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Top Diversity Official at Columbia University Medical School Accused of Plagiarism

Top Diversity Official at Columbia University Medical School Accused of Plagiarism

“The passages you shared can definitely be classified as plagiarism”

This has been uncovered so many times in recent weeks that it’s hard to keep track of the cases.

Campus Reform reports:

Columbia medical center DEI head plagiarized Ph.D. dissertation, complaint alleges

The leading Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) officer at a major New York City medical center has recently been accused of plagiarizing nearly a fifth of his Ph.D. dissertation.

Citing a recently submitted anonymous complaintThe Washington Free Beacon on Feb. 29 wrote that Alade McKen “plagiarized extensively in his doctoral dissertation, lifting entire pages of material, without attribution, from sources that include Wikipedia.”

The Free Beacon shared a side-by-side comparison of excerpts from McKen’s Iowa State University doctoral dissertation that closely resemble the work of other authors and Wikipedia.

“A complaint filed with Columbia yesterday implicates approximately a fifth of McKen’s 163-page dissertation,” Free Beacon reporter Aaron Sibarium posted to X the same day as the article’s publication. “Over two of those pages are a near-verbatim facsimile of Wikipedia’s entry on ‘Afrocentric education,’ which McKen never cites.”

McKen’s dissertation, entitled, “‘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,” was written for a Ph.D. program on education, social, and cultural studies at Iowa State in 2021.

The complaint accuses McKen of plagiarizing more than 30 authors for his dissertation, with some listed in a bibliography but none apparently included for in-text citations.

One of the scholars that McKen allegedly plagiarized from, Chika Ezeanya-Esiobutold the Free Beacon that she found the evidence supporting the allegations to be convincing.

“The passages you shared can definitely be classified as plagiarism,” she told the outlet.

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Comments

He’s black stealing material from other blacks.

So that’s just amplifying black voices, according to DEI. sarc/

JackinSilverSpring | March 20, 2024 at 6:33 pm

Hey, that still leaves four-fifths as his own./sarc

Dolt plagiarized from WIKIPEDIA? That’s the first place that any academic integrity software checks! The Ivies must be so used to cheating that they don’t even bother checking for it now—they just expect that everyone is doing it and accept it, if you are a minority degree-seeking candidate. If you are white, watch out.

Are there any DEI officers that did NOT commit academic fraud to get their credentials?

    PostLiberal in reply to markm. | March 21, 2024 at 10:10 pm

    It’s certainly beginning to seem like that. Which makes DEI appear to be nothing more than a “jobs for the boys (and girls): program. Call DEI “sinecures for the stupid.”

    (Someone who plagiarizes from Wikipedia can’t be accused of being brilliant. 🙂 )

    The more that such academic frauds are found among DEI officials, the more that DEI is shown to be a scam that should be done away with.