The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s chief diversity officer, LaVar Charleston, is facing scrutiny regarding his academic work. According to the Washington Free Beacon, it has been revealed that Charleston has had two encounters with the justice system, one of which involved a 2011 felony charge where he was accused of attempting to strangle a police officer.
Furthermore, a complaint has been filed against Charleston, alleging that eight of his publications either plagiarized previous work or were presented as new when they were actually recycled content. This accusation comes after a previous complaint in January, which claimed that a publication from Charleston and his wife, Sherri Ann Charleston, who serves as Harvard’s chief diversity officer, was essentially identical to one published in 2012.
“This is an extraordinary case of serial misrepresentation and deception,” said Peter Wood, the head of the National Association of Scholars and a former associate provost at Boston University. “The closest analogy would be someone who sells the same real estate to five different buyers, all of whom are unaware of the others.”
The report highlighted that two papers published in separate journals in 2014 were nearly identical.
“It is academic misconduct to publish essentially the same paper twice with no acknowledgment of the duplication,” said Alexander Riley, a sociologist at Bucknell University. “It seems fairly clear that Charleston is gaming the system in order to get more on his CV than is merited by the amount of research he has actually done.”
“The two 2014 papers do indeed appear to be two versions of the same paper,” Riley said. “I don’t see the two as distinct from one another in any substantive way.”
Large portions of Charlsteon’s doctoral thesis from 2010 can be identified verbatim in works published in 2012, 2014, 2016, and 2022.
”I know of no other cases where a researcher has simply repeated his dissertation findings like a broken record for twelve years,” Wood said.
Lee Jussim, a psychology professor at Rutgers University, stated that the likelihood of individuals producing identical quotes for numerous studies is comparable to that of monkeys typing on typewriters reproducing Hamlet. Additionally, Charleston, who earns an annual salary of $280,000, is responsible for supervising student tutoring.
Complaint Alleges University of Wisconsin DEI Czar, Husband of Harvard’s DEI Chief, Has Decades-Long History of Research Misconduct
LaVar Charleston—who once assaulted a police officer—passed off old studies as new research at least five times
The chief diversity officer of the… pic.twitter.com/DGjYZnUGAH
— Owen Gregorian (@OwenGregorian) March 21, 2024
I am laughing my ass off. All those black “””academics””” are just thieves, not smart enough to realize they will be found out! From “hahvahd” president to MOST new hires in exalted positions with huge paychecks, banking on their skin color, and diplomas given to them without any real presence in the schools, like “TRAITOR 44” in Columbia U. None of them really did anything of value, most were lawless thugs, and all were and still are worthless.