Are black women disproportionately involved in plagiarism in academia, or there a “witch hunt” against them?
One side speaks:
Chris Rufo & his allies are leading a plagiarism witch hunt and creating the false impression that Black women disproportionately plagiarize. Universities like Harvard must take back control of the narrative and conduct plagiarism reviews of all faculty.https://t.co/Iw6tBYKHKg pic.twitter.com/DoIYM2cjJl
— Maya Bodnick (@MayaBodnick) April 9, 2024
“Witch hunt” is an interesting term. It harks back to the Salem witch trials – and similar proceedings that were far more widespread in Europe than in the US – that were prosecuted for hundreds of years starting in the 1400s:
In the early modern period, from about 1400 to 1775, about 100,000 people were prosecuted for witchcraft in Europe and British America. Between 40,000 and 60,000 were executed. The witch-hunts were particularly severe in parts of the Holy Roman Empire. Prosecutions for witchcraft reached a high point from 1560 to 1630, during the Counter-Reformation and the European wars of religion. Among the lower classes, accusations of witchcraft were usually made by neighbors, and women made formal accusations as much as men did. Magical healers or ‘cunning folk’ were sometimes prosecuted for witchcraft, but seem to have made up a minority of the accused. Roughly 80% of those convicted were women, most of them over the age of 40. In some regions, convicted witches were burnt at the stake.
There is no dearth of theories (including feminist ones) to explain what was going on and why, and who were the targets and why. There is little doubt that most of the people convicted of witchcraft were not even attempting to practice witchcraft, although there are theories (highly disputed) that at least a small number may have been part of some sort of pagan witchcraft cult.
However, plagiarism and related academic deceptions are real. And they are usually quite provable, and not by such ancient rituals as trial by water. And there is little question that there has been a recent spate of solid accusations of plagiarism against a number of black female academics:
Right-wing activists have levied new plagiarism accusations on a monthly basis. In Dec., conservative activist Christopher F. Rufo and Christopher Brunet reported on accusations against former Harvard University President Claudine Gay. Then, in Jan., the conservative Washington Free Beacon covered a complaint filed against Sherri A. Charleston, Harvard’s Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer. In Feb., anonymous bad actors accused Harvard Extension School administrator Shirley R. Greene of plagiarism. And finally in March, Rufo reported on allegations against Harvard assistant professor of Sociology Christina J. Cross.
Conservatives have emphasized that all four of the accused are Black women.
“Let’s not ignore the pattern,” Rufo wrote on X. “This is the fourth black female CRT/DEI scholar to be accused of plagiarism at Harvard.”
Others have pounced on these allegations, arguing that they provide evidence these women were diversity hires in the first place. U.S. Senator J.D. Vance (R-OH) took to X and argued that Gay “got her job not through merit, but because she checked a box.”
Republicans pounce!
More:
Clearly, the right has an agenda: crafting a narrative that Black academics, particularly women and those who study race, disproportionately plagiarize.
The author goes on to mention a bunch of white academics who have been accused of plagiarism. I have little doubt that white people in academia also commit plagiarism and I doubt anyone is suggesting otherwise. Several issues come to mind, however. The first is how common plagiarism is in academia as a whole. Is the entire enterprise riddled with it, or is it rare? With recent advances in plagiarism-detecting software, it wouldn’t be all that hard to find out not just the numbers of accusations of plagiarism (which could be skewed in various ways), but the actual incidence of plagiarism. Is anyone doing that sort of research?
Also at issue are the racial/sexual demographics of the problem: are women disproportionately involved (in comparison to their percentages in academia)? Are black people disproportionately involved? Is any other race group disproportionately involved? Are professors in certain fields disproportionately involved? Are professors at a certain level of achievement disproportionately involved? Are professors hired during certain years disproportionately involved?
All of these are interesting questions and I don’t know whether anyone is researching the answers. The Crimson article I cited at the beginning of this post makes a similar suggestion (after the author has blasted the right, of course) and I agree with her suggestion.
Meanwhile, in regard to the latest person accused of plagiarism, economist Lisa D. Cook, we have this:
Lisa D. Cook is one of the world’s most powerful economists. She taught economics at Harvard University and Michigan State University and served on the Obama administration’s Council of Economic Advisers before being appointed, in 2022, to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, which controls the interest rates and money supply of the United States.
Despite her pedigree, questions have long persisted about her academic record. Her publication history is remarkably thin for a tenured professor, and her published work largely focuses on race activism rather than on rigorous, quantitative economics. Her nomination to the Fed required Vice President Kamala Harris to cast a tie-breaking vote; by contrast, her predecessor in the seat, Janet Yellen, now Treasury secretary, was confirmed unanimously.
The quality of her scholarship has also received criticism. Her most heralded work, 2014’s “Violence and Economic Activity: Evidence from African American Patents, 1870 to 1940,” examined the number of patents by black inventors in the past, concluding that the number plummeted in 1900 because of lynchings and discrimination. Other researchers soon discovered that the reason for the sudden drop in 1900 was that one of the databases Cook relied on stopped collecting data in that year. The true number of black patents, one subsequent study found, might be as much as 70 times greater than Cook’s figure, effectively debunking the study’s premise.
Cook also seems to have consistently inflated her own credentials.
In the case of Cook, it seems plagiarism is just a part of it. And she’s not just any old professor, she’s been a star for quite some time in terms of appointments to prestigious positions in the world of economics.
is maya real,
https://www.wgbh.org/news/local/2023-07-28/maya-bodnick-passed-her-freshman-year-at-harvard-so-did-chatgpt
she does seem to a roving train of category error,
At some point in time our academic community made the decision to push people into positions of power and authority even though they didn’t meet the standards. When did this happen? And was it a policy sent down from on high? Or was there a gradual acceptance of the idea that pushing unqualified ethnic minorities was doing the right thing?
I remember many of my old profs. They were whip smart, worked like Trojans, and held both themselves and their students to high standards. I never imagined that their successors would turn out to betray those standards.
We know what has happened. Can the academic system ever lift itself pout of this gutter it’s fallen in to? I’m not optimistic.
In evolutionary terms a trait, which has become nonessential for survival, is selected out of the species. For example, for some fish in the lightless depths of the ocean their eyes become small and may not function at all.
So if plagiarism is not a deterrent for academic success, it stands to reason that more academics will plagiarize. They will optimize their work output to things which will actually make a difference in their careers.
I don’t know that this applies moreso to black female academics, but it is reasonable that in today’s DEI climate they would be among the least likely to be penalized for plagiarism.
Until today when conservatives have wised up and are checking the receipts.
“Maya Bodnick @MayaBodnick
Chris Rufo & his allies are leading a plagiarism witch hunt and creating the false impression that Black women disproportionately plagiarize. Universities like Harvard must take back control of the narrative and conduct plagiarism reviews of all faculty.”
I fully support every university conducting plagiarism reviews of all of its faculty. I can’t think of a more effective way to trash and expose en masse, our current academic’s illegitimacy. Useful analysis of the fallout would be to see what percentage of black academics have engaged in plagiarism versus the percentage of other races’ academics. For every Thomas Sowell who earned his degrees, I’d bet that at least 10 other black ‘academics’ have cheated. The incompetent White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre is not an anomaly on the left.
And clearly, Bodnick is a “true believer’, a “useful idiot”… but I repeat myself.
Oh, I don’t know. Dunking them in a Pond to see if they survive sounds good to me. The ones that do are clearly guilty, so them fire them.
I will say a lot of Trumps’ prosecutors are Black Woman.
a modest proposal, lisa cook is rather striking in this regard, as she didn’t even interpret the data she plagiarized correctly, does anybody vet these papers, rhetorical, the cited sources said the reverse of what she asserted,
I know the same sense of due diligence seems to apply to Dr Jills’ exegesis of error, that she called a phd,
Any sort-of-informed person has heard the names of very influential and/or famous economists.
Don’t know about anyone else, but until today I had never heard of Maya Bodnick.
I seriously doubt she is “one of the world’s most powerful economists.”
Not sure how one would define what is a “powerful economist” but I will surmise it’s someone of great influence within the realm of academic/financial economics and government.
I don’t know if black women are more likely than white women or men to engage in plagiarism, but one cannot just toss aside the notion that blacks in academia (esp.those in non-STEM fields) are given the benefit of the doubt in hiring; clearly they are.
Perhaps any shortcomings they display are swept under the carpet to appease the DEI (Stalinist thought and speech control) commissars.
she’s a fresh faced harvard sophomore I thought they waited a few years, befoe they embarassed themselves so readily, the npr interview was the first up on the list,
I suspect young Maya there…a pro-Palestine lady of Jewish heritage…won’t like it if that “review all the faculty” rock gets turned over.
So…hell yeah…review all the faculty.
Let’s expose the absolute vacuousness of & lack of veracity in modern liberal academia. Burn the damn barn down & get the rats out.
It’s possible, of course, that only DEI true believers are being investigated for plagiarism. Someone should examine that question. However, I don’t think “everybody does it” would be a very effective argument. If everybody does it, our academic establishments are even more compromised than we already thought they were.
Hmm. A PHd dissertation on plagiarism in phd dissertations?
Is the problem too many phd wannabes and not enough avenues of research for them all let alone the affirmative action contributions?
they used to call this ‘epistemic closure’ one of those phrases they came up to shield one from reality,
https://twitter.com/MayaBodnick/status/1777716976061915563
there is a ouroboros quality to the thing, remember when they cooked up ‘reality based community out of thin air, with Dr Cook, she does have a hand in steering economic policy toward the shoals
now this may be a phase, after a long interval naomi wolf came to cold realities of things, but the density of the bubble they exist in, is troubling,
If she were a law student she would know not to ask a question she doesn’t know the answer to. I’ll bet there are a lot of people who don’t want to know the answer. Party on Garth.
From the Maya Bodnick article (7:52 miguel cervantes comment)
Au contraire, the University did NOT stick its head in the sand. When the NY Post published plagiarism allegations about Claudine Gay, Harvard threatened legal action, saying that plagiarism accusations were bogus. Harvard had to back down when the plagiarism accusations were well documented.
Witch hunt? I thought that academic papers were always subject to review; in particular those that are submitted to meet a requirement.
Sort of like scientific papers were routinely reviewed before global warming.
It hardly qualifies as a witch hunt if plagiarism is found in the course of an accepted practice. But, that is not the point, is it?
Victim status has become a weapon of racialists. They cloak themselves in it, and employ the rhetoric of victim hood like a spear. But the rhetoric is becoming a bit dulled through over use.
On another level Hamas, using the population of Gaza as their surrogates, have been very successful at selling this concept to excuse anything and everything in the minds of vapid souls who depend on the effluent from the daily media for their view of the world. That does not excuse the likes of Biden and Blinken who are in a position to see the truth.
DEI is holy writ to them, so one can only speak heresy, I think Rufo is the last major deep challenger against Academic circles in 70 years, thats why they thrash like the Sandworms inside the water tank,
as o’keefe noted in his most recent expose, re Fed employees like Aurel Hizmo leftist attitudes are nearly at critical mass,
btw where has Bill Ackman, gone, to the tune of ‘where have you gone Joe DiMaggio
I don’t know about black female faculty, but as the academy has become a gynocracy, that may skew the statistics towards women.
John Tyler:
Bodnick is not being called an economist at all, much less a powerful one. It’s Cook who is described that way.
there he is,
https://twitter.com/BillAckman/status/1777002557983846821
John Guilfoyle:
I wonder why you made a point of Bodnick’s “Jewish heritage” in a thread that has nothing to do with Jews or Palestine, but is about plagiarism and black women professors. Or why you decided that Bodnick is “pro-Palestinian.”
You are correct that Bodnick is an ethnic Jew. But I would not call her “pro-Palestine.” See this:
She then goes on to criticize the more extreme members of the Likud Party for supporting more settlements and espousing the idea that the same territory (*river to sea”) should be Israel’s. Then she adds:
She definitely seems anti-Likud and specifically anti-“settlements.” But I see nothing in her essay that is pro-Palestinian.
TBF, it isn’t so much the fault of the students as of the faculty at the institutions that awarded the degrees and the reviewers who reviewed the publications. It isn’t new. I recall an incident at the university I was at in the 1970’s where a professor from Egypt on a Ph’D committee pointed out that the Arab student going for the Ph’D had plagiarized large sections of his dissertation, he even showed the committee the articles that were plagiarized. The committee passed the student anyway. I suspect that there is a small industry in bogus dissertations.
Of course a thing like plagiarism is pretty cut & dried, as academic offenses go. Either there’s evidence of it, or there isn’t – a matter of record. And funding for character assassination is not a budget line item that goes wanting, in the Democratic Party. So if there were evidence of rampant plagiarism on the part of the white male conservative patriarchy – or even any – I think one can presume it would have been brought to light already, quickly and without mercy. And if there wasn’t, the subject would be left quietly unaddressed. Crying ‘DEI Racism !’ is just the cover required to protect & deflect, in other words.
If one is interested in DEI hires, there won’t be many straight white males involved. That leaves….
As has been said before, there isn’t much new in the grievance field. So you either use somebody else’s work or fake up your own. It’s possible that the limits of imagination have been sighted coming over the horizon on this issue and some things are just too dumb to assert. That leaves….
If the accepted standard is you must show some original work which benefits your field, then that’s the standard. Why that should be tied to the presumption that the individual is a good teacher is not clear. Even more to the point, why does that make you a good bureaucrat? But if that’s what’s required, then those who present themselves as having new work benefiting their field should be telling the truth.
That said, I figured I wasn’t smart enough to plagiarize stuff, but pointing to something really cool which I had found meant I was a mean researcher and knew what I was looking for and what supported my premise and deserve a great grade. Giving up that chance for the possibility that someone who’s a pro in the field wouldn’t recognize it when I faked it as mine seemed like a bad bet.
That said, I had a fraternity brother who was a grad student and who helped read papers for a prof. Not sure how that worked. But under the pressure of time–lots of stuff happening and didn’t even have much time for sleep–I had to wing it on two papers just making a case. No research cited, nothing. Just Aubrey’s idea. One was how cultural anthropology could pay the bills. The prof told my buddy those were the two best papers he’d ever read. Now what?
I think he took it seriously; in the Afghanistan adventure, the DoD hired cultural advisors or some such who were supposed to know how to deal with and use Afghan culture.
Never saw a royalty.
Of course a thing like plagiarism is pretty cut & dried, as academic offenses go. Either there’s evidence of it, or there isn’t – a matter of record.
Aggie:
Point taken. However, with AI it’s a brand new day.
–Maretha & the Vandellas, “Nowhere to Run; Nowhere to Hide”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YN9bfhrL7Yo
It’s all a cargo cult.
FTR: Maya Bodnick is Sheryl Sandberg’s niece.
https://www.karlstack.com/p/lisa-cooks-new-plagiarism-scandal
Are black women disproportionately involved in plagiarism in academia…
Probably not any more so than white male academics are. You can bet your last dollar that their plagiarism is disproportionately winked at though.
I wonder why you made a point of Bodnick’s “Jewish heritage” …
Neo…as things stand today…any person of Jewish heritage must surely understand that Islam will not rest until ALL the Jews are dead. The Arabs aka Palestinians surely know THEY want every Jew dead. For her, in a place of absolute privilege, to use an overused word, to not sense the existential threat of Islam under which her people live and then to carp on about the absolutely imaginary threat of “witch hunts” against black female academics…
She “hobbles between two opinions”…argues for the very proponents of her people’s existential threat…yet dances lightly on the “Israel is a democratic nation.” Did I overstate her “pro-Palestinian” leaning? Perhaps…but I can’t fathom any sensible person, especially a sensible Jewish person harbouring any kind of “well they have a point” in reference to Palestinians. Yes…at times I think in more exclusionary terms.
@ chuck > “The committee passed the student anyway. I suspect that there is a small industry in bogus dissertations.”
Two things are at work here IMO:
(1) There have been lots of posts recently explaining why the pro-Hamas rioters are never punished: they pay full tuition, and their families and countries make big donations; I suspect that was the same in the 1970s. Even ivory-tower academics know what side of their bread substitute the icky wax is on, and are not going to endanger there rice bowl by insisting that the cash-cows actually learn something;
(2) There is in fact a large industry providing made-to-order college papers, probably even dissertations; the software tools that are used to detect plagiarism were contrived for that very reason.
You can even use them to check your own work, if you are concerned that you may have used something you read sometime and didn’t remember but thought it was your own original brilliance.
https://www.check-plagiarism.com/
That was not the problem with the subjects of the post.
However, that the supervising professors didn’t use the tools is suggestive of their desire to enlarge the coven, or at least not be thrown out of it.
Similar to the folk wisdom that you aren’t paranoid if they really ARE out to get you — it’s not a “witch hunt” if there really are witches.
Not the Bee was on this beat yesterday.
https://notthebee.com/article/harvard-student-writes-that-chris-rufos-plagiarism-exposing-is-a-witch-hunt-against-black-women-so-she-proposes-reviewing-all-harvard-faculty-for-plagiarism
Bodnick: “Universities like Harvard must take back control of the narrative and conduct plagiarism reviews of all faculty.”
Rufo: “Your terms are acceptable.”
https://twitter.com/realchrisrufo/status/1778077487056253308
“One of the ironies to this accusation is that I have explicitly asked my sources to review the work of white and Asian scholars and, thus far, the verified plagiarism cases have been predominantly from black women. ”
How it started:
https://christopherrufo.com/p/trouble-at-the-fed
or the same article here
https://www.city-journal.org/article/lisa-d-cooks-careless-scholarship
“Time will tell if the gears of justice turn against Lisa Cook, or if repeated academic misconduct, defended by some as mere sloppiness or isolated mistakes, is fast becoming an acceptable part of the academic order—as long as the alleged author of that behavior is favored by the powerful.”
Bonus: He predicted this in January.
https://twitter.com/realchrisrufo/status/1752383564870758587
“There are now multiple active initiatives to hunt for plagiarism across academia. Another shoe will drop. And another. And another. And another.”
The plagiarism issues explained simply. Once you subscribe to a system of closed values, it’s daunting to derive anything novel about the circular “inquiry.”
This neglect of external and original research is a feature — not a bug — for Wokism. Mid-wid appeal. Ergo, plagiarism is popular because of necessity — the alternative requires greater intelligence or much more time and scarce resources. Plagiarism is practical today.
Honesty is a manifestation of white supremacy(TM), AKA RACISM.
Honesty is also a manifestation of white fragility(TM), AKA RACISM.
(And, um, if one might object that there appears to be a contradiction here, hey that’s OK—hobgoblins, small minds, etc.—one of the hyuge advantages of being a “progressive” is that EVERYTHING makes sense, as long as you want it to….)
And it’s not just “honesty”: the same can be said about the law, the Constitution, civility, manners, common decency…and while we’re at it—science, mathematics, physics, astronomy, etc.
(Kinda like “Jewish Science” when you think of it…but it’s probably better not to think about it too much…)
That’s right they’re ALL racist constructs—and so must be deconstructed, or rather “reconstructed”. Taught differently.
Taught in a way that STAMPS OUT WHITENESS.
That PURIFIES all these things from the TAINT of WHITENESS.
Keeping in mind that…ALL OF THE ABOVE are manifestations of the ABSOLUTE moral and ethical IMPERATIVE for REPARATIONS…this because Black Lives Matter (except, of course, for those Black Lives that the BLM movement has decided don’t matter at all).
Think of it as Affirmative Action for the 21st century…. IOW “AA TNG”
“…can’t fathom…”
Well, ordinarily you’d be right…however…
some people are far too “intelligent” for their own good…(keeping in mind, if you prefer, the “Intelligence-Perversity nexus…as measured by the “Perversity Quotient”….):
” ‘Source of inspiration’—Israeli professor eulogizes convicted terrorist;
“Dr. Anat Matar, a professor of philosophy at Tel Aviv University, praised convicted terrorist Walid Daka, who took part in the abduction and murder of IDF soldier Moshe Tamam in 1986.”—
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/388261
+ Bonus:
From the “Words Are Entirely Meaningless” File:
“Haniyeh claims: My sons weren’t Hamas fighters;
“Hamas leader says group is still seeking a hostage release deal despite the elimination of three of his sons in an air strike in Gaza.“—
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/388363
(Wondering if that should that be “despite…” or “BECAUSE OF…” …)
File under: And Humpty Dumpty shall inherit the earth…
Maybe the racist Jeremiah Wright was right about the differences in white and black children. Were these black women taught in a ‘left brained cognitive object oriented learning style’ educational system – where maybe they needed to cheat in order to get better grades?
Transcript of Jeremiah Wright’s speech to NAACP:
White and black children have different brains or different ways of learning. Imagine a white person say that.
I think the bigger issue is if these black “scholars” ever received any constructive criticism on their writing through their ascent through elite universities. My guess is that they have always engaged in blatant copy-and-paste plagiarism, but would be given an “A” on whatever paper they turned in and told that they were absolutely brilliant. Since they were getting such positive feedback for the crap they handed in and never had a teacher willing (or brave enough) to give them proper guidance, they probably didn’t even realize what they were doing was unethical or intellectually lazy.
Then when they got into academia, they still didn’t know any better and just kept doing the same thing, and receiving even more effusive praise for their “scholastic work”.
It wonder if it is possible to follow the trail of plagiarism from one DEI “scholar” to another, and if it all leads to a seminal “Paper Zero” on racial grievances from which the entire compendium of “black studies” was plagiarized from.
Instead of casting a broad net and investigating plagiarism everywhere, they should look to see if there is rampant plagiarism going on in any other specific academic field.
In this case, we have black academics (mostly female) who all write about the same thing, namely “white man bad”. There are only so many new or original twists you can put on that theme. If you were interested in looking for some equivalence in fraud outside of this field, you should try to find a similar narrow academic pursuit with primarily non-black scholars who engage in a similar proliferation of plagiarism.
Before there was Diversity’s hiring there were quota hires. I believe that the problem people who are hired this way face, or faced, is a huge degree of imposter syndrome. That is why there is an emphasis on entitlement in certain communities. “You deserve this”. Of course this leads to cheating.
The hell of this is lived by the people who are intelligent and do the work to find out that they were hired to check a box.
“ There are only so many new or original twists you can put on that theme”
ANY theme. Too many candidates. Not enough ideas. Downside of too many people. Over production of elites.
}}} but the actual incidence of plagiarism. Is anyone doing that sort of research?
If they are, then:
1 — if it turns out that it is a racially-founded problem, it will be suppressed.
2 — if it turns out that it is happening across the board, well, then it will be suppressed because… face it, it’ll be mostly liberals doing it.
3 — what won’t be found is and evidence that anyone is being oppressed. But that will not be the merdia spin no matter what happens.
Karmi, that transcript from Jeremiah Wright is very interesting. I wonder if he realized that he was making a case for “Separate but Equal?”
And as someone who has been in actual African classrooms, elementary through HS, I’ll just say that he is/was full of horse manure.
Karmi on April 12, 2024 at 6:00 am
“White and black children have different brains or different ways of learning.”
I was going to say that given the 40K to 50K years from “out of Africa” [and possibly return trips, or more than one exodus], the different environments of Europe and Africa could provide some modest genetic differences via evolution. But I will defer to Telemachus’s personal experience that such potential differences are probably too small to be observable in the general case. Besides, we know women and men have different brain wiring: more side to side, or front to back, respectively. And no man who has been married more than a year will ever claim to know how or what his wife is thinking. 🙂
scentdolt on April 12, 2024 at 9:30 am
“I wonder if it is possible to follow the trail of plagiarism … to a seminal “Paper Zero” on racial grievances…” Careful what you wish for. We might find that paper was written by Thomas Sowell, Charles Murray, Glenn Loury, or ?? But more likely we would find this seminal author was either Karl Marx or Malcom X.
topper on April 12, 2024 at 9:44 am
“… you should try to find a similar narrow academic pursuit with primarily non-black scholars who engage in a similar proliferation of plagiarism.” You mean, like “climate science”, Federal Reserve tea leaves reading, or transgender medicine?
JFM on April 12, 2024 at 11:13 am
“The hell of this is lived by the people who are intelligent and do the work to find out that they were hired to check a box.” I certainly hope that in the end they do realize that their talents and productive output would end up speaking for itself.
Does the sample size include all that identify as black females?