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April 22, 2024

Another day and another plagiarism story out of academia

By Andrea Widburg

Once it emerged that Harvard’s former president, Claudine Gay, was a serial plagiarizer, conservatives started looking for other examples of plagiarizing in the halls of America’s colleges and universities. It turns out that this kind of search is akin to shooting fish in a barrel: You cannot fire without hitting something. The latest case is the DEI official at UCLA’s School of Medicine, an institution that’s completely abandoned itself to the worst excesses of DEI, CRT, and other Democrat madness. And as is so often the case, the culprit is a black woman.

The Daily Wire has the story:

UCLA has a DEI program called “Cultural North Star,” and at the medical school, it is led by Natalie J. Perry. Her official biography says her job is to “embed our aspirational Cultural North Stars [sic] value [sic] in our organizational DNA.” UCLA honored Perry last month for teaching students to “do what’s right,” saying her “empathy and radical listening” are to thank for her “success as an educator and a leader.”

According to a Daily Wire and City Journal investigation, however, Perry’s academic career is based on fraud. Perry has published a single paper, a 2014 Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Virginia about how colleges should create larger DEI programs. An analysis of the paper found it ridden with the worst sort of plagiarism, reproducing large swaths of text directly from several other authors, without citations.

Image: Screengrab of Natalie J. Perry’s UCLA Medical School page.

Perry is the latest, not the only. Just looking at Harvard, one finds example after example of plagiarism:

There’s a common thread binding many of these corrupt academics. Most (although not all, as Professor Panigrahy shows) are black women. Indeed, leftists are attacking Christopher Rufo, who has been reviewing dissertations, for being racist because of the many black women he’s exposed as plagiarizers. However, as Rufo explains, the database he and his colleagues are searching includes white and Asian scholars. It’s just the black women who keep popping up as cheaters:

Faced with this unpleasant reality, angry Democrat academics are contending that plagiarism is no longer a crime (just as shoplifting is food liberation, not a criminal act when blacks do it):

Yesterday, I wrote a post about how Democrats have deliberately inculcated sociopathic values into black Americans. I focused generally on criminal activity (I’ve got two more examples—here and here), but nodded to the problem we see with high-profile, college-educated blacks in the media, politics, and academia.

It’s worth pointing out that, at the upper echelons of Democrat-voting blacks, the problem of sociopathy seems to be most deeply rooted in the women. The list of black women who don’t believe the rules should apply to them is seemingly endless of late: Natalie J. Perry, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, Joy Reid, Stacey Abrams, Letitia James, Fani Willis,  Tiffany Henyard, LaToya Cantrell, and all the academic plagiarists. These women make the rules up as they go along, whether for themselves (i.e., Claudine Gay) or for others (i.e., Joy Reid, who hasn’t violated laws, regulations, or moral standards but insists that they shouldn’t apply to people who look like her.)

I can’t blame any of these women for thinking as they do. They’ve been told that they are double victims of both racism and misogyny, even as they are highly evolved beings who are fully capable of creating any standards that are necessary to rise above the systemic pressures they face. If the pond in which I swam (e.g., the K-12 education system, academia, the entertainment world, and the political world) told me all those things, I would take them to heart, too, and act accordingly.

This is a depressing post, so I’ll leave you with a more uplifting, or at least amusing, approach to plagiarism when it happens on the left, in the form of this 1953 gem from Tom Lehrer about mathematical plagiarism in the Soviet Union:

 

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