Posted on October 11, 2024

Dean of Michigan State’s Top-Ranked Ed School Is a Serial Plagiarist, Complaint Alleges

Aaron Sibarium, Washington Free Beacon, October 8, 2024

The dean of Michigan State University’s College of Education, Jerlando Jackson, plagiarized extensively over the course of his career, according to a complaint filed with the university on Thursday, lifting text without attribution and raising questions about his fitness to lead one of the top teacher training programs in the country.

The complaint includes nearly 40 examples of plagiarism that span nine of Jackson’s papers, including his Ph.D. thesis, and range from single sentences to full pages. It adds to the allegations of research misconduct already facing the embattled dean, who was a coauthor on several papers implicated in complaints against diversity officials earlier this year, including Harvard University’s chief diversity officer, Sherri Ann Charleston.

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In a 2002 paper, for example, he lifts pages of material from Lorraine McDonnell, a political scientist at UC Santa Barbara, and Richard Elmore, a professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, without attribution, keeping the order of their sentences while swapping out synonyms and details.

He does the same thing to Gary Orfield, a professor of law at UCLA, in a 2003 paper. None of those scholars appear in the bibliography of either article.

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That context makes the allegations all the more galling, said Steve McGuire, a fellow at the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, given that graduates of Jackson’s program will inherit a plagiarism crisis with no precedent in modern memory.

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Thursday’s complaint follows a string of plagiarism allegations against prominent university officials, including former Harvard president Claudine Gay and University of Maryland president Darryll Pines. Other allegations have targeted diversity deans at HarvardColumbia, and UCLA.

Unlike most of those officials, however, Jackson has direct oversight of both academic programs and student discipline. And he is not just an administrator but a scholar—with hundreds of papers under his belt and grants from the National Science Foundation—albeit one who studies diversity programs for a living.

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Between 2008 and 2020, he also produced 75 percent of the research “exclusively on African American/Black individuals in computing,” according to his bio on Michigan State’s website. It is not clear how that statistic was derived.

At Wisconsin, Jackson met Sherri and LaVar Charleston—now the top diversity officials at Harvard and UW-Madison, respectively—and coauthored several papers with them, two of which contained survey results that they had already published in other journals.

Neither paper acknowledged that its findings had been published elsewhere, a form of academic dishonesty known as duplicate publication. Sometimes considered a form of self-plagiarism, duplicate publication often leads to retractions and can even violate copyright law. Jackson was the most senior scholar on both papers, which were also accused of plagiarizing other authors.

Thursday’s complaint reiterates those allegations and adds 27 new ones that have not been previously reported, painting the most comprehensive picture to date of Jackson’s academic transgressions. It runs 68 pages, single-spaced.

“No professor who takes plagiarism seriously would accept this kind of work from an undergraduate student, let alone a dean,” said McGuire, who previously taught political theory at Villanova University. {snip}

Many of the new allegations center on Jackson’s doctoral dissertation, submitted to the University of Iowa in 2000, which borrows liberally from Henry Mintzberg, a professor of management at McGill University.

The complaint describes over a dozen cases in which Jackson quotes or paraphrases Mintzberg without attribution, at times changing the subject of the passage while retaining its structure.

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