This has been uncovered so many times in recent weeks that it’s hard to keep track of the cases.

Campus Reform reports:

Columbia medical center DEI head plagiarized Ph.D. dissertation, complaint alleges

The leading Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) officer at a major New York City medical center has recently been accused of plagiarizing nearly a fifth of his Ph.D. dissertation.

Citing a recently submitted anonymous complaint, The Washington Free Beacon on Feb. 29 wrote that Alade McKen “plagiarized extensively in his doctoral dissertation, lifting entire pages of material, without attribution, from sources that include Wikipedia.”

The Free Beacon shared a side-by-side comparison of excerpts from McKen’s Iowa State University doctoral dissertation that closely resemble the work of other authors and Wikipedia.

“A complaint filed with Columbia yesterday implicates approximately a fifth of McKen’s 163-page dissertation,” Free Beacon reporter Aaron Sibarium posted to X the same day as the article’s publication. “Over two of those pages are a near-verbatim facsimile of Wikipedia’s entry on ‘Afrocentric education,’ which McKen never cites.”

McKen’s dissertation, entitled, “‘UBUNTU’ I am because we are: A case study examining the experiences of an African-centered Rites of Passage program within a community-based organization,” was written for a Ph.D. program on education, social, and cultural studies at Iowa State in 2021.

The complaint accuses McKen of plagiarizing more than 30 authors for his dissertation, with some listed in a bibliography but none apparently included for in-text citations.

One of the scholars that McKen allegedly plagiarized from, Chika Ezeanya-Esiobu, told the Free Beacon that she found the evidence supporting the allegations to be convincing.

“The passages you shared can definitely be classified as plagiarism,” she told the outlet.

NEW: The chief diversity officer of Columbia University’s medical school, Alade McKen, plagiarized extensively in his doctoral dissertation, lifting huge chunks of material without attribution.

Two pages in the dissertation come directly from Wikipedia.🧵https://t.co/V1cy1vOwe4 pic.twitter.com/UBpTyOWXXT

— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) February 29, 2024

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