Copy and Paste
Another Harvard racial-justice scholar is accused of plagiarism.
Harvard professor Christina Cross is a rising star in the field of critical race studies. She earned a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, secured the support of the National Science Foundation, and garnered attention from the New York Times, where she published an influential article titled “The Myth of the Two-Parent Home.”
Cross’s 2019 dissertation, “The Color, Class, and Context of Family Structure and Its Association with Children’s Educational Performance,” won a slate of awards, including the American Sociological Association Dissertation Award and the ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award, and helped catapult her onto the Harvard faculty.
According to a new complaint filed with Harvard’s office of research integrity, however, Cross’s work is compromised by multiple instances of plagiarism, including “verbatim plagiarism, mosaic plagiarism, uncited paraphrasing, and uncited quotations from other sources.”
I have obtained a copy of the complaint, which documents a pattern of misappropriation in Cross’s dissertation and one other academic paper. The complaint begins with a dozen allegations of plagiarism related to the dissertation that range in severity from small bits of “duplicative language,” which may not constitute an offense, to multiple passages heavily plagiarized from other sources without proper attribution. (Cross did not respond to a request for comment.)
The most serious allegation is that Cross lifted an entire paragraph nearly verbatim from a paper by Stacey Bosick and Paula Fomby titled “Family Instability in Childhood and Criminal Offending During the Transition Into Adulthood” without citing the source or placing verbatim language in quotations. Here is the paragraph from Bosick and Fomby:
We use data from the PSID and two of its supplemental studies, the Child Development Supplement (CDS) and the Transition into Adulthood Supplement (TAS). PSID began in 1968 as a nationally representative sample of approximately 4,800 households. Original respondents and their descendants have been followed annually until 1997 and biennially since then. To maintain population representativeness, a sample refresher in 1997 added approximately 500 households headed by immigrants who had entered the United States since 1968. At each wave, the household head or the spouse or cohabiting partner of the head reports on family household composition, employment, earned and unearned income, assets, debt, educational attainment, expenditures, housing characteristics, and health and health care in the household. In 2015 (the most recent wave available), the study collected information on almost 25,000 individuals in approximately 9,000 households.
And here is the paragraph from Cross, with identical language italicized:
This study draws on data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (1985-2015) and its two youth-centered supplements, the Child Development Supplement (CDS) (1997-2007) and the Transition into Adulthood Supplement (TAS) (2005-2015). The PSID began in 1968 as a nationally-representative sample of nearly 5,000 U.S. households. Original sample members and their descendants were followed annually until 1997 and have been followed biennially since then. To maintain population representativeness, in 1997, a sample refresher added approximately 500 households headed by immigrants who had entered the United States since 1968. At each wave, the household head or the spouse or cohabiting partner of the head reports on household composition, and household members’ employment, income, educational attainment, and health status. In 2015, the study collected information on nearly 25,000 individuals in approximately 9,000 households.
This was not a one-off error. Later in the paper, Cross lifts another full paragraph from Bosick and Fomby, with minor word substitutions, without placing the copied language in quotation marks or properly citing the authors. Cross cannot plead unfamiliarity with the source: Fomby served on Cross’s dissertation committee, making the offense even more egregious.
Elsewhere in the paper, Cross borrows language from other academic sources, sometimes citing the authors but failing to place the verbatim language in quotations, and other times failing to cite the source at all, creating the false impression that it was her own work. For example, Cross lifts verbatim language from “Examining the Antecedents of U.S. Nonmarital Fatherhood,” by Marcia Carlson, Alicia VanOrman, and Natasha Pilkauskas—the last of whom also served on Cross’s dissertation committee—without the use of direct quotations, as required. Here is the paragraph from Carlson et al.:
To adjust for biennial interviewing starting in 1994, we assign the previous year’s reported values (adjusting earnings for inflation) as the missing year’s values for the time-varying covariates during noninterview (i.e., odd) years in the 1994–2006 period.
Cross directly copies this language, including the idiosyncratic use of parentheticals, with minor word substitutions, suggesting a certain amount of deliberateness. Cross writes, again with identical language italicized:
To adjust for biennial interviewing starting in 1997, I assign the previous year’s reported values (adjusting income for inflation) as the missing year’s values for the time-varying covariates during noninterview (i.e., even) years in the 1998-2012 period.
According to the complaint, Cross repeats this pattern of plagiarism in at least one other paper, “Extended family households among children in the United States: Differences by race/ethnicity and socio-economic status,” published in the academic journal Population Studies in 2018. The complaint alleges that Cross again uses material from others, including the same passages from her dissertation advisors, without proper attribution.
This complaint raises a number of pertinent questions. First, do the allegations rise to the level of “plagiarism”? To answer that question, one might turn to Harvard’s own policy, which states: “If you copy language word for word from another source and use that language in your paper, you are plagiarizing verbatim . . . you must give credit to the author of the source material, either by placing the source material in quotation marks and providing a clear citation, or by paraphrasing the source material and providing a clear citation.”
Second, what is happening at Harvard? We have seen an explosion of plagiarism allegations against prominent scholars and administrators in recent months, all associated with critical race studies and “diversity and inclusion” programs. Former president Claudine Gay, chief diversity officer Sherri Ann Charleston, DEI administrator Shirley Greene, and now star professor Christina Cross have each come under fire for alleged plagiarism.
This raises several additional questions. Did these scholars manage to earn positions at Harvard without a comprehensive review of their work? Why are Gay, Charleston, and Greene, in particular, still employed at Harvard, given the seriousness of the questions raised about their academic integrity? Harvard’s own policy recommends serious consequences for students who have committed plagiarism. Are professors held to a lesser standard?
Finally, given Harvard’s long-standing support for DEI policies and affirmative action programs, it is reasonable to ask whether scholars such as Gay, Charleston, Greene, and Cross rose through the ranks on their merits or, at least in part, on their identity and their politics.
Further investigation is needed. Independent researchers currently looking into plagiarism at Harvard should scrutinize not only these programs but also a control group in other, more substantive disciplines to determine whether plagiarism correlates with left-wing racial disciplines or is widespread throughout the university.
Time will tell. My sources say that more allegations are coming.
This article was originally published in City Journal.
I bet Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson could benefit from a plagiarism audit.
I once had to take an "on the spot", no-warning oral exam to disprove an accusation of cheating.
The basis of the accusation? I would wear my dirty mechanic's uniform to class, and my professor didn't think I was intellectually capable of the papers I was turning in.
I could have been expelled if I'd shown up hungry or hungover.
These DEI people at HARVARD are getting the pass after actually cheating and plagiarizing their way through school and into their jobs! There's incontrovertible evidence, and they're still there. Crazy.
Leftist demagogues value ideology over anything else. This is the Left, in a nutshell. And they must be taken down.