Jamaal Bowman, the <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/investigators-uncover-bowman-deception-in-fire-alarm-probe" target="_blank" rel="noopener">controversial</a> New York congressman, often appeals to his work as a former school principal and his Ed.D. in education as the basis for his policy positions.
But, according to our analysis, Bowman’s primary academic work — his 2019 <a href="https://www.proquest.com/openview/d593e623c894d5d70952589d37b5ac5f/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&amp;cbl=18750&amp;diss=y">dissertation</a>, “Community Schools: The Perceptions and Practices that Foster Broad-Based Collaboration among Leaders with the Community School Ecosystem” — is riddled with basic errors, failures of logic, and multiple instances of plagiarism. (Bowman did not return a request for comment.)
Bowman has <a href="https://x.com/JamaalBowmanNY/status/1239341511353012224" target="_blank" rel="noopener">boasted</a> about the paper on social media and considers it formative to his political orientation. When asked recently about his political views, Bowman <a href="https://freebeacon.com/democrats/jamaal-bowmans-closing-message-im-still-a-socialist-and-oct-7-was-israels-fault/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">said</a>, “I identify as an educator, and as a Black man in America. But my policies align with those of a socialist, so I guess that makes me a socialist.”
The dissertation, which Bowman completed at Manhattanville College, says that “Black, Latinx, and poor White children have been historically oppressed throughout American history,” and as recompense makes an argument for “community schools,” a concept developed by the Brazilian Marxist pedagogist Paulo Freire, in which schools would be expanded to provide full-time government services for every aspect of society, including for adults.
The statistical work in the paper is limited, and the method primarily consisted of “qualitative” research, with Bowman interviewing 13 school administrators, activists, and parents. Each was immediately placed in a demographic box and assigned the role of oppressor or oppressed. For example, Bowman wrote that “Ms. Melendez, a parent leader at Manny Ramirez High School, was born in the Dominican Republican [sic]” and is a true member of the New York community, while “Ms. Warren, who identified racially as White, discussed being very aware of being ‘a visitor in someone else [sic] community all the time.’”
Bowman’s community schools model holds that the government, not parents, is responsible for children’s success. Bowman quotes one school official saying, “Families don’t have any deficits. If a mother is collecting welfare, so what?”
Bowman’s paper relies on large leaps of logic. His limited quantitative research contradicts his basic argument in favor of community schools.
For example, Bowman looked at the outcome of community schools in New York City, referring to it with a pseudonym: “Quantitatively, the aggregate data from the Unified City School Survey were uploaded into Microsoft Wxcel [sic] for data analysis.” Even though the community schools advocated by Bowman were supposed to bring the community together, in his own data, they fared worse than regular schools. “Non-Community Schools achieved a statistically significant higher mean in the area of Strong Family-Community Ties as measured by the 2017 Unified City School Survey,” Bowman wrote.
Bowman shrugged this contradiction aside, saying “it is especially challenging for the Unified City Schools to foster Strong Family-Community Ties” because it is “culturally diverse.” Instead of questioning his premise, he argued that “additional opportunities for professional learning in the area of Strong Family-Community Ties within the Community School ecosystem could help improve the achievement of Community Schools in this category.”
Bowman’s paper also appears to include multiple instances of plagiarism.
In one passage, Bowman explains critical race theory, one of his theoretical methods, by copying from another author’s summary of the 2001 book, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction. He takes the passages from R. Rolon-Dow without quotation marks, as required by academic authors. In the copied passage, Bowman merely substitutes “Latino/Latina” with “Latinx/Latina,” following the latest academic fashion, although it appears that he misunderstood the purpose of the “x” noun ending, which is to remove gendered language like “Latina.” He also inserts a typo by changing “the intersection between race/ethnicity and caring” to “the intersection between race/ethnicity caring.”
Though he credits a string of authors in parenthesis, those citations are also copied from Rolon-Dow, with her name also tacked on the end.
<div class="image"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-753911" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/06/bowman1-1.png" alt="" width="2716" height="1666" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/06/bowman1-1.png 2716w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/06/bowman1-1-300x184.png 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/06/bowman1-1-939x576.png 939w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/06/bowman1-1-768x471.png 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/06/bowman1-1-1536x942.png 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/06/bowman1-1-2048x1256.png 2048w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 2716px) 100vw, 2716px" /></div>
On multiple other occasions, Bowman summarizes other research by copying and pasting without quotation marks, instead of paraphrasing the passages to show that he has an independent understanding of the concepts. For example:
<div class="image"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-753913" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/06/bowman2-1.png" alt="" width="2716" height="838" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/06/bowman2-1.png 2716w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/06/bowman2-1-300x93.png 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/06/bowman2-1-1024x316.png 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/06/bowman2-1-768x237.png 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/06/bowman2-1-1536x474.png 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/06/bowman2-1-2048x632.png 2048w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 2716px) 100vw, 2716px" /></div>
In another instance, when describing a study by other researchers, he copies verbatim, again without quotations:
<div class="image"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-753915" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/06/bowman3-1.png" alt="" width="2716" height="782" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/06/bowman3-1.png 2716w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/06/bowman3-1-300x86.png 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/06/bowman3-1-1024x295.png 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/06/bowman3-1-768x221.png 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/06/bowman3-1-1536x442.png 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/06/bowman3-1-2048x590.png 2048w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 2716px) 100vw, 2716px" /></div>
The paper provides little in the way of meaningful advances in scholarship. “As a pragmatic study, no attempt was made here to generalize these data. The researcher studied the phenomenon of collaboration among leaders within the Community School ecosystem within its natural setting. This study reported based simply on the results found,” it concluded.
The general observation amounts to a form of racial reductionism, separating people into identity categories and judging them according to their ancestry.
Bowman implied that minority students learn better from minority educators—a contention that would, if true, amount to advocating for segregated schools. Being “just like the children she served” allowed “a Black female principal” to “enact[] Critical Care as part of her transformational leadership,” the paper said, referring to the version of Critical Theory that Bowman describes deploying on schoolchildren.
Bowman suggested that it may be more important for an educator to be oppressed than competent. “One can conclude that personal experiences, as opposed to professional learning or training, creates the perceptions and practices that were trauma-informed, culturally responsive, and community-driven,” Bowman wrote, adding that “exemplary academic performance or professional development” was less important than “personal experiences” such as growing up as a fellow member of the minority “community.”
This is the kind of dismal pseudo-scholarship that drives much of education and, unfortunately, an increasing share of political life. It should be scrutinized, as should its authors.

UNITED STATES – JUNE 22: Rep. Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y., arrives to the U.S. Capitol before the House voted to send an articles of impeachment resolution against President Joe Biden to committees on Thursday, June 22, 2023.

Bowman’s Folly: New York Dem Appears To Have Plagiarized From ‘CRT: An Introduction’ For Dissertation

Jamaal Bowman Copied From A Summary Of ‘CRT: An Introduction’ In His Doctorate Dissertation

Congress

Education

Jamaal Bowman

New York

Plagiarism

Recent headlines about UCLA School of Medicine suggest that the institution has lost its focus. Instead of brushing up on organic chemistry, its students were <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/ben-shapiro-reveals-how-ucla-med-students-are-taught-anti-white-anti-american-hatred" target="_blank" rel="noopener">subjected</a> to lessons on “Indigenous womxn” and “two-spirits.” Future doctors had to take a class on “structural racism” and were led in a “Free Palestine” <a href="https://freebeacon.com/campus/ucla-med-school-requires-students-to-attend-lecture-where-speaker-demands-prayer-for-mama-earth-leads-chants-of-free-palestine/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">chant</a> by a Hamas-praising guest speaker. The school made plans to <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/ucla-school-of-medicine-antiracism-course-do-no-harm-office-of-civil-rights-8143c3ae" target="_blank" rel="noopener">segregate students</a> by race for courses on left-wing ideology, and two of its psychiatry residents championed <a href="https://freebeacon.com/campus/revolutionary-suicide-ucla-psychiatrists-cheer-self-immolation-in-leaked-audio/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">“revolutionary suicide.”</a>
Why has the school charted this course? One reason is its commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion ideology. UCLA has a DEI program called “Cultural North Star,” and at the medical school, it is led by Natalie J. Perry. Her <a href="https://medschool.ucla.edu/people/natalie-j-perry-phd" target="_blank" rel="noopener">official biography</a> says her job is to “embed our aspirational Cultural North Stars [sic] value [sic] in our organizational DNA.” UCLA <a href="https://www.facebook.com/story.php/?story_fbid=829852155850799&amp;id=100064780655815" target="_blank" rel="noopener">honored</a> Perry last month for teaching students to “do what’s right,” saying her “empathy and radical listening” are to thank for her “success as an educator and a leader.”
According to a Daily Wire and City Journal investigation, however, Perry’s academic career is based on fraud. Perry has published a single paper, a 2014 Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Virginia about how colleges should create larger DEI programs. An analysis of the paper found it ridden with the worst sort of plagiarism, reproducing large swaths of text directly from several other authors, without citations. The scale of the plagiarism suggests that Perry lacks both ethics and competence and raises questions about academic programs that push DEI.
Perry’s dissertation lifted passages from ten other papers. In key portions of her text, she copied almost every paragraph from other sources without attribution. She fails even to mention at least four of the ten plagiarized papers anywhere in her dissertation.
Let’s review some examples.
The first three pages of Perry’s <a href="https://libraetd.lib.virginia.edu/public_view/wd375w520" target="_blank" rel="noopener">paper</a>, “Faculty Perceptions of Diversity at a Highly Selective Research-Intensive University,” suggest that she did not even bother to read beyond the first page of papers from which she stole. Her dissertation’s second sentence reproduces verbatim part of a sentence on the first page of a paper by Adrianna Kezar, Peter Eckel, Melissa Contreras-McGavin, and Stephen John Quaye. Her third paragraph, without citation, lifts more than 100 words from the first page of a paper by Angela Locks, Sylvia Hurtado, Nicholas Bowman, and Leticia Oseguera.
<div class="image"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-726417" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/04/Locks_Perry3.gif" alt="" width="1108" height="652" /></div>
Each colored portion of the below text was taken from a different author:
<div class="image"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone wp-image-726409" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/04/perry-1-3-1018x576.png" alt="" width="720" height="407" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/04/perry-1-3-1018x576.png 1018w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/04/perry-1-3-300x170.png 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/04/perry-1-3-768x434.png 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/04/perry-1-3-1536x869.png 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/04/perry-1-3-2048x1159.png 2048w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 720px) 100vw, 720px" /></div>
In some cases when Perry did include parenthetical citations, she wasn’t citing the papers whose text she had lifted. Instead, she simply reproduced the citations included in those stolen excerpts.
<div class="image"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-726421" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/04/Aguerre_Perry1.gif" alt="" width="906" height="790" /></div>
Take the above paragraph, which ends with “(Bernard, 2005; Bollag, 2005; Munoz, Jasis, Young, and McLaren, 2004; Williams, Nakashima, Kich, and Reginald, 1996).” Perry was not synthesizing those authors. Instead, the citation was part of Adalberto Aguirre and Ruben Martinez’s paper, which she copied without attribution.
A core part of Perry’s dissertation involved summarizing work done by professors Robert Quinn and John Rohrbaugh. Instead of citing them directly, however, Perry cribbed summaries from other academics. Perry copied and pasted almost all of a nearly thousand-word passage from a <a href="https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2011-00494-001" target="_blank" rel="noopener">paper</a> by Chad Hartnell, Amy Yi Ou, and Angelo Kinicki, without quoting or crediting the authors.
<div class="image"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-726425" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/04/Hartnell_Perry2.gif" alt="" width="910" height="794" /></div>
The rest of Perry’s analysis of Quinn and Rohrbaugh’s work is largely copied, unquoted and unattributed, from a 2003 <a href="https://www.proquest.com/openview/5673abad3db19db51c14f851f6b7fb2a/1.pdf?pq-origsite=gscholar&amp;cbl=54013" target="_blank" rel="noopener">paper</a> by John Smart. Below are pages 13 and 14 of Perry’s paper, outlining its “Theoretical Framework,” with the italicized text coming directly from Smart:
<div class="image"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-726749" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/04/Smart_Perry4v3.gif" alt="" width="2200" height="1758" /></div>
In a section titled “Positioning Diversity Leadership in Higher Education,” Perry copies almost every sentence from one of several other papers. In no case does she credit the actual source:
<div class="image"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone wp-image-726411" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/04/perry-19-21-1024x472.png" alt="" width="720" height="332" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/04/perry-19-21-1024x472.png 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/04/perry-19-21-300x138.png 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/04/perry-19-21-768x354.png 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/04/perry-19-21-1536x708.png 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/04/perry-19-21-2048x944.png 2048w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 720px) 100vw, 720px" /></div>
Finally, in a section on organizational culture, Perry duplicates language from a variety of other authors:
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone wp-image-726413" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/04/perry-30-38-1024x483.png" alt="" width="720" height="340" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/04/perry-30-38-1024x483.png 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/04/perry-30-38-300x142.png 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/04/perry-30-38-768x362.png 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/04/perry-30-38-1536x725.png 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/04/perry-30-38-2048x967.png 2048w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 720px) 100vw, 720px" /> 
Perry presented her paper as “qualitative” research because she chatted with what appear to be ten of her colleagues at the University of Virginia who sat on the  faculty-retention taskforce and counted their musing as “data.” But when the paper gets to this section, where plagiarism wasn’t possible, Perry includes the following jumbled passage that includes a glaring spelling error:
<blockquote>The positionality of the participants informed the perspective on the origins of the commission. /in response to the needs of the varios [sic] stakeholders within the university, the commission addressed issues of diversity on the faculty, undergraduate, graduate, and university level.</blockquote>
The section of original text suggests that her plagiarism could be used to mask glaring academic deficiencies. Moreover, Perry in her references section fails to list some of the papers that she cites parenthetically in the body of the dissertation—a telltale sign that she had simply copied those citations from somewhere else.  A legitimate academic field never would have found this dissertation plausible.
Perry and UCLA did not return requests for comment.
Entrepreneur Mark Cuban recently argued that DEI policies don’t necessarily lower an organization’s expectations. But for Harvard, UVA, and UCLA Medical School—where Perry earned her master’s, Ph.D., and DEI position, respectively—this is evidently not the case. These institutions have dramatically lowered expectations for favored groups and pushed a cohort of “scholars” through the system without enforcing basic standards of academic integrity.
Ultimately, Natalie Perry is to blame for her misconduct. But these institutions of higher learning share some fault for permitting such shoddiness to stand unchallenged.
<a href="https://www.city-journal.org/person/christopher-f-rufo" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Christopher F. Rufo</a> is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of <a href="https://manhattan.institute/book/americas-cultural-revolution-how-the-radical-left-conquered-everything" target="_blank" rel="noopener">America’s Cultural Revolution</a>. <a href="https://city-journal.org/person/luke-rosiak" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Luke Rosiak</a> is an investigative reporter for The Daily Wire and author of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Race-Bottom-Uncovering-Destroying-Education/dp/0063056720" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Race to the Bottom: Uncovering the Secret Forces Destroying American Public Education</a>.

UCLA diversity official Natalie J. Perry (Credit: UCLA). At right, a UCLA flag (Credit: Icon Sportswire / Contributor via Getty Images)

DEI Official At UCLA School of Medicine Massively Plagiarized Her Dissertation On DEI

Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI)

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Lisa Cook, governor of the US Federal Reserve. Photographer: Al Drago/Bloomberg

Trouble At The Fed: Investigation Into Lisa Cook’s Academic Record Raises Questions

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Luke Rosiak and Christopher F. Rufo

Bowman’s Folly: New York Dem Appears To Have Plagiarized From ‘CRT: An Introduction’ For Dissertation

DEI Official At UCLA School of Medicine Massively Plagiarized Her Dissertation On DEI

Trouble At The Fed: Investigation Into Lisa Cook’s Academic Record Raises Questions