An officer in charge of diversity, equity and inclusion at Columbia University Irving Medical Center was accused this week of plagiarizing large portions of his doctoral dissertation, according to an anonymous complaint filed with the university.
The 55-page complaint accused the official, Alade McKen, of copying material in his 2021 Iowa State University thesis from more than two dozen other scholars and from Wikipedia, which is written and edited by volunteers from the general public.
The complaint was published online Thursday by the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative news site that led a campaign last year against former Harvard University President Claudine Gay. She resigned in January following accusations of plagiarism and after her response to anti-Semitism on campus was criticized.
Allegations of plagiarism have rocked the elite world of academia in recent months. They often had clear political overtones, with conservative critics blaming left-leaning administrators and at least one high-profile indictment that has been portrayed as an act of liberal revenge.
The complaint published online Thursday accused Mr. McKen of copying passages of his thesis from the Wikipedia entry on “Afrocentric education” and from the published scholarship or doctoral theses of at least 28 people.
“Is Alade McKen a plagiarist?” the anonymous author of the complaint wrote at the top of page 1. “A small selection of examples from his dissertation are included below to guide your research.”
Mr McKen did not respond to messages seeking comment on Thursday. Angie Hunt, a spokeswoman for Iowa State University, said the school “has received and is in the process of reviewing the complaint.”
“The university is committed to the highest ethical standards to ensure the integrity and public trust in research conducted at Iowa State,” Ms. Hunt said in a statement.
Columbia declined to comment on the case, saying in a statement that it does not comment on “the details of individual personnel matters.”
“Columbia University has clear standards and policies regarding academic conduct and integrity for all members of our community, including faculty, and we take allegations of misconduct seriously,” the school said.
The disputed passages of Mr. McKen’s thesis were largely copied verbatim from other scholars or from Wikipedia with only minor changes in grammar or verb tenses, according to the complaint. The New York Times reviewed portions of the thesis and the Wikipedia page and found parts that appeared to be nearly identical.
“Woodson criticized African-American education as ‘bad education’ because he argued that it denigrated blacks while glorifying whites,” Mr. McCann wrote on page 53 of his thesis, citing the great Black scholar Dr. Carter G. Woodson. “For many early Afrocentrists, the goal was to break what they saw as a vicious cycle of the reproduction of black self-denial.”
Almost the same phrase appears in the Wikipedia article on “Afrocentric education”. Mr. McKen appeared to change the order of some words and remove a hyphen.
“Woodson criticized African-American education as ‘bad education’ because he argued that it denigrated blacks while glorifying whites,” the Wikipedia article states. “For these early Afrocentrists, the goal was to break what they saw as a vicious cycle of the reproduction of black self-denial.” The Times reviewed versions of the page dating back to 2013 in an online archive and found the same language.
Mr. McKen is the third diversity manager from an Ivy League university to be accused of plagiarism in a month, following Sherri Ann Charleston and Shirley R. Greene, both at Harvard.
At Harvard, Dr. Gay resigned in January after more than 40 instances of plagiarism in her academic work were uncovered by an anonymous tipster. The allegations came shortly after Dr Gay survived an earlier campaign to oust her over what critics called her inadequate response to anti-Semitism following the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel.
She had served as Harvard’s president — the first black woman in the role — for about six months.
Days later, an investigation by the news site Business Insider accused Neri Oxman, the wife of one of Dr. Gay, of hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman, for plagiarizing parts of her PhD thesis from other scholars as well as from Wikipedia.
Ms Oxman later apologized for what she called “mistakes”. a post on Twitter. Mr. Ackman said he believed the charges against his wife were retaliation for his support for the ouster of Dr. Gay, which he described as “my actions to address problems in higher education.”
Mr. McKen began work at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, which includes the university’s medical school, in September 2023. Prior to that, he was assistant dean for recruitment, diversity and inclusion in the School of Architecture, Planning and Design of Columbia University Preservation, according to a university profile.
In addition to his doctorate in education, social and cultural studies from Iowa State, Mr. McKen received a master’s degree in higher education administration from Baruch College and a certificate in diversity and inclusion from Cornell University, the profile said.
