Karen Mapp — a nationally known scholar who has been with the Harvard Graduate School of Education for nearly 20 years — wonders when “they” will come for her, whether she’ll be next.
“They” refers to right-wing activists who have leveled accusations of plagiarism against Black scholars and diversity, equity and inclusion professionals at universities across the country, particularly those who study the effects of structural racism and how to combat it.
Mapp, who was recently named “professor of practice,” has never been targeted. But she worries that right-wing activists will unfairly pick apart her hard-won academic achievements as they have with other Black female scholars since the resignation of former Harvard President Claudine Gay over plagiarism allegations.
Already this year, three other Black women from Harvard have faced publicized plagiarism charges in the last few months. Some Harvard faculty, a plagiarism expert and civil rights leaders believe the accusations are racially motivated. And a columnist for the student newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, described the campaign as a “witch hunt” against Black women and advocates of diversity, equity and inclusion in higher education.
“Why is it only Black women? It seems like, at least in the case of Harvard and some of the institutions I know, that seems to be who’s being targeted,” said Mapp. “And apparently one of these men said something like, ‘Well, they’re the ones that are most likely to do that’ — which is ridiculous.”
The allegations at Harvard
Those weren’t exactly activist Christopher Rufo’s words, but they were close.
Rufo is a senior fellow with the right-leaning Manhattan Institute, who is leading a crusade against what he defines as diversity, equity and inclusion and critical race theory.
“Let’s not ignore the pattern: This is the fourth black female CRT [critical race theory]/DEI scholar to be accused of plagiarism at Harvard,” Rufo wrote in a March 20 post on X, formerly Twitter. “We need further research, including a control group of more rigorous fields, but initial reports suggest that the grievance disciplines are rife with fraud.”
What Rufo terms as “grievance disciplines” are academic studies and policies that identify and explore structural racism and histories of oppression in the United States, including the Civil Rights Movement. Critical race theory, which Rufo cites in his posts, posits — in part — that racism is inherent in American government systems. Rufo describes the theory as anti-white and Marxist, which scholars and supporters of critical race theory say is patently false.
Gay resigned in January amid the fallout from Harvard’s management of the campus in the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack — as well as plagiarism allegations.
That same month, Rufo and a writer for the right-wing news outlet Washington Free Beacon targeted Harvard’s Chief DEI Officer Sherri A. Charleston. An anonymous complainant cited 40 instances of alleged plagiarism by Charleston, according to the Free Beacon, which was the first to report many of the complaints.
The next month, an anonymous complainant to Harvard accused administrator Shirley R. Greene of 42 instances of plagiarism. The source cited material in her 2008 University of Michigan dissertation.
And in March, Rufo, writing on an online publication, singled out Harvard sociology assistant professor Christina Cross, whose research focuses on the intersection of families, race/ethnicity, and social inequality.
The department chair of Harvard’s sociology department wrote the university’s student paper, The Crimson, that same month to publicly denounce the accusations.
“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,” Frank Dobbin wrote.
Rufo, the accused women and Harvard officials all did not respond to requests for comment.
In Gay’s case, Harvard looked into the plagiarism allegations against Gay — that were first leaked to the New York Post in October and popularized by Rufo weeks later — concluded that, though there were scattered instances of improper citations in her body of work that required corrections, they did not violate Harvard’s standards for research misconduct.
Harvard has declined to comment on any of the plagiarism allegations beyond the independent body review of two of Gay’s papers published in 2012 and 2017. The investigators concluded that there was “virtually no evidence of intentional claiming of findings” that were not Gay’s.
Jonathan Bailey, a writer in New Orleans who runs an online publication called Plagiarism Today, told GBH News that “it is obvious” that the intent of the allegations is not to further academic research integrity, but “to attack DEI and score political points.”
“The plagiarism allegations so far have been all over the map. Some of them have been very reasonable, and these are deeply problematic. But a lot of them have been either not an issue or an incredibly small one where they’re trying to make a mountain out of a molehill,” Bailey said. He examined each of the claims made against the women.
The plagiarism allegations against Cross in particular, he said, are not supported by the facts. And three scholars whose work Cross was accused of plagiarizing defended her scholarship and pushed back against Rufo’s accusation, according to The Crimson.
The allegations elsewhere
Attacks by right-wing activists against Black academics extend to campuses beyond Harvard. Plagiarism claims have also been made against Black professionals at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Columbia University, among other institutes of higher education.
In an online post in April, Rufo accused UCLA Medical School DEI expert Natalie J. Perry of “academic dishonesty” in her 2014 dissertation on diversity programs. In May, a Free Beacon article cited a complaint filed with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology excoriating DEI experts Tracie Jones-Barrett and Alana Anderson as “serial plagiarists,” alleging that they copied pages of text without attribution.
Perry did not respond to a GBH News request for an interview. And an MIT spokesperson, in a written reply to a GBH News’ query about the two cases, said, “We do not, out of respect for individuals’ privacy and in adherence to MIT policies, discuss individual employees.”
GBH News also reached out unsuccessfully to editors and reporter Aaron Sibarium at the Free Beacon, which has tagged numerous articles as “plagiarism,” so far only targeting Black academics and DEI professionals. Sibarium has written most or all of the site’s articles with plagiarism allegations.
The Manhattan Institute and the Free Beacon are both funded by Paul Singer, a billionaire chairman of the Manhattan Institute and has poured tens of millions of his own money into the nonprofit’s treasury.
‘Open season’ on Black scholars
Mapp says she’s stunned by the sweeping generalizations being tossed about by conservatives, creating an “open season” on Black scholars, which have resulted in racist attacks on social media, death threats in the case of Claudine Gay, and a grotesquely distorted view of policies and concepts such as DEI, race studies and critical race theory.
“I don’t even know what to say. I think if people want to come for you, they’re going to come for you,” Mapp said. “I think the question is: why?”
On X, Rufo explained why he is targeting scholars who study race and experts in DEI: “I am demonstrating that an academic discipline and its bureaucratic counterpart is not only wrong philosophically—which I argued in my book—but also rife with fraud, which helps make the argument for terminating continued public subsidy.”
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Ilya Shapiro, director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute, said DEI policies are key to understanding the ongoing anti-plagiarism campaign that began with the criticism of Claudine Gay.
“Claudine Gay is the apotheosis of the anti-intellectual movement that values DEI identity and activism over truth seeking merit and education,’’ Shapiro told GBH News. “She is sort of the epitome of the crisis in higher education.”
Shapiro and Rufo penned a Manhattan Institute briefing paper together last year calling for the abolishment of DEI bureaucracies. Rufo told his more than 600,000 followers on X last January that his goal in launching a plagiarism hunting fund is to root out “racialist ideology” from higher education.
Jonathan Bailey, who edits Plagiarism Today, says the selective use of plagiarism as a weapon was exposed when Business Insider reported on plagiarism issues in the work of Neri Oxman, the wife of Bill Ackman, a leading critic of Claudine Gay. Right-wing activists were largely silent on this discovery and the story was denounced by Ackman, who has come out as a fierce critic of DEI.
“It was a moment of schadenfreude because I would say it is at least as serious, probably more serious than, what Claudine Gay was accused of — because Gay realistically only had a few passages in a 25-year history of research,” Bailey said.
Bailey says he became an expert in plagiarism after he became a victim of it himself 18 years ago. He takes plagiarism seriously, and that makes him all the more incensed that such a grave offense has been “weaponized” by the right. He argues that plagiarism is rampant in academia.
“It’s not isolated to ‘DEI’ or specific groups within academia,” he said.
Barbara Ransby, a professor of history at the University of Illinois Chicago, describes the conservative campaign against DEI as “very explicit racial and gender attacks.”
The view of many on the right, said Ransby, is that “there’s certain people, certain ideas, certain bodies of scholarship that are just undeserving and that don’t fit into the sort of longstanding, white supremacist, patriarchal notion of the academy, of brilliance, of intelligence.”
Harvard Professor of History Khalil Gibran Muhammad said the allegations against his colleagues and others around the country “are a political assault on a community of scholars who work generally on topics that explore how racism works, in this society and in countries around the world.”
He said Rufo, in particular, has been at the center of “false claims and manufactured lies” about what scholarship on race and racism is all about.
Muhammed described the plagiarism charges as examples of “racial profiling” meant to discredit the work of critical race theory scholars.
The campaign comes as some universities are rolling back commitments to diversity and inclusion. MIT last month announced it would no longer require diversity statements from applicants for faculty positions. In June, Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences did the same thing, reversing a practice that went into effect in the months following the murder of George Floyd in the spring of 2020.
A strategy ‘to bully and intimidate’
Harvard’s Muhammad says many critics are simply threatened by Black people in power.
“For many people, the ascent of Claudine Gay to the presidency [of Harvard] was an affront to their sense of identity as white people, who could not imagine that a Black woman had earned the right to hold that position.”
Like critical race theory, he said, the term “DEI” is being used by white nationalists as a pejorative catch phrase to push back against the progress made by Black Americans since the Civil Rights Movement.
“If these people have their way, they will criminalize even the ability to talk about race in America — let alone to track it or to study it, or to look at the racial disparities that continue to be a source of a fundamental threat to a functioning, healthy democracy,” he said.
Sociologist Joan Donovan, assistant professor of Journalism at Boston University and an expert on disinformation, says the attacks on DEI and race studies are all about white grievance.
“They believe having to go through the process as a white person, particularly as a white man, disadvantages them,’’ she said. “I think people who are white have this vision of whiteness as being more advantaged and therefore are owed these positions.”
Shapiro of the Manhattan Institute told GBH News that he has seen no evidence of systemic racism or racial discrimination in higher education, with two exceptions.
“I do see great evidence of discrimination against Asian American applicants and white applicants,” he said, referencing arguments that ultimately compelled the U.S. Supreme Court to strike down affirmative action in university admissions last year.
Shapiro, Rufo, and other activists on the right say that what they are seeking is a return to the “traditional core mission of higher education,” which they characterize as “color blind.”
But Ransby argues those declaring themselves to be color blind while making selective plagiarism accusations should be viewed skeptically.
“We saw that during Reconstruction, when Black politicians finally assumed positions of leadership and there was a mockery made of their ability to speak, lead, legislate, etc.,” Ransby said in an interview with GBH News. “The kinds of character assassinations that we’ve seen on Black women academics is a part of that larger context.”
Ransby says that, as a historian on race and gender, she would not be surprised if the anti-DEI agitators and critics of race studies came after her, too.
“Because that’s the strategy: to bully and intimidate and make people silent and fearful,” she said. ”We have to name this moment of growing racism, repression and authoritarianism, which means we have to organize. And that’s something academics are not known for doing.”
