E is for Equity

The hidden power in DEI

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Equity used to be mainly a financial term. Now the meaning has been enlarged. Equity is said to mean fairness, according to thousands of corporate and institutional websites that, since 2020, have been rife with DEI dogma. Whereas equality gives everybody a chance to succeed, equity does better and ensures that everybody succeeds—a nice idea. But, in life, not everybody succeeds.

Some administrators at what once were considered America’s leading institutions got where they are because of equity. They rose to positions of power despite their demonstrably poor training. Equity ensured their success. Now some administrators at Harvard University have been shown to have plagiarized their work. Equity is responsible for that as well.

Plagiarism is a sign of many things. It is always an ethical lapse; it can also be a sign of inadequate preparation. Christopher F. Rufo has exposed the plagiarism of DEI leaders at Harvard. They include former president Claudine Gay; Sherri Ann Charleston, Harvard’s chief diversity officer; and Shirley Greene, administrator of the Harvard Extension School.

A clever plagiarist’s work can be hard to spot. I remember an example from my teaching days. Reading an essay written by a graduate student we all admired, a colleague spotted an unusual phrase in a quotation from a well-known author. Curious about the phrase, my colleague Googled it and found not only the unusual phrase (it was a mistake, an editorial error) but, surrounding it, an entire essay, much of which had been deftly smuggled into the student’s paper. When confronted, the student left the program. The rest of us became a lot more cautious.

The work of the Harvard plagiarists was not clever or deft. Instead, it shows simple ignorance of the basic procedures of scholarship and academic honesty. Gay, Charleston, and Greene made errors that even cursory supervision would have caught. Two of them plagiarized the writing of their own directors, and nobody, least of all the directors themselves, noticed.

Scholars acknowledge and build on the work of others. Gay, Charleston, and Greene attended fine graduate schools. Yet they failed to learn how to acknowledge the work of others. They also failed to grasp the elementary mechanics of citation. Failure to teach these matters and to check on students’ grasp of them is itself an ethical failure. When they applied for jobs at Harvard, it’s clear that nobody read their dissertations. What got Gay, Charleston, and Greene their jobs was equity, not excellence.

In the familiar DEI triad, the middle term is the one that counts. Equity is a silent process of amendment and improvement. Equity masks poor work in the interest of uniform results or, as they say, outcomes. Some students acquire information and produce their work according to rules established for scholarship. Others get information second-hand. They piece together ideas and paragraphs from their sources, suppress references, and pass the work off as their own. Equity levels the difference between these two groups. In an equitable world, they all graduate, whether they know a lot or a little. The degree is the “outcome.”

How does equity work? This graphic from the National Association of Colleges and Employers shows us. On the left we see a “just” system in which everybody starts at the same level and in which some do better than others. This is now considered an evil and an injustice. At the right, we see a system of equity, meaning that everybody finishes at the same level. This, of course, is good. (Source: https://community.naceweb.org/home.)   

In the diagram on the left, everybody gets a boost (e.g., an education). But the figures reach different levels because they are not equally gifted. On the right, one figure reaches the top while two others are boosted to the top level.

Let’s translate. On the left, three people go to the same college but earn different GPAs; they stand on their merits. On the right, three people go to the same college but only one stands on merits. The others reach the same level through equity.

Like many woke concepts, this model has an appealing simplicity. It illustrates a way to increase opportunities for those who are at a disadvantage. An institution that desires a uniform outcome will build boxes so that everyone involved reaches the same level. That’s the desired result. But to reach that result, the learning process has to be adjusted—modified, improved, amended.

The operations of equity are all around us. In 2022 the U.S. Army eased fitness standards for women and some men. The Army had devised a gender-neutral physical fitness test. But men were passing the test at six times the rate women were passing it. Rather than draw the obvious conclusion, the Army adjusted the test to achieve equity. Men and women must pass, or fail, at similar rates. The test for women was simplified, dumbed down.

However, in life qualifications matter more than they do on paper. Do you want a pilot who successfully passed a rigorous training period to fly your plane, or do you want a pilot who passed tests that were dumbed down so they were easier to pass? I think I can predict your preference.

Hiding the difference between the qualified and the unqualified is not a simple matter. We know this because advisory firms and DEI consulting groups consistently recommend that poorly qualified candidates be brought up to speed by the company that wants to hire them. Here is an example of the suggested remediation:

“If organizations want a more diverse executive team, they may need to start leadership development programs earlier and support historically underrepresented groups to give them the relationships and experiences necessary for success. This may even precede selection into a leadership program—starting with daily feedback, coaching and mentorship or sponsorship.” (Source: Gallup, “a global analytics and advisory firm.” Go to https://www.gallup.com/workplace/401573/ workplace-equity-dei-why-matters.aspx.)

Such training is now routine in many businesses. College graduates, with their sparkling degrees in cultural studies and gender studies, know so little that they have to be schooled at work. They may be good learners, but it is up to the company that hires them to teach them what to do.

Recent articles in the Wall Street Journal have shown that such remediation is about more than the content of a particular business. It now includes lessons in decorum, how to act, how to speak, how to answer the phone, how to write a memo, and so on. Young employees are unaware of customs and courtesies that some businesses expect to be observed. No one seems to have taught them that “Gotcha. Cool!” might not be the best response to a memo from your supervisor.

If the goal is equity in academic matters, then one’s history of academic performance (i.e., one’s writing) is not a primary concern. That means that written work does not need to be scrutinized. In fact, the work of Gay, Charleston, and Greene seems not to have been examined carefully before they graduated or when they applied to Harvard.

Looking at Harvard’s DEI staff, we see that two generations are involved in this charade. The first involves the faculty who trained today’s experts. The second generation comprises today’s DEI leaders, those whose work Rufo examines to such devastating effect. There is a third generation, unfortunately, the DEI enthusiasts who are currently preparing for their professional roles. Below I look at a celebrated example from the DEI depths of Columbia University.

Yesterday: The mentors of Gay, Greene, and Charleston

Gay, with a BA from Stanford and a PhD from Harvard; Greene, with a PhD from the University of Michigan; and Charleston, with a Columbia BA, a PhD from the University of Michigan, and a law degree from the University of Wisconsin, must have had many fine teachers.

When these applicants were graduate students, their supervising faculty failed to require the students to master the details that preserve scholarly standards. The degree was the goal. To reach it, the faculty silently compensated for the students’ shortcomings. The students were given credit for expertise they did not have and were awarded doctorates. That phony credit was honored by Harvard when the graduates were hired.

Everybody in education should understand the meaning of plagiarism and the injustice it involves. Harvard, like all schools I know of, spells out rules of academic honesty for students. “If you copy language word for word from another source and use that language in your paper,” says the school’s statement, “you are plagiarizing verbatim.” When copying a source, “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.”

Yet these three students were not taught the rules of academic honesty and professional writing, or, if they were, nobody looked at their writing to see if the rules were being followed. The samples Rufo published (some are below) make this ignorance painfully clear. The students could cut and paste but could not do much more.

Today: Gay, Charleston, and Greene

Gay is E-for-equity’s Exhibit A. Any body of work as slight as hers might get an assistant professor tenure and promotion in a non-competitive Political Science department. Harvard did not used to have non-competitive departments—that is, departments with mediocre standards. But Harvard has such departments now. Gay wasn’t hired and promoted because of her academic achievement. She was hired and promoted because she was a black female with a Stanford degree and a Harvard PhD. Equity covered up her mediocrity. Nobody cared about her work.

Gay’s plagiarism was exposed in waves, starting in December 2023. The New York Times drew on a report by an online news site, The Washington Free Beacon, saying that Gay’s dissertation “‘borrowed’ two paragraphs from a 1996 conference paper by Bradley Palmquist, a political science professor then at Harvard, and Stephen Voss, who was in Gay’s program at Harvard.

Carol Swain, a former political science professor at Vanderbilt University, wrote to the Wall Street Journal (Dec. 17, 2023) to say that Gay “failed to credit” her for sections of Swain’s 1993 book, Black Faces, Black Interests: The Representation of African Americans in Congress. In addition, Gay also copied from Swain’s 1997 article, “Women and Blacks in Congress: 1870-1996.” 

“Gay had no problem riding on the coattails of people whose work she used without proper attribution,” Swain wrote. “Many of those whose work she pilfered aren’t as incensed as I am. They are elites who have benefited from a system that protects its own.” This damning comment suggests that, among those who dismissed reports of Gay’s academic dishonesty, there were some who themselves had benefited from weakened professional standards—from equity. Equity is indeed “a system that protects its own,” and Harvard knows how that game is played.

In January 2024, Emily Crane reported in the New York Post that Gay “lifted other scholars’ works in her 1997 doctoral thesis and that four papers published between 1993 and 2017 did not include proper attribution.” Here is Rufo’s extract showing Gay’s method, her source at left, her version of it at right.

Gay put some directly quoted material in quotation marks; other direct quotes were not marked as such. She did not represent her source accurately or make it clear to the reader which material was her own and which was taken from her source. The phrase “a more trusting and efficacious orientation,” for example, is distinctive but is missing quotation marks. “Black” is twice changed to African-American in this awkward mix of quotation, hidden quotation, and paraphrase.

Greene took a more aggressive approach. Greene plagiarized more than 40 passages of her 2008 dissertation, “Converging Frameworks: Examining the Impact of Diversity-Related College Experiences on Racial/Ethnic Identity Development.” Rufo found that Greene took material directly from Janelle Lee Woo’s 2004 dissertation, “Chinese American Female Identity,” without citing Woo. “In two significant sections,” Rufo writes, “Greene copied words, phrases, passages, and almost entire paragraphs verbatim, without proper attribution or quotation. She also copies most of an entire table on ‘Racial/Ethnic Identity Development Models,’ a foundational concept in the paper, without acknowledging the source.”

Woo (2004):

Stage 2, White Identification (WI), is a direct consequence of the increase in significant contact between the individual and white society. This stage entails the sense of being different from other people and not belonging anywhere. The individual’s self-perception changes from neutral/positive to negative, and she begins to internalize the belief systems of white society. Consequently, the individual does not question what it means to be Asian American. The individual alienates herself from other Asian Americans, while simultaneously experiencing social alienation from her white peers. Only when the individual seeks to “acquire a political understanding of [her] social status” (Kim 1981: 138) does she enter into the next stage.

Greene (2008):

White Identification (WI), is a direct consequence of the increase in significant contact between the individual and white society. Individuals in this stage have the sense of being different from other people and not belonging anywhere. Their self-perception changes from neutral/positive to negative and they begin to internalize the belief systems of white society. Consequently, the individual fails to question what it means to be Asian American and alienates themselves from other Asian Americans, while simultaneously experiencing social alienation from their white peers. In order to move to the next stage, the individual must acquire a political understanding of social status.

This plagiarism is more flagrant that Gray’s and looks intentional. Greene suppresses a reference to Kim (1981) but paraphrases Kim’s content. Rufo also shows that Greene borrowed from Anthony Antonio’s paper, “Developing Leadership Skills for Diversity.”

Sherri Ann Charleston at work

Charleston’s 2009 dissertation reproduced many paragraphs from the work of her supervisor, Rebecca J. Scott, whose book, Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery, was published by Harvard University Press in 2005.

Charleston’s mix of paraphrase and unmarked direct quotation is shown below. The excerpt from her dissertation ends with note *75; material with yellow background is taken directly from Scott’s book (graphic from The Washington Free Beacon). Note that there are no quotation marks.

Here, in part, is Charleston’s source (Scott).

Charleston reproduced some Scott’s work verbatim, but without quotation marks, omitting phrases here and there, and giving a page reference in a footnote. Absent quotation marks, there is no way for the reader to know the source of what is on the page. Is Charleston paraphrasing Scott, or is this Scott’s writing? It is as if nobody ever told Charleston why quotation marks had been invented.

Doing the Charleston

The “lower standards of academic integrity” Rufo identified in work by Greene, Gay, and Charleston appear in different degrees. Poor training explains some of this, but, as Aaron Sibarium has shown, more than carelessness is evident in Charleston’s collaboration with her husband, LaVar Charleston. Since earning her degree, Sherri Ann Charleston has published one article, which lists her, her husband, and another scholar as authors. It appeared in The Journal of Negro Education (83.3), 2014.

It turns out that much of this paper was already published by her husband in 2012, as “A Qualitative Investigation of African Americans’ Decision to Pursue Computing Science Degrees: Implications for Cultivating Career Choice and Aspiration,” in The Journal of Diversity in Higher Education.

The three authors of the 2014 version worked together at the University of Wisconsin. The purpose of the 2014 article seems to have been to boost Sherri Ann Charleston’s standing at Harvard. Her husband and Jackson both have many publications; she now has one.

According to a complaint filed against the authors, the 2014 JNE article contained the same findings, method, and survey subject descriptions as those included in the 2012 article in JDHE. The MacIver Institute reports:

“The 2014 study used the same interview responses LaVar collected in a 2012 study to identify factors that impact African Americans’ success in pursuing computer science degrees. LaVar interviewed 37 individuals for that study. Jerlando, LaVar and Sherri Ann also claimed in their 2014 article to have interviewed 37 individuals, whose demographics were identical to those in the 2012 study. Both articles described the group as 22% undergraduate students, 48% graduate students, and 30% PhDs; 50% were at predominantly white schools, 42% were at historically black institutions, and 8% were at predominately black schools. The coincidences did not stop there.

“These were qualitative studies, so it was important to include direct quotes from the interviews in the articles. Several identical responses appeared in both articles verbatim. Although LaVar’s 2012 article was cited several times in the 2014 article, there was no mention that the data used in the 2014 study was the exact same data collected for the 2012 study.”

The problem goes beyond the writers to their editors. Any experienced academic would wonder how the editors of one journal (JNE) did not know that key data and case histories from a manuscript submitted to them had been published two years earlier in a similar journal (EDHE). Don’t editors read?

Sibarium has also shown that LaVar Charleston recycles his own work. In 2014 he published an essay in one of the journals above, JDHE, and the same essay in the Journal of Progressive Policy and Practice. Each editor presumably took the author at his word that the article had not been submitted elsewhere.

“This is an extraordinary case of serial misrepresentation and deception,” Peter Wood, the head of the National Association of Scholars and a former associate provost at Boston University, told Sibarium. “The closest analogy [to what LaVar Charleston did] would be someone who sells the same real estate to five different buyers, all of whom are unaware of the others.” It’s enough to sell the same property to two different buyers, I would say.

Writing in The Washington Free Beacon, Sibarium reported early in 2024 that a complaint filed against LaVar “implicates eight of Charleston’s publications, many of them coauthored, and accuses him of plagiarizing other scholars as well as duplicating his own work. It comes as the university is already investigating Charleston over a separate complaint filed in January, alleging that a 2014 study by him and his wife—Harvard University’s chief diversity officer, Sherri Ann Charleston—is a facsimile of a study he published in 2012.” (In The Journal of Negro Education [83.3], 2014, referred to above.)

Complaints about plagiarism have no effect, which is the result we would expect in the DEI universe. LaVar Charleston is Deputy Vice Chancellor for Diversity & Inclusion, Vice Provost and Chief Diversity Officer, and Elzie Higginbottom Director of the Division of Diversity, Equity, & Educational Achievement at the University of Wisconsin.

Tomorrow: Where DEI leads

The future of DEI looks a lot like DIE, at least at Columbia University, which is the leader in the anti-Israeli rage that DEI has produced. Khymani James, one of the school’s student leaders (center, below), proudly boasted that he would be “comfortable” killing Zionists. James calls himself “an educator.” They “don’t deserve to live,” he said of Zionists. He told the school’s president that she should be “grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists.”

My guess is that Khymani, in all his 20 years, has never killed anything. His bluster to one side, I wager that he would not have the guts to chop the head off a chicken, much less follow his Hamas heroes in beheading babies and raping girls. Has this boy wonder, with his nice nails, ever experienced physical violence?

James is not alone in his desire to wipe out Jews and make Israel vanish. Today many universities are filled with students calling for death to America, death to Israel, and especially death to Zionists. Do they know what death is, or what it means to kill? Hitler, who had a good idea of both, has many disciples marching on American campuses. They are widely quoted in newspapers and magazines, thirsting for the murderous power of Der Führer. They seem to think that the only degenerates he sought to destroy were Jews.

But what do they know about Hitler? This is not about cultural amnesia, as some have suggested. It’s about the suppression of inconvenient facts, among them the Holocaust. What do people say about those who fail to learn from history?

Like other academics, today’s DEI champions come to their neo-Nazism not only through their vast ignorance of history but through their neo-Marxism. It is no accident that Columbia, Harvard, Yale, and other expensive schools are centers of rage against Israel. These schools favor applicants who reflect the results of “critical pedagogy,” the teaching philosophy that has taken public education by storm and turned history inside out.

“Critical pedagogy” encourages student dissatisfaction with the existing social order. It is a pedagogy that teaches students to scorn the basics conditions of American life, including freedom and patriotism, and to idealize socialism. Wikipedia tells us that critical pedagogy emphasizes anti-racist, feminist, and queer theories, among other ideologies dear to neo-Marxists—the usual catalogue of victims, that is.

Covid-19 exposed the emptiness and the sexual dogmatism of elementary and high school teaching to parents who, before Zoom classes, had no idea what vapid rot passed for education in K-12 schools. Likewise, this year’s anti-Israeli demonstrations and encampments exposed what “critical pedagogy” has accomplished in colleges and universities.

Since neo-Marxist transformation is the woke academic goal, minor offenses such as plagiarism could hardly not matter. But perhaps there is a small sign of hope. Christine Rosen chronicled woke media’s rush to defend Gay from plagiarism.  

Rosen reports that the Associated Press dismissed plagiarism as a “new conservative weapon against colleges.” Against colleges? AP meant “against black women.” Charges of plagiarism could only be racist and misogynist. CNN blurted out that Gay’s work was “sort of more like copying other people’s writing without attribution” and was just “sloppy attribution,” not “stealing anyone’s ideas.” As far as CNN is concerned, “sort of more like” is not sloppy, and, anyway, dude, writing is just words. What are ideas, anyway?

Harvard also covered for Gay. It was a question of “duplicative language,” Harvard’s legal team claimed. “Duplicative” means redundant, unnecessarily repetitive, wasteful (as in spending). Gay’s wording wasn’t wasteful; it was stolen. But “duplicative” sounds like wordy writing or poor editing, not like plagiarizing.

“In the aftermath of the allegations,” Emily Crane wrote in the New York Post, Harvard concealed “a weeks-long investigation into whether Gay had used other researchers’ work without crediting it and hired a bulldog law firm to help cover it up.” Then Gay was allowed to add references and correct the publications in which she had plagiarized. At The New York Times, such correction is known as a “rowback.” A “rowback” obliterates the evidence of error, a change made without a trace (see Okrent). In Gay’s case, it’s more than evidence of error: it’s a long history of dishonesty that was made to disappear.

The equity box explains Gay’s publications and her spot at Harvard, but it could not help her when she was sitting before members of Congress. Not everybody there was going to believe her just because she was black, female, and rich. She later claimed that she fell into “a trap.” At the microphone, she had to explain herself to people who were not fans. This was something new to her. The trap, it turns out, was being asked what she thought. Unused to conversations with people who did not genuflect before her, she came off as smug, superior, and insular. How Harvard!

Harvard’s faculty has now been warned to avoid such traps. Last week Harvard’s Social Sciences dean, Lawrence Bobo, told faculty that they were to avoid “behaviors that plainly incite external actors—be it the media, alumni, donors, federal agencies, or the government—to intervene in Harvard’s affairs.” Such speech was “outside the bounds of acceptable professional conduct” and could “cross a line into sanctionable violations.”

Eyes on you, guys

What Bobo fears is not intervention but more scrutiny like the scrutiny Gay’s testimony brought to Harvard. Harvard’s cover-up of plagiarism, its hiring of plagiarists, and its attempt to disguise anti-Semitic violence as free speech, are operations once concealed in the DEI boxes that support Harvard’s faculty and staff. These operations preserved the school’s reputation. Dean Bobo doesn’t want them scrutinized. Thanks to Rufo, Rosen, Sibarium, and others like them, the scrutiny has begun. We are starting to see Harvard, Columbia, and other Ivy League schools for what they are, not for what they are reputed to be.

References

Crane, Emily. “Harvard’s diversity chief hit with 40 plagiarism accusations in wake of Claudine Gay scandal: report.”  https://nypost.com/2024/01/30/news/harvards-chief-diversity-officer-sherri-ann-charleston-accused-of-plagiarism-report/. January 30, 2024.

Lee, A. L. ‘Entirely Counterfeit’: Another Harvard Administrator In Hot Water Amid Claims of University’s DEI Chief Sherri Ann Charleston Committed Plagiarism.” February 3, 2024. https://atlantablackstar.com/2024/02/03/another-harvard-administrator-in-hot-water-amid-claims-of-universitys-dei-chief-committed-plagiarism/

MacIver Institute. “Three Current and Former UW-Madison Diversity Officials Accused of Academic Fraud.” February 1, 2024.https://www.maciverinstitute.com/2024/02/three-current-and-former-uw-madison-diversity-officials-accused-of-academic-fraud/

Okrent, Daniel. “The Public Editor; Setting the Record Straight (but Who Can Find the Record?).” The New York Times, March 14, 2004.

Polansky, David. “We argue about campus free speech because we forget what the university is for.” The Washington Examiner. May 28, 2024, p. 55-56.

Rosen, Christine. “Enola Gay, or, How the Media Imploded When It Came to Harvard’s President.” Commentary 157.2 (February 2024), 11-12. https://www.commentary.org/articles/christine-rosen/media-harvard-president/

Rufo, Christopher R. https://christopherrufo.com/p/harvards-plagiarism-problem

Schuessler, Jennifer, and Vimal Patel. “Harvard Clears Its President of ‘Research Misconduct’ After Plagiarism Charges.” The New York Times. Dec. 12, 2023. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/12/us/harvard-claudine-gay-plagiarism.html

Sibarium, Aaron. “Complaint Alleges University of Wisconsin DEI Czar, Husband of Harvard's DEI Chief, Has Decades-Long History of Research Misconduct.” The Washington Free Beacon, March 21, 2024. https://freebeacon.com/campus/complaint-alleges-university-of- wisconsin-dei-czar-husband-of-harvards-dei-chief-has-decades-long-history-of-research-misconduct/

Sibarium, Aaron. “Not Just Claudine Gay. Harvard's Chief Diversity Officer Plagiarized and Claimed Credit for Husband's Work, Complaint Alleges.” The Washington Free Beacon, January 30, 2024. https://freebeacon.com/campus/not-just-claudine-gay-harvards-chief-diversity-officer-plagiarized-and-claimed-credit-for-husbands-work-complaint-alleges/