Harvard University's principal diversity and inclusion officer has faced dozens of plagiarism claims related to her academic work.
According to the Washington Free Beacon, the institution received an anonymous complaint on Monday, Jan. 29, identifying at least 40 incidents of alleged plagiarism by Sherri Ann Charleston dating back to 2009, a decade before she joined Harvard.
The allegations, which include failing to properly cite other scholars' work and failing to reference it in footnotes, come just weeks after Harvard University president Claudine Gay resigned amid a scandal over allegations of plagiarism and her handling of antisemitism on campus.
According to the Beacon, which conducted its own investigation into the complaint, Charleston allegedly referenced or paraphrased a dozen professors without proper citation in her 2009 dissertation at the University of Michigan.
According to the complaint, Charleston ultimately took credit for a 2012 report written by her husband, LaVar Charleston, who is now the University of Wisconsin-Madison's deputy vice chancellor for diversity and inclusion.
Charleston allegedly plagiarized major chunks of her husband's paper in a peer-reviewed publication they co-authored in 2014, according to the complaint.
The complaint alleges that the 2014 study published in the Journal of Negro Education contained the identical findings, method, and survey subject descriptions as Charleston's husband's original research.
"You cannot just republish an old paper as if it is a new paper," Lee Jussim, a social psychologist at Rutgers University, told the site. "If you do, that is not exactly plagiarism; it's more like fraud."
The new allegations are the latest directed against Harvard-affiliated researchers or staff after the Ivy League school's president resigned from her coveted position following weeks of controversy about her own academic record.
Gay's academic career was heavily scrutinized when she received nearly 50 charges of plagiarism or poor citation.