalizing away the experiment. “We were taken aback by that,” one of the men said. He added: “We obviously were not willing to accept that.” That documentary came out...

For a long time, people (including me) have been calling for major changes in higher education. Now someone is doing something about it. Hedge-fund tycoon Bill Ackman is waging war to make universities accountable. Ackman started his campaign by demanding the resignations of University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill, Harvard President Claudine Gay and Massachusetts Institute of Technology President Sally Kornbluth after the trio’s shambolic performance before Congress on antisemitic harassment on their campuses. Magill and Gay are now gone, and Kornbluth is worried. Penn’s board of trustees pushed Magill out pretty quickly. Gay, being a diversity hire, was harder...

Plagiarism and Collaboration The College recognizes that the open exchange of ideas plays a vital role in the academic endeavor, as often it is only through discussion with others that one is fully able to process information or to crystallize an elusive concept. Therefore, students generally are encouraged to engage in conversations with their teachers and classmates about their courses, their research, and even their assignments. These kinds of discussions and debates in some ways represent the essence of life in an academic community. And yet, it is important for all scholars to acknowledge clearly when they have relied upon...

Last night, no one at @MIT had a good night’s sleep. Yesterday evening, shortly after I posted that we were launching a plagiarism review of all current MIT faculty, President Kornbluth, members of MIT’s administration, and its board, I am sure that an audible collective gasp could be heard around the campus. Why? Well, every faculty member knows that once their work is targeted by AI, they will be outed. No body of written work in academia can survive the power of AI searching for missing quotation marks, failures to paraphrase appropriately, and/or the failure to properly credit the work...

Academic dishonesty and crime are alike: ... When my peers are found responsible for multiple instances of inadequate citation, they are often suspended for an academic year,” wrote the student who sits on Harvard’s honor council.. When the president of their university is found responsible for the same types of infractions, the fellows of the Corporation ‘unanimously stand in support of’ her ... Gay’s plagiarism, the Harvard Corp. showed that its commitment to academic integrity was as phony as its other ideals. ... serious academic-integrity offenses, are too often ignored or excused—much like petty crimes in cities with left-wing governments....

Now that Claudine Gay is out as Harvard's president on evidence that she plagiarized research and failed to counter antisemitism on campus, Harvard's elites are steaming with fury. They had, after all, signed a letter urging that the university keep her and her wokester policies on board. But that wasn't the worst of it. The biggest indignity was in the knowledge of who took her down: Not a top Harvard scholar but a lowly Harvard night school student with the equivalent of a master's degree named Christopher Rufo, writing on his humble Substack. He was the one who found the...

Whew, what a week it’s been for higher ed!The Claudine Gay debacle at Harvard has raised some fundamental questions about academia in general. She was president of the university, traditionally seen as the pinnacle of American academia.But a careful look at her extremely thin academic publishing record was packed with unattributed borrowings from other authors in her own field.Once all of this became public, and in light of her Congressional testimony in which she found a new love for the free speech that has been heretofore nearly banned at Harvard, it became impossible for her to continue as president and...

The billionaire hedge fund manager and major Harvard donor Bill Ackman seized on revelations that Harvard's president, Claudine Gay, had plagiarized some passages in her academic work to underscore his calls for her removal following what he perceived as her mishandling of large protests against Israel's bombardment of Gaza on Harvard's campus. An analysis by Business Insider found a similar pattern of plagiarism by Ackman's wife, Neri Oxman, who became a tenured professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2017. Oxman plagiarized multiple paragraphs of her 2010 doctoral dissertation, Business Insider found, including at least one passage directly lifted...