Columbia University Hospital DEI Chief Is Serial Plagiarist, Complaint Alleges

Washington Free Beacon ^ | February 29, 2024 | Aaron Sibarium

[george76]

Alade McKen plagiarized pages of material from Wikipedia..

The chief diversity, equity, and inclusion officer of Columbia University's medical school, Alade McKen, plagiarized extensively in his doctoral dissertation, lifting entire pages of material, without attribution, from sources that include Wikipedia, according to a complaint submitted to the university on Wednesday.

The allegations implicate approximately a fifth of McKen's 163-page dissertation, "'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," submitted to Iowa State University's School of Education in 2021. More than two of those pages are a near-verbatim facsimile of Wikipedia's entry on "Afrocentric education," which is not cited anywhere in the dissertation.

...

Other pages lift paragraphs from well-known African scholars, including the University of Rwanda's Chika Ezeanya-Esiobu, while making small tweaks to their prose, such as reordering certain clauses or changing a "were" to a "was."

...

Some of the scholars McKen allegedly plagiarized appear in the dissertation's bibliography but not in in-text citations. Others, like Ezeanya-Esiobu, an expert on "indigenous knowledge" who has worked with numerous international agencies, including the World Bank, aren't cited at all.

...

"The passages you shared can definitely be classified as plagiarism," Ezeanya-Esiobu told the Washington Free Beacon. McKen lifts pages worth of material from Ezeanya-Esiobu's 2019 chapter "A Faulty Foundation: Historical Origins of Formal Education Curriculum in Africa," published in the Frontiers in African Business Research book series.

Columbia's research integrity officer, Naomi Schrag, did not respond to a request for comment. Iowa State University did not respond to a request for comment.

McKen, who holds a certificate in diversity and inclusion from Cornell University, oversees all DEI programs for staff at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, which includes Columbia's flagship medical school, the Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, and is the largest campus of NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital. The center's DEI initiatives include mandatory "antiracism" training for faculty and admissions officers, as well as an expedited hiring process for minority scholars.

McKen also works with the Columbia provost's office, according to a fall 2023 bulletin announcing his appointment. That office oversees tenure decisions for the entire university, including the medical school. Columbia did not respond to a request for comment about whether McKen has oversight of faculty and doctors.

Before arriving at the medical center, McKen was the assistant dean of recruitment, diversity, and inclusion for Columbia's graduate school of architecture. His current role was created in 2021 when the medical center hired Tonya Richards as its inaugural chief diversity officer. The new position came as the university was embarking on an ambitious plan to address "structural racism" in health care, guided by a 100-person task force drawn from Columbia's four medical schools: the Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, as well as the schools of nursing, dentistry, and public health.

"It is very clear that promotion of diversity or even the presence of diversity is insufficient to counter deeply embedded anti-Black racism," read the task force's 2020 report. "Our self-reflection and actions at this time must be focused on the elimination of racism in all aspects of our work."

The complaint against McKen, which was filed anonymously, marks the third time in one month that a diversity administrator at an Ivy League school has been hit with charges of plagiarism. Other complaints have alleged that Harvard Extension School's Title IX coordinator, Shirley Greene, copied paragraphs and tables from other scholars without proper attribution and that Harvard University's chief diversity officer, Sherri Ann Charleston, took credit for an entire study done by her husband. The allegations against both officials followed the downfall of former Harvard president Claudine Gay, who resigned after nearly half her published work was implicated in a plagiarism scandal.

McKen's dissertation contains some of the most extreme examples of plagiarism thus far. The 50-page complaint, which was submitted to Iowa State University as well as Columbia, outlines nearly 60 cases in which McKen, who assumed his post at the medical center last year, borrows passages from Africanists, education scholars, and diversity consultants without attribution.

One of the plagiarized authors is Kwayera Archer-Cunningham, a "change agent" and "well-being coach" who offers courses on "decoloniality." McKen lifts over five paragraphs from Archer-Cunningham's 2007 journal article "Cultural Arts Education as Community Development: An Innovative Model of Healing and Transformation," in New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education.

...

As with Ezeanya-Esiobu, McKen makes scant changes to the plagiarized text. One passage simply switches the order of two items in a bulleted list while keeping their contents identical, and without citing Archer-Cunningham's paper in parentheses.

...

The passages appear to run afoul of Iowa State University's plagiarism policy, which state that "it is a violation for students to reproduce another person's paper, work or artistry, even with modifications."

McKen did not respond to a request for comment. Archer-Cunningham, who founded the Brooklyn-based arts academy on which McKen's dissertation research was based, did not respond to a request for comment.

McKen also lifts a jargon-filled passage from LaGarrett King, a scholar of black education at the University of Buffalo who urges the "dismantling" of "white epistemic logic." King is not cited anywhere in the dissertation and did not respond to a request for comment.

...

The complaint alleges that McKen plagiarized over 30 authors total, not including Wikipedia. While the allegations only cover his dissertation, McKen has published multiple academic articles, according to his Google Scholar profile, with titles such as "Black Men in Engineering Graduate Education: Experiencing Racial Microaggressions Within the Advisor–Advisee Relationship" and "I Am Because We Are," which explores "how African cultural practices can direct learning toward liberation."

In September, McKen outlined his DEI priorities in a news bulletin for the medical center. "Everyone here," he said, "is committed to doing the work."

[EQAndyBuzz]

Hmmm. Another DEI expert who had to steal others work to get their degree. Seems they all have something in common, but I cannot put my finger on it.

[ClearCase_guy]

The Left likes to complain that there are not enough blacks “at the top”.

It may be true that there are not a lot of blacks “at the top”. But my observation is that of the blacks who get high positions, only about 5% of those people deserve to be there. The rest (Fani Willis, that president of Harvard, this DEI Chief, etc.) either cheated their way to the top or were installed above their station for political reasons.

The Left has taught me that judging people entirely by their skin color is the way to go. The Left does this all the time. So do I.

[MayflowerMadam]

Plagiarism seems to be a common trait among leftists. It’s a resume enhancer, actually.

[ronnie raygun]

Fake phoney frauds that need to pay the price

[jmaroneps37]

My many years in academia showed me that this is the norm not the exception. It started with affirmative action fakes being placed in positions that were way over their heads.

[Liz]

FTA----The chief diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) officer of Columbia University's medical school, Alade McKen, plagiarized extensively in his doctoral dissertation, lifting entire pages of material, without attribution, from sources that include Wikipedia, according to a complaint submitted to the university on Wednesday.

The allegations implicate approximately a fifth of McKen's 163-page dissertation, "'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," submitted to Iowa State University's School of Education in 2021. More than two of those pages are a near-verbatim facsimile of Wikipedia's entry on "Afrocentric education," which is not cited anywhere in the dissertation. ...

Other pages lift paragraphs from well-known African scholars, including the University of Rwanda's Chika Ezeanya-Esiobu, while making small tweaks to their prose, such as reordering certain clauses or changing a "were" to a "was." ...

Some of the scholars McKen allegedly plagiarized appear in the dissertation's bibliography but not in in-text citations. Others, like Ezeanya-Esiobu, an expert on "indigenous knowledge" who has worked with numerous international agencies, including the World Bank, aren't cited at all. ...

[Liz]

Professor fired for faking research data; 6 studies retracted
nypost.com, Rikki Schlott, Published Aug. 4, 2023

Florida State University criminology professor Eric Stewart was a guru of the claim that “systemic racism” infests America’s police and American society. Now he’s out of a job on account of “extreme negligence” in his research. The academic was fired after almost 20 years of his data — including figures used in an explosive study, which claimed the legacy of lynchings made whites perceive blacks as criminals, and that the problem was worse among conservatives — were found to be in question.

College authorities said he was being fired for “incompetence” and “false results. Among the studies he has had to retract were claims that whites wanted longer sentences for blacks and Latinos. To date, six of Stewart’s articles published in major academic journals like Criminology and Law and Society Review between 2003 and 2019 have been fully retracted after allegations the professor’s data was fake or so badly flawed it should not have been published.

The professor’s termination came four years after his former graduate student Justin Pickett blew the whistle on his research.

snip-—long read

[ComputerGuy]

Not guilty. Blackness trumps accountability.

[Liz]

Disgraced plaigirisr “Harvard president,” Claudine Gay,
built a towering ghetto-nurtured DEI empire on campus.

Source-—12/21/23 FR thread

In one example, Gay commissioned a “Task Force on Visual Culture and Signage” after the death of George Floyd in 2020. This task force later released a series of recommendations for engaging in what it referred to as the “historical reckoning with racial injustice.”

Among its recommendations reportedly included a mandate to change “spaces whose visual culture is dominated by homogenous portraiture of white men.”

It also said administrators should “refresh” the walls of Annenberg Hall, which “prominently display a series of 23 portraits, none of [which] depict women, and all but three of [which] depict white men.”

The task force never explained who the white men were or why they were on the walls of Annenberg Hall in the first place. The only reasons for the removal of these paintings appeared to be due to their skin color and sex, according to white-biased Gay.

Last year, Gay launched an initiative within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences for “de-naming” any “space, program, or other entity” deemed racist by the faculty and administration.

Moreover, deeming such entities “racist” would be “based on the perception that a namesake’s actions or beliefs were ‘abhorrent’ in the context of current values,” meaning that Harvard would use presentism in order to pass judgment on individuals who lived hundreds of years ago.

“Since then, the university has grappled with denaming multiple buildings, including Winthrop House, named after John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and his great grandson, also John Winthrop, a Harvard professor and president,” Rufo pointed out.

In another example, Gay, as president of Harvard, is leading a “sprawling DEI bureaucracy,” otherwise known as Diversity, equity, and inclusion, which “seeks to influence how students speak, think, and behave in relation to race.”

The CRT expert noted that....... Harvard has deleted nearly all DEI materials from its website....... following Gay’s disastrous congressional testimony, in which she declined to say whether advocating for the genocide of Jews is permissible on campus.

Recovered DEI documents through an Internet archive show that Harvard’s diversity administrators urge students to internalize the Critical Race Theory narrative, which is that America is systemically racist, riddled with white-baiting code words like “police brutality,” “white supremacist violence,” and the “weaponization of whiteness.”

Students have also been encouraged to “unpack” their so-called “white” and “male” privileges, and to consider their “white fragility,” which ghetto-nurtured Gay’s DEI documents say is derived from “the privilege that accrues to white people living in a society that protects and insulates them from race-based stress.”

As Breitbart News reported, Gay has been facing nationwide scrutiny since the October 7 Hamas terrorist attacks against Israel due to her failure to properly respond to the matter.

The Harvard leadership botched its statement after more than 30 of its student groups signed a pro-terror later blaming Israel for the terrorist attack against itself.

Gay later delivered a disastrous testimony during a congressional hearing regarding antisemitism alongside the presidents of University of Pennsylvania and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Now, the Harvard president’s own Ph.D. dissertation is being called into question over allegations of plagiarism.

You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Facebook and
X/Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.

[thesligoduffyflynns]

I like teading about how bugs hit the fan

[PGalt]

D enying
E xcellent
I ndividuals

[Da Coyote]

DEI = Dumbasses
DEI degrees, when majoring in “eddikashun” or “Underwater Lesbian Drawing” was too difficult.

[yldstrk]

Total fake and a fraud.

[Rummyfan]

A bogus position given to one whose academic work is bogus as well. No surprise. Never mind why the med school even has a DEI admin position.

[The Louiswu]

Obviously making blacks publish or write dissertations is blatantly racist. /s

[moovova]

Yeah...Alade McKen’s Twitter acct has been vacated. LOL.

[Salman]

Because they all are?

[dfwgator]

Being a plagiarist didn’t stop Joe Biden.