Harvard ‘s Chief Diversity Officer Sherri Ann Charleston has been accused of plagiarism in her dissertation less than a month after former university President Claudine Gay resigned amid backlash over her response to antisemitism on campus and plagiarism allegations.
Charleston has been accused of lifting other scholars’ language without proper attribution in her 2009 dissertation, according to a Washington Free Beacon investigation based on an anonymous complaint filed to Harvard recently. The complaint also accuses Charleston of lifting work from her husband’s academic study. The Washington Examiner has not been able to investigate the claims independently.
The complaint contains 40 examples of plagiarism, accusing her of lifting text that was previously published by her adviser, Rebecca Scott, word for word. The complaint accuses Charleston of plagiarizing Scott’s “Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery” in her dissertation from 2009, “The Fruits of Citizenship: African Americans, Military Service, and the Cause of Cuba Libre,” which was submitted to the University of Michigan.