Harvard student cries 'witch hunt' after another black female former professor accused of academic dishonesty

A student writer for the Harvard Crimson has called for a university-wide review of all faculty publications after investigative journalists uncovered more examples of alleged academic dishonesty at the hands of a black female former Harvard professor.

On Wednesday, Christopher Rufo of City Journal and Luke Rosiak of the Daily Wire revealed that Lisa D. Cook, a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors and a tenured professor at Michigan State University, has allegedly been even more untruthful about her academic work than previously thought.

Cook's economic credentials have been called into question at least since President Joe Biden nominated her to the Federal Reserve board in January 2022. Back then, critics noted not only that her list of publications was unusually thin for a tenured professor but that her most celebrated article — "Violence and Economic Activity: Evidence from African American Patents, 1870 to 1940," published in 2014 — was predicated on egregiously flawed data, leading her to unfairly argue that lynching and discrimination caused the number of patents issued to black people to collapse around the turn of the 20th century.

One attempt at replicating her research for that article indicated that the number of patents issued to blacks at that time could have been nearly 70 times higher than the number Cook offered.

She also continues to mislead about the quality of at least one her publications. In 2022, Chris Brunet of the Daily Caller News Foundation noticed that Cook had claimed she had been published in the American Economic Review, described by Brunet as "the top peer-reviewed economics journal in the world." However, that 2009 article actually appeared in American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings, which is not peer-reviewed. Though this detail has been publicly documented for more than two years, the CV included on Cook's personal academic website — which is also linked to her directory listing at the MSU Department of Economics — still implies the article appeared in the more prestigious version of AER.

Now, Rufo and Rosiak have reported that Cook has also repeatedly copied lengthy passages from the work of other scholars without proper attribution and even committed "self-plagiarism," lifting excerpts from her previous articles and including them in new ones, thereby compromising the notion of original work. In the journalists' opinion, Cook's publication missteps demonstrate "a pattern of careless scholarship at best or, at worst, academic misconduct."

Cook, who was also once a member of the faculty of the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government and the deputy director of Africa research at its Center for International Development, is now the fifth current or former Harvard professor who also happens to be black and female to be accused of some form of academic malfeasance. The others include former Harvard President Claudine Gay, current chief diversity and inclusion officer Sherri Charleston, current Extension School administrator Shirley Greene, and current assistant sociology Professor Christina Cross.

"Let’s not ignore the pattern," Rufo tweeted a few weeks ago.

Maya Bodnick of the Harvard Crimson believes this "pattern" is actually the result of a conservative "witch hunt" to try and show that female black scholars plagiarize at disproportionally high rates. "But plagiarism has nothing to do with race, gender, or identity — rather, it’s a broad problem in academia," Brodnick argued.

To show that members of both genders and all racial groups commit plagiarism at roughly the same rates, Bodnick called for "a broad plagiarism review of the entire faculty" at Harvard. Though others suggested such a project would take years of work to complete and therefore cost a considerable amount of money, Bodnick insisted the review would be "worth the resources."

"We can’t let outsiders control the plagiarism narrative," she claimed. "Harvard and other universities must stay ahead of the game, surfacing instances of plagiarism and addressing them before malicious actors can hurt the University’s credibility."

Cook did not respond to Blaze News' request for comment.

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