Plagiarism and Disparities

Journalism, in part, is the work of turning up stones. Sometimes a reporter finds nothing underneath. Other times, he uncovers shock, scandal, or corruption.

{snip}

Now, reporters for prestige publications defend, rather than interrogate, the organs of power. They seek to propagate official narratives and to discredit those who would question them. {snip}

{snip}

At first, the prestige press ignored these academics’ misbehavior. Then, under enormous pressure, they acknowledged it, couched with caveats and excuses. And finally, in the face of overwhelming evidence, they adopted the Left’s defensive counter-narrative, claiming that exposing plagiarism in academia is a form of “racial profiling” designed to “bully and intimidate” “Black women.”

They based this accusation on the racial identities of our targets. But I specifically tasked my researchers with investigating potential plagiarism by Harvard scholars and administrators of all racial groups. The initial evidence, though not systematic, pointed to an inconvenient result: a ponderance of plagiarism by academics who specialized in “diversity.”

Nevertheless, the Harvard student newspaper, mimicking the legacy press, cried foul. It called the investigation a “witch hunt,” and suggested that I was “[t]argeting [b]lack [f]aculty.” Jennifer Hochschild, a white professor of African-American studies, deemed our reporting a “targeted” attack on black women. The existence of racial disparities in our plagiarism reporting, they believed, was prima facie evidence of racist intent.

{snip}

There is a reasonable alternative hypothesis to racism for our disparate plagiarism findings. First, universities have practiced decades of formal and informal affirmative action, recruiting, admitting, advancing, and hiring black scholars with lower standardized test scores than their white peers. Second, it stands to reason that grievance disciplines, such as critical racial studies and DEI administration, have lower academic standards than, say, astrophysics.

Put together, lower admissions standards and scholarly expectations could easily produce racially disproportionate outcomes when measured against general demographics.