Article r.e. Plagiarism

[Ancient Fellow]

This article was in the Telegraph this morning:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/08/27/anti-racism-robin-diangelo-plagarism-accused-minority-phd/

I'm no longer a subscriber and so couldn't read the entire article, but the author is accused of lifting parts of her doctoral thesis on white racism from non-white researchers. It's mentioned in brief on her Wikipedia page as well. An interesting situation.

[Hibush]

You can read more at the unpaywalled, aptly named Plagiarism Today website.

It appears to be another case of billionare Bill Ackman attacking academics whose conclusions he dislikes.

[Langue_doc]

I'm not on Twitter, aka X, but here's the link to John McWhorter's post.

There are at least two instances of plagiarism from scholars of Asian descent.

An unattributed paragraph.

So much virtue signalling on the part of the plagiarists. Whatever happened to "don't throw stones if you live in a glass house"? Plagiarism is still plagiarism regardless of political affiliation.

[Hibush]

I'm not on Twitter, aka X, but here's the link to John McWhorter's post.

There are at least two instances of plagiarism from scholars of Asian descent.

An unattributed paragraph.

So much virtue signalling on the part of the plagiarists. Whatever happened to "don't throw stones if you live in a glass house"? Plagiarism is still plagiarism regardless of political affiliation.

You can find more unattributed paragraphs in the anonymous complaint (PDF).

If I wanted to lift someones great words to describe important concepts, I would not choose to lift those words. Was this kind of writing considered good in some circles two decades ago when she was writing this thesis?

[Langue_doc]

Author of 'White Fragility' Faces Accusations of Plagiarism
A complaint filed with the University of Washington raises questions about attribution in Robin DiAngelo's Ph.D. thesis, which was published 20 years ago.

The entire article below:

Four years ago, Robin DiAngelo, the author of the best seller "White Fragility," emerged as a prominent public intellectual and advocate for racial equity and inclusion.

Now, she faces accusations that she plagiarized portions of her Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Washington.

A complaint filed this month with the University of Washington. The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative online journal, obtained and published passages from it. The complaint accuses DiAngelo of "research misconduct," and details 20 instances in which DiAngelo appears to have drawn on the work of other scholars and reproduced it without proper attribution in her 2004 dissertation, "Whiteness in Racial Dialogue: A Discourse Analysis."

Among the scholars whose work DiAngelo drew on without proper acknowledgment, according to the complaint, are Stacey J. Lee, a professor of education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, as well as Northeastern University's Thomas K. Nakayama, and his coauthor, Robert L. Krizek, a professor emeritus at St. Louis University.

While DiAngelo cites the scholars whose ideas she is reproducing, and later credits them in her bibliography, the complaint highlights some lengthy passages that repeat phrases almost word for word from their source material, without quotation marks.

Jonathan Bailey, a plagiarism expert and consultant who reviewed the complaint, said that while one or two of the passages cited in the complaint were "definitely worrisome or problematic" examples of plagiarism, the rest required only mild corrections or didn't seem substantially similar enough to prove they were copied.

The passages in question accounted for a small percentage of the dissertation, which totals 255 pages, not including bibliography and appendices, Bailey noted.

"I wouldn't expect her to lose her Ph.D. over this," Bailey said. "What I would expect the university to do is to request that she revise the dissertation and resubmit it."

A spokeswoman for the University of Washington said that complaints about academic integrity are confidential, and that the university was unable to confirm the accuracy of any given complaint.

"We are committed to the integrity of research conducted at the University of Washington," Dana Robinson Slote, the university's director of media relations, said in an email. "All complaints are carefully reviewed."

In a statement, DiAngelo said that she expected the university would properly vet the complaint, and suggested that she was being subjected to scrutiny because of her work as an antiracism advocate.

"I am confident that the University of Washington will thoroughly review any concerns and I trust the legitimacy of the peer-review process," she said. "Accusations of plagiarism should be guided by the norms of academia and not by partisan actors with a well-documented agenda to discredit antiracism work."

Such complaints are confidential, so it is unclear who filed the one against DiAngelo, or what motivated such scrutiny 20 years after her dissertation was published.

Debian Marty, a professor emeritus at California State University, Monterey Bay, is one of the scholars whose work was cited in the complaint as an example of scholarship that DiAngelo had plagiarized. She declined to comment, noting that she would let "any official investigation make the necessary assessments."

Three other scholars whose work was cited in the complaint as potentially plagiarized material did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The allegations against DiAngelo follow several other cases in which plagiarism and research misconduct accusations were leveled at academics and administrators who promote diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, Bailey said. Similar complaints have been filed against diversity officers at Harvard, Columbia, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

"It's obviously got political and ideological motivations behind it, which is frustrating because as someone who takes plagiarism seriously, having it used as an ideological weapon is not encouraging," Bailey said. "We're seeing D.E.I. administrators and individuals like DiAngelo, who are connected with D.E.I. initiatives and race initiatives, are the ones being targeted."

In her dissertation, DiAngelo explored the concept of "white fragility" — the idea that white people exist in a cocoon of privilege and feel threatened by any suggestion that they are perpetuating racism and segregation. In 2018, she released a book that draws on these ideas, "White Fragility," which argues that white people like herself need to examine the ways in which they are responsible for systemic racism. It became a best seller, launching DiAngelo as a spokeswoman for antiracism, and also making her a magnet for criticism.

In 2020, the book shot to No. 1 on Amazon as readers across the country sought to understand America's legacy of racism following the murder of George Floyd. DiAngelo addressed members of Congress and appeared on "The Tonight Show" with Jimmy Fallon, and received requests to speak at major companies like Amazon, Facebook and American Express.