Recycling research in DEI – andMad magazine
Here’s another case alleging research misconduct by a DEI academician:
The chief diversity officer of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, LaVar Charleston, who also teaches at the university’s school of education, has a decades-long track record of research misconduct, according to a complaint filed with the university on Wednesday and a Washington Free Beacon analysis. That misconduct includes presenting old studies as new research, which he has done at least five times over the course of his career.
The complaint, which was filed anonymously, 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. …
Charleston also appears to have recycled findings and interview responses from his 2010 dissertation, which involved a survey of black computer science students, in four subsequent papers: the 2012 and 2014 studies that were the subject of the previous complaint, as well as two additional studies published in 2016 and 2022.
Each study is framed as a novel survey addressing a gap in the scholarly literature. None cite Charleston’s dissertation or indicate that they are drawing on previously published material.
Plagiarism-detection software has been around since the early years of the 21st century. But I don’t know if and when its use became commonplace in evaluating academic hires or new research by established professors. I also don’t know whether these programs would catch what Charleston is alleged to have done, which is a kind of self-plagiarism.
I do know what it reminds me of, though. When I was a child my brother used to get Mad magazine, which I would peruse, and even in early adulthood I’d occasionally come across it. Thus it was that in 1973 my then-boyfriend (and husband-to-be) happened on an issue that contained what we both considered a clever and funny spoof on academic writing. My boyfriend was a Ph.D. student at the time and so the whole thing struck a responsive chord with both of us, and over the decades we’d sometimes have occasion to remember the piece.
And so, by the magic of the internet, I’ve managed to find it again. You can view it here. You can even read it if you enlarge the graphic. It’s called “Rewriting Your Way to a Ph.D.,” and here’s an excerpt:
It should be obvious to anyone with an ounce of connivance in his soul that breezing through school without ever cracking a book is a cinch if one remembers two simple facts: (1) The first theme you wrote in second grade can be rewritten to fill every assignment you’ll be saddled with later on, merely by adding some appropriate big words and twisting the subject matter around a little! And (2) teachers seldom read the trash turned in by students anyway! All that really counts is filling lots and lots of pages with words, thus “proving” that you’ve emerged with a clear grasp of whatever it is you’re supposed to be grasping.
The writer proceeds to show how it’s done, with several series’ of essays, including a sequence beginning with a second-grader’s report on his summer vacation visit to his uncle’s pig farm and progressing to “A Qualitative Analysis of Swine Vision As It Pertains to Human Behavioral Response in Osborne County, Kansas” by the same author.
Life imitates art.
Once in college, the main question was one on which I could remember only one thing. So I wrote that down. Then rewrote it. Kept rewriting it until I’d filled enough blue book pages.
Got an A. So I’d guess the theory is sound.
In the brave new world of generative AI, plagerism will become almost impossible to detect, if you consider using things like Chat GPT to generate text a form of plagerism (which I guess it baiscally is in the sense that it’s taking credit for work that is not one’s own).
There is an old saying that applies to these Didn’t Earn It “Scholars.”
“If it isn’t worth doing, it isn’t worth doing well.”
Our universities have become academic Potemkin villages.
Strictly apocryphal (and predating d-e-i):
Many researchers endeavor to reach the LPU: the Least Publishable Unit.
The idea is to infuse the smallest amount of genuinely new material into what is otherwise a compendium of older, already-published results, but sufficient to consider the resulting journal article new research, publishable on its own.
(That way, the researcher can add more to his/her list of published journal articles, having rationed the new research so it may be spread among more submissions.)
That Mad magazine piece is very clever and well done!
And of course neo’s husband had a PhD. No pedestrian Undergrad plebe would be worthy nor capable of winning her hand! I’m sure their son is off the charts smart!
Given the overwhelming preponderance of leftists in academia, it is highly likely that this is the tip, of the tip, of the tip of the iceberg that is academic plagiarism.
It is hardly a surprise to learn that those who embrace the DEI scam exhibit a willingness to lie. Plagiarism is simply one form of the lying in which the intellectually dishonest ‘academic’ engages.
Like the unrepentant criminal, they are incapable of real shame. As shameful regret requires a moral conscience and, if even a vestige remained of one, they wouldn’t have been able to continue to falsely claim credit. Multiple instances of plagiarism is what reveals this not to be a simple mistake.
So embarrassment at being caught is their only regret. They are part of the “indecent race” of men and deserve expulsion from all contact with the decent.
A society regains its moral conscience by insisting that certain violations are beyond the pale, then imposing consequence proportionate to grave offenses.
Any society that disregards intellectual dishonesty among its academics is a society that not only cannot advance but will decline into history’s ash heap.
Rufus T. Firefly:
Yep, son and ex-husband Ph.D.s. However, although my ex was a professor for a little while, he hated it and left to go out into the Real World. As did our son, who never was a professor.
But I never was especially impressed by academic credentials. I have impeccable ones, but I learned early on that there are plenty of dumb people in academia and plenty of smart ones who never got those credentials. It’s a funny thing.
More importantly, my ex has a great sense of humor and is smart. Same for Gerard, who was never particularly big on academia.
Wow, that’s amazing your son also has a PhD. When you three gather in a room you’ve got more degrees than a thermometer!
Thanks for posting this, Neo! I will explore the website later. I have many memories of the drollness and great comic art of old Mad magazines.
Speaking of magazine archives, “Spy” magazine is also online, https://archive.org/details/SpyMagazine/Spy%20Magazine%201986-1998/1986/1986-10-OCT/
I was a subscriber right up until the very end. They did some great reporting and humor pieces. And, of course, they had their years long battle with Donald Trump regarding his hand size.
Here is an even more legible archive of Spy: https://books.google.com/books?id=dInX4BRTlQ8C&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false
I remember that bit in Mad Magazine. I though of it when I recycled a paper I wrote on German economic malaise for several different classes.
Usually they do read, but perhaps not always. I took a Master’s level class with a prof in his 70s who, I was told, was teaching only because his retirement investments had gone bad and he had to teach additional years to get an acceptable pension. This was his last class before he finally retired- or was it retired for a second and final time. He never bothered to return our final paper. The assumption we made was that for the last assignment before his retirement, he never even bothered to read the papers we had submitted. Previously, he had made cogent comments on our papers.
Some months after he retired, I ran into him at Lowes. Cordial conversation. What the heck.
There used to be a debate about morality and ethics. Religious folk said they arise out of religion and without religion they would fade away. Humanists, of whom Iaasic Asimov was a leading light, claimed that the qualities could exist outside the Religious realm.
Academia, now void of religion save Wiccans and Muslims who share the quality of flexible morality, seems to be proving the Humanists to be full of shit.
@ Rufus > “When you three gather in a room you’ve got more degrees than a thermometer!”
LOL – reminds me of the old line about Jefferson dining alone.
I used to have a similar joke about AesopSpouse, who got his BA in history, then a JD, and finally acquired a BS in engineering when he went into patent writing.
So I call him a lawyer in the third-degree.
And don’t forget what Tom Lehrer recommended in this song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXlfXirQF3A
I am never forget the day I heard the secret of success in mathematics!
There’s PhDs and then there’s PhDs. The STEM PhDs in general are not awarded for having taken classes which could be passed by recycling essays, though it is possible to get a master’s that way in some disciplines at some institutions. In general STEM PhDs are awarded for having done original research, and putting together words in a different way is not sufficient to meet that requirement.
Or perhaps we should say “were” because Didn’t Earn It has throughly parasitized STEM over the last 20 years.
Like the SATs after renorming it may not be valid to compare STEM PhDs awarded before 2010 – 2020 with those awarded after 2010 – 2020.
1. A typical state system should have few public institutions enfranchised to award research degrees, first professional degrees, or master’s degrees in academic subjects. Two might be the mean number.
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2. It should be a matter of law that instructional divisions of state institutions follow a fairly stereotyped pattern. You have an academic provost under whom there are two or three deans (one for the undergraduate core curriculum, one for the arts and sciences, and (perhaps) one for the performing and studio arts). You have one or two provost for occupational schools each with a dean: business, teacher training, nursing, sports and recreation, counseling & social work, police & security, (non-business) administration, public policy, communications, public health, clinical laboratory sciences, agriculture, engineering, medicine, and one of a menu of treating professions allied with medicine, &c.
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3. Within any institution authorized to issue research degrees, the instructional units which might so offer are properly limited to the faculties of arts and sciences, engineering, medicine, clinical laboratory sciences, business, and public policy.
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4. Any state institution wishing to offer a degree or certificate program of any kind would have to limit its offerings to those within its statutorily prescribed book of business and also seek approval from a commission of the state board of regents ‘ere establishing the program. Other public institutions could offer a reply to such requests making the case that the program was offered elsewhere in the state and the market was saturated.
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5. The state comptroller or like official would conduct annual audits of degree programs offered at the institutions of the state and close programs which were persistently undersubscribed (with the exception of those programs which were the depository for the whole state system).
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6. Any program established and maintained at a state institution would have to fit the title and capsule description prescribed in a glossary enacted into law by the state legislature.
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As a practical matter, a typical teaching institution will seldom have the clientele to justify the maintenance more than about a dozen academic degree programs and two dozen or so occupational degree programs. Victimology programs will never be present because they are patronage programs for favored political interests; students have no interest in them. (Truly. The best subscribed victimology program is women’s studies, in which about 1,200 baccalaureate degrees are awarded in a typical year; that’s less than one per baccalaureate granting institution).
While it’s not surprising that all these academic DEI officers are being found to have committed plagiarism, in their defense, there are only so many ways one can say “white men are evil racists and the cause of all the world’s ills”.
(2) teachers seldom read the trash turned in by students anyway!
I once took an econ class, in which I suspected the professor was not actually reading the work handed in. So, in one paper, I foolishly added the sentence, “On the other hand, she had a wart.” It came back marked with a bright red ??!!!, and a mediocre grade. So, maybe they read more than we suspect.
When I was an undergraduate, I majored in Biology and minored in English. If I had to write a paper in any of my biology classes, it was always a different paper. For my English classes I took a paper I had written about the popular American women writers of the 19th century and re-wrote it. I ended up submitting it in four different classes.
In honor of Tom Lehrer, whose songs I enjoyed as I grew up in the ’50s, I offer his musical commentary on the subject of plagiarism.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXlfXirQF3A&ab_channel=themisfitoddity