Another scalp goes up on Chris Rufo's wall. And Luke Rosiak's.
Recent headlines about UCLA School of Medicine suggest that the institution has lost its focus. Instead of brushing up on organic chemistry, its students were subjected to lessons on "Indigenous womxn" and "two-spirits." Future doctors had to take a class on "structural racism" and were led in a "Free Palestine" chant by a Hamas-praising guest speaker. The school made plans to segregate students by race for courses on left-wing ideology, and two of its psychiatry residents championed "revolutionary suicide."
Why has the school charted this course? One reason is its commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion ideology. UCLA has a DEI program called "Cultural North Star," and at the medical school, it is led by Natalie J. Perry, whose official title is Cultural North Star Lead. Her UCLA biography says that her job is to "embed our aspirational Cultural North Stars [sic] value [sic] in our organizational DNA." UCLA honored Perry last month for teaching students to "do what's right," saying her "empathy and radical listening" are to thank for her "success as an educator and a leader."
According to a Daily Wire and City Journal investigation, however, Perry's academic career is based on fraud. Perry published her Ph.D. dissertation in 2014 at the University of Virginia about college diversity programs. An analysis of the paper found it ridden with the worst sort of plagiarism, reproducing large swaths of text directly from several other authors, without proper citations. The scale of the plagiarism suggests that Perry lacks both ethics and competence and raises questions about academic programs that push DEI.
Perry's dissertation lifted passages from ten other papers. In key portions of her text, she copied almost every paragraph from other sources without attribution. She fails even to mention at least four of the ten plagiarized papers anywhere in her dissertation.
Let's review some examples.
The first three pages of Perry's paper, "Faculty Perceptions of Diversity at a Highly Selective Research-Intensive University," suggest that she did not even bother to read beyond the first page of papers from which she stole. Her dissertation's second sentence reproduces verbatim part of a sentence on the first page of a paper by Adrianna Kezar, Peter Eckel, Melissa Contreras-McGavin, and Stephen John Quaye. Her third paragraph, without citation, lifts more than 100 words from the first page of a paper by Angela Locks, Sylvia Hurtado, Nicholas Bowman, and Leticia Oseguera.
Each colored portion of the below text was taken from a different author:
In some cases when Perry did include parenthetical citations, she wasn't citing the papers whose text she had lifted. Instead, she simply reproduced the citations included in those stolen excerpts.
In other words: She read one book which then cited multiple other books as authority. Instead of citing the one book she actually read, she cited the books the book she read cited, which denies the credit for the research to the one book she actually read, and, not accidentally, makes it appear, falsely, that she read many books when in fact she just read the one.
Even if you don't think this is a big deal, it's a red flag: Only an imposter would feel the need to inflate the size of the bibliography she's drawing from.
A core part of Perry's dissertation involved summarizing work done by professors Robert Quinn and John Rohrbaugh. Instead of citing them directly, however, Perry cribbed summaries from other academics. Perry copied and pasted almost all of a nearly thousand-word passage from a paper by Chad Hartnell, Amy Yi Ou, and Angelo Kinicki, without quoting the authors.
I mean... she can't even write her own summaries?
...
In a section titled "Positioning Diversity Leadership in Higher Education," Perry copies almost every sentence from one of several other papers. In no case does she credit the actual source...
What the hell is going on in DEI "studies"?
These people must have been caught out committing plagiarism earlier in their careers. Obviously, their fraudulence was covered up by DEI Fellow Travelers, and the lesson learned was "fraud and plagiarism are academic research, you just have to be crafty about it."
This isn't just a few DEI "bad apples" spoiling the barrel. Obviously the people filling the barrel are all in on it.
It's almost as if this is a massive grift in which all of the "professors" and all of the "students" are conspiring to pretend that DEI is not just a naked political grift for academic failures who cannot rise by their own merits, but is some kind of "real academic field" with citations and footnotes!