The main variety commander of the University of Wisconsin- Madison, LaVar Charleston, who likewise teaches at the university’s school of education, has a decades- longer track record of study misconduct, according to a complaint filed with the school on Wednesday and a Washington Free Beacon evaluation. This wrongdoing includes presenting outdated reports as fresh studies, which he has done at least five times throughout his job.
The problem, which was filed secretly, implicates eight of Charleston’s papers, many of them coauthored, and accuses him of plagiarizing other scientists as well as dividing his own job. It comes as the school is currently investigating Charleston over a distinct complaint filed in January, alleging that a 2014 study by him and his wife— Harvard University’s key variety officer, Sherri Ann Charleston—is a copy of a research he published in 2012.
This is an extraordinary instance of repeated deception and misrepresentation, according to Peter Wood, the national association’s head and former associate provost at Boston University. The person who sells the same amount of real estate to five different buyers without knowing the other buyer would be the closest to saying that.
In January, Charleston won a lifetime achievement award for “excellence in higher education”. In a press release, the university praised the award, praising his “unwavering dedication to creating inclusive environments in academia” and noting his “wealth of academic accolades.”
Charleston’s CV, however, appears to have been inflated by duplicate publication, the practice of publishing the same research in multiple journals without attribution. In 2014, for example, he published a pair of papers in two separate journals—the Journal of Diversity in Higher Education and the Journal of Progressive Policy &, Practice—that are near- verbatim copies of each other.
Both describe a 15-person focus group led by an African-American woman and include identical quotes from participants who all appear to have been recruited from the same academic conference.
Neither paper indicates the other was published elsewhere—a troubling omission, scholars who reviewed both studies said.
” It is academic misconduct to publish essentially the same paper twice with no acknowledgment of the duplication”, Alexander Riley, a sociologist at Bucknell University, told the Free Beacon. Charleston appears to be playing a system game to get more on his resume than is merited by his extensive research, according to the statement.
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 presented as a novel survey that addresses a gap in academic literature. Charleston’s dissertation is not mentioned or does Charleston not quote or quote works that have already been published.
According to Lee Jussim, a professor of psychology at Rutgers University, the odds that “monkeys typing on typewriters would reproduce Hamlet are about the same.
Charleston did not respond to a request for comment.
The complaint raises important questions about how a prestigious public university evaluated one of its top administrators, whose professional development has been hampered by questionable research practices as well as criminal behavior.
According to documents obtained by the MacIver Institute, a conservative think tank in Wisconsin, Charleston was charged with attempting to strangle a police officer shortly after joining UW- Madison as a researcher in 2009, according to documents obtained by the institution. Through the Deferred Prosecution Program, a neighborhood initiative run by the district attorney’s office that removes first-time felons ‘ arrest records from public databases and prevents them from getting detained, he escaped a conviction.
” Even with a PhD, I’m looked at as a criminal”, Charleston said in an interview in 2020. ” ]I ] t has to be because of my color”.
The arrest did n’t stop Charleston from climbing the ranks of the school’s diversity bureaucracy. Between 2010 and 2017, he helped to build Wisconsin’s Equity and Inclusion Laboratory, which conducts research on “inclusive learning”. He served as the University of Wisconsin- Whitewater’s inaugural dean of diversity, equity, and inclusion, the third-ranked educational institution in the nation, as reported by US News and World Report, before he was assistant vice chancellor of student diversity at the University of Wisconsin- Whitewater in 2017. In 2021, he was the university’s chief diversity officer.
Charleston is also a clinical professor of education, has led “anti- racism” workshops for Wisconsin public school teachers, and sits on the state’s Equity and Inclusion Council, which helps “advance diversity, equity, and inclusion practices across Wisconsin state government”.
The complaint raises questions about the celebrated diversity scholar’s originality, who is paid$ 280,00 per year by UW-Madison and runs tutoring programs for students.
” The two 2014 papers do indeed appear to be two versions of the same paper”, Riley said. ” I do n’t see the two as being in any significant way distinct from one another.”
Both papers also feature a well-known coauthor, Jerlando Jackson, who is currently the dean of the Michigan State University College of Education, who advised Charleston’s UW-Madison dissertation and coauthored one of the studies based on it. The overlap raises further questions about academic integrity standards in educational institutions as well as in the field of DEI scholarship, which has come under intense scrutiny in recent months as a result of periodic plagiarism scandals.
” Either]Charleston and Jackson ] are ignorant of this principle of research publication ethics”, Riley said, referring to rules against duplicate publication, “or they were both aware of what they were doing”.
Jackson did not respond to a comment request.
The University of Wisconsin- Madison stated that it “takes all allegations of research misconduct seriously” and would look into the complaint. According to the university, Charlesston is a “valued member of the University of Wisconsin- Madison leadership team and we continue to support his work.”
A DEI official has been charged with research misconduct for the fourth time this year in the complaint filed on Wednesday. In addition to Sherri Ann Charleston, Harvard’s chief diversity officer, plagiarism allegations have been made against Shirley Green, the Title IX coordinator for Harvard Extension School, and Alade McKen, the chief diversity officer of Columbia Medical School. The deluge came after former Harvard president Claudine Gay’s resignation in January after it was discovered that half of her published work contained plagiarized material.
Unlike those other officials, who work for private universities with lavish endowments, Charleston is a government employee subject to a state budget. His position was put on the cutting block last year when Wisconsin Republicans proposed a budget that would have cut the UW system’s exact spending on DEI initiatives by$ 32 million.
The University of Wisconsin Board of Regents, which in December rejected a deal to cap DEI staff in exchange for pay raises and a new engineering school, was still furious about a watered-down version of the proposal. After learning that it had prioritized positions like Charleston’s over$ 800 million in additional funding, the board changed its mind.
That money has paid for a scholar who appears to have nothing new to say. The four studies based on Charleston’s dissertation, which was submitted to the University of Wisconsin- Madison, are strikingly similar to each other, regurgitating not just interview results but entire pages of text.
Each one discusses the difficulties African-American science students face, and makes the case, among other things, that mentoring can help students succeed in computer science. The testimonials that make up each of the four studies serve as the backbone of each paper are identical descriptions of survey participants.
No other instances have a researcher “repeated his dissertation findings like a broken record for twelve years,” Wood said.
Scholars are expected to give appropriate attribution to earlier research if it has already been published in an academic journal, even though they can reuse it as much as they like and frequently turn their dissertations into peer-reviewed articles. Failure to do so could lead to retractions and a copyright violation for the publisher.
Duplicating is sometimes referred to as a more serious offense than plagiarism because it biases meta-analyses, articles that aggregate the findings of previous studies and use them to make statistical generalizations about a body of research, in addition to stealing a journal’s intellectual property and padding a scholar’s CV. Some meta- analyses in education focus on the very issues Charleston’s work has addressed, including the effects of mentorship and diversity training.
Riley, the Bucknell sociologist, argued that the four studies did n’t quite meet the bar for “unethical behavior” because they were all based on a single dissertation, unlike the pair of papers from 2014. But, he added, the redundancies were revealing nonetheless.
” I think there are a lot of people doing this in the DEI universe—essentially repeating the same assertions over and over again in various settings,” Riley said. Given the orthodoxy on which it is founded,” the field draws such people to it more or less naturally.”
Charleston is also accused of plagiarizing other scholars from his dissertation and some of his peer-reviewed papers, including the one from 2012, according to the complaint. He extracts a number of passages from a Ph. D. thesis by Leslie Pendleton Graham, who earned her Ph. D. in counselor education in 1997, without citing her in a footnote or parentheses.
He also borrows from Craig Alan Green’s dissertation, which earned his Ph. D., to add to it. D. from the University of Tennessee- Knoxville in 2008, without any sort of attribution.
Charleston was able to ensure that his subsequent work contained plagiarism by recycling a thesis that was heavily laden with plagiarism, according to the complaint.
” Much of LaVar’s scholarly work since the dissertation lifts language from the dissertation verbatim”, the complaint reads. ” But the dissertation is full of plagiarism. So LaVar’s peer- reviewed work has plagiarism throughout”.
