Since the end of 2023, four Harvard University employees have been been accused of plagiarism. Each of them have two very obvious things in common that will remind everyone that we are, in fact, dealing with an institution with an historical reputation of racism.
The university’s student newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, called the attack on its Black woman faculty “a witch hunt.” According to the paper, the hunt started when the university’s first-ever Black president, Dr. Claudine Gay, was accused of plagiarizing parts of her four academic works, including a 1997 doctorate dissertation, back in December.
Gay resigned in January but warned “the campaign against me was about more than one university and one leader.” She said in her New York Times article: “Such campaigns don’t end there. Trusted institutions of all types... will continue to fall victim to coordinated attempts to undermine their legitimacy and ruin their leaders’ credibility.”
And she was right.
Not even a month after Gay’s resignation, Harvard’s Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer, Sherri A. Charleston — also a Black woman — was accused of 40 counts of plagiarism, according to the Crimson.
The following month, another Black faculty member, Shirley R. Greene — who acts as Harvard’s Extension School administrator — was accused of 42 counts of plagiarism. In March, Harvard Sociology assistant professor Christina J. Cross became the fourth Black woman to be accused of plagiarism at the university.
In all four cases, an anonymous tip jumpstarted each investigation into plagiarism, but the Harvard community seems to know exactly who’s responsible for this campaign: Manhattan Institute senior fellow Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist and journalist who was a vocal opponent of Gay.
In an interview with Politico, Rufo said the “shared goal” between him and other conservatives was to “topple the president of Harvard University.” He said the ultimate objective is to “eliminate the DEI [Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion] bureaucracy in every institution in America and to restore truth rather than racialist ideology as the guiding principle of America.”
Rufo seems laser-focused on targeting all things anti-DEI and Critical Race Theory. Under Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Rufo was appointed as a New College of Florida board member in 2023. In his role, Rufo works to transform the college into an right-wing institution, more fitting of DeSantis’s “anti-woke” state.
As such, it should come as no surprise that Black women at these prestigious universities are targeted — it begs the question of if Rufo and his cronies even bothered to do any research at all on Harvard plagiarizers who are not Black women.
For now, Harvard appears to be rallying behind the accused women: In a statement to The Harvard Crimson, the Department of Sociology wrote, “We find these bogus claims to be particularly troubling in the context of a series of attacks on Black women in academia with the clear subtext that they have no place in our universities.”
Interestingly, Harvard is not the only college whose Black educators seem disproportionately under attack: a Black educator at Columbia University was accused of plagiarism in March. And most recently, at least two Black professionals at MIT are facing accusations, as reported in right-wing newspaper Free Beacon.