Complaint: Columbia U. Medical School DEI Chief Plagiarized Dissertation, Including Material From Wikipedia
The complaint submitted to Iowa State and Columbia came without a name. The source brought up 60 possible plagiarized parts of the dissertation.
A new complaint accuses Alade McKen, Columbia University Medical School’s Diversity, Equity, Inclusion (DEI) chief, of plagiarizing his dissertation, including material from Wikipedia.
The complaint submitted to Iowa State and Columbia came without a name. The source brought up 60 possible plagiarized parts of the dissertation.
You know, it is not hard to attribute material, even when you paraphrase.
The alleged plagiarism covers 1/5 of the 163-page dissertation “‘UBUNTU’ I am because we are: A case study examining the experiences of an African-centered Rites of Passage program within a community-based organization.”
McKen submitted the dissertation to Iowa State University’s School of Education in 2021.
Two pages come from Wikipedia.
NEW: The chief diversity officer of Columbia University's medical school, Alade McKen, plagiarized extensively in his doctoral dissertation, lifting huge chunks of material without attribution.
Two pages in the dissertation come directly from Wikipedia.🧵https://t.co/V1cy1vOwe4 pic.twitter.com/UBpTyOWXXT
— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) February 29, 2024
Other pages lift paragraphs from well-known African scholars, including the University of Rwanda’s Chika Ezeanya-Esiobu, while making small tweaks to their prose, such as reordering certain clauses or changing a “were” to a “was.” pic.twitter.com/17VZpS8ozS
— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) February 29, 2024
Some of the scholars McKen allegedly plagiarized appear in the dissertation’s bibliography but not in in-text citations. Others, like Ezeanya-Esiobu, an expert on “indigenous knowledge” who has worked with numerous international agencies, aren’t cited at all. pic.twitter.com/qvbdoRJI3i
— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) February 29, 2024
McKen lifts pages worth of material from Ezeanya-Esiobu's 2019 chapter "A Faulty Foundation: Historical Origins of Formal Education Curriculum in Africa," published in the Frontiers in African Business Research book series.
— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) February 29, 2024
McKen lifts over five paragraphs from Archer-Cunningham’s 2007 journal article “Cultural Arts Education as Community Development: An Innovative Model of Healing and Transformation,” in New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education. pic.twitter.com/VmolDS6YAZ
— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) February 29, 2024
As with Ezeanya-Esiobu, McKen makes scant changes to the plagiarized text. One passage simply switches the order of two items in a bulleted list while keeping their contents identical, and without citing Archer-Cunningham’s paper in parentheses. pic.twitter.com/Ps6Lo4bT5O
— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) February 29, 2024
McKen also lifts a jargon-filled passage from LaGarrett King, a scholar of black education at the University of Buffalo who urges the “dismantling” of “white epistemic logic.” King is not cited anywhere in the dissertation. pic.twitter.com/mfonVy2E8T
— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) February 29, 2024
Another paragraph cribs from a 2002 paper by Michael Adeyemi and Augustus Adeyinka, “Some Key Issues In African Traditional Education,” published in the McGill Journal of Education. pic.twitter.com/EYqpUs9CFk
— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) February 29, 2024
Ezeanya-Esiobu told The Washington Free Beacon that someone could classify the passages pointed out as plagiarism.
McKen attended Binghamton University, Baruch College, and Iowa State University. He received his DEI certificate from Cornell in 2021. He also got a social justice certificate from Iowa State in 2017.
It’s getting to the point that plagiarism, a serious offense, won’t matter anymore because everyone has plagiarized.
It will be a big deal when someone doesn’t plagiarize.
Professor Jacobson has written many posts about DEI and Critical Race Theory infecting medical schools nationwide.
- Most people don’t realize how bad the situation is in medical schools, worse than in general higher ed
- Racially Discriminatory Youth Programs At Six Private NY Medical Schools Challenged by Equal Protection Project
- SUNY Buffalo Medical School Youth Program Racial Preferences Challenged By Equal Protection Project
- Critical race theory has arrived at medical schools. What could go wrong?
- “The incoming House of Representatives should hold hearings on the destructive racialization of medical schools and medicine”
- “The national alarm should be sounding over the racialization of medical school education”
- Almost All Of Top 25 Medical Schools Mandate Race-Based Training and Study, New CriticalRace.org Database Shows
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Comments
This could put him on the short list for new Harvard president.
Or on the short list for Michelle Obama’s running mate.
My self-flagellation session (for noticing an inconvenient truth) will be conducted immediately after I post my comment.
Comment. I’ve been noticing that there’s a high correlation between AA people and plagiarism. Could it be that all these AA people aren’t really the quality people we’ve been lead to believe?
Midwits not smart enough to get a real degree cheating to get one in a made up thing then gravitating to a made up job doing nothing useful. All ill give them credit for is recognizing the grift and climbing on that gravy train. Heck, Gay is even more of an intellectual lightweight than this clown but is still pulling in $900,000.
Obama and his wife came up with the cock and bull story that the young couple put their Ivy League law licenses in inactive status to save chicken feed license renewal fees. Ya, right!
I would love to see an investigation of the records of blacks passing the bar exam. We are getting a very open look at how stupid some of these supposed lawyers are. Something stinks to high heaven.
You have only the tip of the iceberg. I used to be a professor of medicine at our local medical school. We were told to accept clearly poor candidates for movement to fellowships and could not fail students. All had a special skin color. Then there was the case of a surgeon, head of a department, who could not operate. Multiple people were killed or maimed. He was not fired, because his father had marched with Martin Luther. My feeling is that the 3 haplogroups south of Sudan are incapable of achieving like the rest of the world.haplo
Its not stealing research if the material originated from another black, because that’s just a brother helping out another brother??
Why not forced to resign??
DEI/CRT is such a fraud. Academia needs to be purged of racialist frauds.
I very much doubt that Rwandan scholars see this quota mooch as a “bruthah”. They earned their way.
It’s all part of their collective consciousness. Word for word.
It’s almost as if the practitioners of DEI never faced any scrutiny, much less rigorous scrutiny, in their academic pursuits. /S
Almost?
Very nearly, just about, practically, more or less, not likely, almost never, none that we know of.
Scrutiny is racist.
If math is racist then sure, scrutiny is definitely racist.
I used to think that crime was the new black entitlement. Add plagiarism to the list.
An interesting subject for research, possibly for a dissertation, might be looking at the source material these upstanding scholars plagiarized to see how much of THAT was also plagiarized.
Advanced to the highest levels regardless of quality of work.
That’s “anti-racism”?
45 years ago, when I was called on to help operate an international hobby competition during the height of the Cold War, I was confused by the subject matter incompetence of one of the coaches of a foreign team. My mentor, a colonel who served in NATO, introduced me to the concept of a “political officer.” This was a person placed into one of the “coaching” positions of the foreign team by his government for reasons irrelevant to his competence. His actual job was to accompany the team overseas to prevent defections and to make sure that no team member expressed any derogatory sentiments about life under communism.
The parallels between communist political officers and DEI administrators are obvious to anyone who has ever seen this at work before. They are a parasite class whose entire job description is to be oppressive government proxies.
The parallels between communist political officers and DEI administrators are obvious to anyone who has ever seen this at work before. They are a parasite class whose entire job description is to be oppressive government proxies.
Excellent point.
I bet they could have a remake of “Moscow on the Hudson” using DIE as the communists.
What is this guy’s salary working in this worthless position?
I couldn’t find his current salary with Columbia University, but in 2021 when he was with Lehman College, his reported salary was $89,517. That was before he got his “Ph.D.” I would imagine he is being paid over $100k at Columbia.
That makes me want to projectile vomit.
Universities should offer a degree in plagiarism. If colleges award social justice certificates like this dude got a degree in plagiarism would be taking it to the next level.
Exactly where we are headed. The “dismantling” of “white epistemic logic.” It’s just an admission that black folk are dumber than white folk.
That’s the blackity-black genre of dissertation. My experiences being black. Composition is a white thing.
“I am shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!” — Captain Renault, as performed by Claude Rains in Casablanca, Warner Brothers, 1942, dir. Micahel Curtiz. (Note the citation – wasn’t so hard!)
Are you telling me another diversity hire mediocrity is a fraud? Having a DEI certification should be a detriment when looking for employment, but we live in a clown world.
Yes, but they seek employment in DEI positions. It’s like claiming that having murdered someone should be a dealbreaker on your résumé, but if your career path is among gangs and mafias, it suddenly isn’t true.
My company has been using the Wonderlic test for over a decade. Nothing pulls the curtains back on ‘professional credentials’ better than something like Wonderlic. I have seen PLENTY of applicants with an alphabet soup trailing their surname with incredibly impressive academic records, score in the low-teens, sometimes even in the single digits. We also have applicants submit a writing sample we collect through a series of long-form personal history questions (if an applicant can’t write about themselves in a compelling way, will they be able to write about anything in a compelling way?). There seems to be a reliable correlation between the Wonderlic scores and the quality of the writing sample.
The moral of the story is Academia will give degrees to anyone whose checks clear and who can fog a mirror. Buyer – and employer – beware.
I’m surprised that no authority or pressure group has said that such testing is racist and that your company can’t do it.
I believe in some states, companies have moved away from pre-employment testing because they’re afraid of facing the ‘it’s RACISSS’ warriors.
Well, OF COURSE it’s rayciss.
“The Wonderlic is an intelligence test that academic research has found to have an anti-Black bias since the 1970s.”
That’s why it’s no longer used to oppress blacks in (wait for it)… the NFL.
I just went to see the Wonderlic site and review the sample test out of curiosity. I am stunned that anyone would not be able to pass that. DIE candidates, not so much. I include the soft “science” majors in that classification.
That said, I have seen a good number of credentialed Ph.D.’s that could barely tie their own shoes (imagine my amusement when two department chairs and one Nobel prize winner were puzzling over the use of a slide projector).
P.S. Yes, I let them squirm. I was only a poor grad student…. LOL!
Jesus, Joseph, and Mary, the large university where I worked adopted “Turnitin” as a plagiarism detector nearly a decade ago. Running McKen’s dissertation through that, or another similar product, would most certainly have thrown up a bunch of red flags PDQ. This suggests McKen’s major professor and defense committee either couldn’t, or wouldn’t, check his work, particularly in the wake of the “Summer of Love,” his race, etc.
My tiny, backwoods high school uses it. Last year we had 3 seniors fail to graduate because they got caught plagiarizing a major assignment and that zero dropped them too low. Our graduating classes are around 25.
Why do my rural redneck kids have a higher standard than Columbia Medical School?
A university or major employer planning to hire a credentialed person for a DEI slot is obligated at this point to review the dissertation, publications, and major presentations for plagiarism. Not to do so could leave the university/employer open to charges of lack of due diligence in the hire.
“Plagiarism”, much like “per capita”, is just a term invented by White Supremacists to make People of Color look bad.
Well, to his credit, a lot of the material he used came from Wikipedia. That shows he must have spent many long laborious hours in deep, time consuming research.
Quoting Wikipedia is risky and bold: tomorrow, that same article may well say exactly the opposite of what it did when you used it.
Wait until AI gets to work. No thinking necessary at all.
“Plagarism” is just a concept invented by like some old dead white dudes.
When society allows you to liberate a random store’s TVs, jewelry, electronics, and fashions, what’s a bunch of words?
My four years in the Navy showed me that “POCs” ( read “black ) did a dine job of that on their own.
Fine ..
his defense
why should I have to work
The newcomers are even more emphatic about that.
as the best lawyer crump said
just change the language and black people are no longer criminals
“Shoplifters” are just “reparations collectors”.
now go to the doctors pilots and lawyers and see that they too are given diplomas etc under the same false pretenses
Someone photoshopped an “unhoused” “substance abuser’s” head on a torso dressed in a suit jacket. Look at those eyes and expression.
Columbia is woke joke.
Perhaps this is a hint for why all the literature on this general topic all sound the same. There just may not be many original thoughts out there. It is certainty a lot easier and surer to copy than to actually attempt to get real data with the risk that real data might invalidate one’s thesis.
“He received his DEI certificate from Cornell in 2021. He also got a social justice certificate from Iowa State in 2017.”
Here’s part of your problem here. These are not academic credentials. They are political credentials indicating skill in a highly dishonest field.
If that’s what you want, don’t be surprised if that’s what you get.
Wow! A bona fide Political Officer, and not even bothering to hide it.
Looking at his LinkedIn account, you can get some insight into his own writing skill.
About
I am self-motivated, detail-oriented, and a fast learner. Coupled with excellent communication skills I have demonstrated patience, loyalty, honesty, and dependability through various job experiences and activities. My experiences have been desirably “hands on,” thus I have a working knowledge of working with people and the community.
Well, at least he knows how to turn Clippy on and listen to his advice.
Maybe “white epistemic logic” is what demands proper attribution and McKen read King’s language as blanket permission to “lift” the passage from him.
What is a “justice certificate?”
He sounds as educated as a ten year old.
Oddly, I got a Certificate when I was 10 from The Boy Scouts for something or other. Maybe I can get a job pulling $100k in a made up job
It’s one of those “everybody gets a trophy” award, but only for POCs.
Its not plagiarism, its just amplifying black voices. sarc/
Probably the result of mail in ballots…
This is a dissertation for a school of Education. I looked at some Ed School doctoral dissertations written by employees of a school district where I used to teach. There was only one dissertation that made a statistically sound analysis of comparing certain education practices. Most of the dissertations stayed away from statistics and were nothing but stories- stories that stayed away from something that could be replicated. Even if he hadn’t plagiarized a word, his “dissertation” would have still been dreck.
Of course, because it was a doctoral degree from an Ed school.
When you need to be called a “doctor” but don’t want to do the work, be an Ed.D.
Whereas if you want a military rank, learn to fry chicken.
Look at JillBilly Biden’s EdD “dissertation”. It’s written at a sixth grade level in crayon on construction paper. The “i’s” are all dotted with hearts and the language is in no way equivalent to a standard higher doctoral degree dissertation.
Why this is just a surprising as when Claudine gay did it
Had I tried to use Wikipedia in my PhD, I would have been laughed out my program.
“Oh Andrei! You’ve lost another submar . . I mean DEI officer.” — Bastardized from “The Hunt For Red October.”
Do these so called scholars ever write about anything but being black
There is no doubt that American higher education is highly infested with such phony scholars
I can tell you, from personal experience, that most of higher ed is filled with useless admins, and the few actual academicians have little or no real life experiences.
I wonder if he even has a copy of Reference Manager.
From WIKIPEDIA? Just how lazy is this guy?
Bucking for a promotion, no doubt. To Prezzy of Harvard, or the US?