UCLA School of Medicine’s diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) official, Natalie J. Perry allegedly plagiarized sections of her dissertation.
An investigation by the Daily Wire and City Journal found that Perry’s 2014 dissertation included text taken directly from other authors without citations.
The plagiarism allegations come as Perry was recently quoted as saying, “Do what’s right.”
According to Christopher Rufo of the City Journal, Perry’s career is “predicated on academic fraud. Her PhD dissertation plagiarized material from ten other papers, which she did not attribute or put in quotations.”
Much of the dissertation is a direct copy of another’s work.
The first three pages of the paper, titled, “Faculty Perceptions of Diversity at a Highly Selective Research-Intensive University,” contains verbatim content from other sources.
The investigators wrote, “Her third paragraph, without citation, lifts more than 100 words from the first page of a paper by Angela Locks, Sylvia Hurtado, Nicholas Bowman, and Leticia Oseguera.”
Perry’s original work in the paper is filled with spelling errors and was described by the investigators as “jumbled.”
The DEI official wrote, “The positionality of the participants informed the perspective on the origins of the commission. /in response to the needs of the varios [sic] stakeholders within the university, the commission addressed issues of diversity on the faculty, undergraduate, graduate, and university level.”
Similarly, Harvard University President Claudine Gay allegedly plagiarized portions of her Ph.D. dissertation.
Gay’s 1977 dissertation, “Taking Charge: Black Electoral Success and the Redefinition of American Policies,” contains “an entire paragraph nearly verbatim from a paper by Lawrence Bobo and Franklin Gilliam,” according to Rufo and journalist Chris Brunet.
“Gay repeats this violation of Harvard’s policy throughout the document, again using work from Bobo and Gilliam, as well as passages from Richard Shingles, Susan Howell, and Deborah Fagan, which she reproduces nearly verbatim, without quotation marks,” Rufo added.
American Faith reported that Sherri Ann Charleston, Harvard University’s Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer, was also accused of plagiarism.
According to a complaint, “Sherri Ann Charleston’s dissertation contains a lot of other scholars’ language verbatim without quotation marks. Parts of Charleston’s dissertation were published previously, word for word, by her advisor, Rebecca Scott, and others. Charleston will lift whole sentences and paragraphs from other scholars’ work without quotation marks, then add a correct reference somewhere in the footnote ending the long paragraph.”
A paper from 2014 takes content from a paper from 2012, which was authored by Charleston, her husband, and Jerlando Jackson, who now serves as the dean of Michigan State University’s College of Education.
The two papers contain identical student interviews, a violation of research ethics.
