The diversity chief of Columbia University’s medical school, Alade McKen, plagiarized large sections of his doctoral dissertation at Iowa State University, according to a complaint filed with the university.
The complaint says that roughly a fifth of McKen’s 163-page dissertation contains sentences and passages that show signs of plagiarism. Some of the worst examples involve sections that appear to be copied almost verbatim and without attribution from other scholars as well as Wikipedia, according to The Washington Free Beacon.
The allegations against McKen landed as Harvard University has been buffeted with a series of plagiarism scandals involving top administrators, including former university president Claudine Gay, who resigned from her post heading the university at the beginning of the year. The scandals have called into question the efficacy of using racial diversity as a key metric in hiring.
Chika Ezeanya-Esiobu of the University of Rwanda was one of several experts that McKen plagiarized, according to the complaint. McKen appeared to copy passages from a chapter Ezeanya-Esiobu wrote in the Frontiers in African Business Research book series.
“The passages you shared can definitely be classified as plagiarism,” Ezeanya-Esiobu told the Free Beacon.
McKen’s dissertation is called: “‘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.” In it, he appears to have copied content from the Wikipedia entry on “Afrocentric Education.”
A section of the Wikipedia entry quoted by the Free Beacon states: “Edward Wilmot Blyden, an American-Liberian educator and diplomat active in the pan-Africa movement, perceived a change in perception taking place among Europeans towards Africans in his 1908 book African Life and Customs, which originated as a series of articles in the Sierra Leone Weekly News. In it, he proposed that Africans were beginning to be seen simply as different and not as inferior, in part because of the work of English writers such as Mary Kingsley and Lady Lugard, who traveled and studied in Africa. Such an enlightened view was fundamental to refute prevailing ideas among Western peoples about African cultures and Africans.”
McKen’s dissertation contains a passage worded largely the same: “Its foundations can be traced back to the early 1900s during the pan-Africa movement where educators and activists such as Edward Wilmot Blyden documented a shift in the narrative in the way Eurocentric perception among Africans in his 1908 book titled African Life and Customs, which originated as a series of articles in the Sierra Leone Weekly News (Odamtten, 2019). He proposed that Africans were beginning to be seen simply as different and not as inferior. Such an enlightened view was fundamental to refute prevailing ideas among Western peoples about African cultures and Africans.”
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In addition to McKen and Gay, at least two other top university officials have come under scrutiny recently for the appearance of plagiarism. Complaints filed against Harvard diversity chief Sherri Ann Charleston and Harvard Extension School administrator Shirley Greene have alleged that both officials plagiarized in their various works.