No Way! MIT Just Hired Six Deans of DEI. (SIX!!!)
According to a Report, Two of Them Are Serial Plagiarists

My world is spinning. I'm in a cyclone of confusion and I just don't think I can trust anymore.

DEI sure attracts some genuine fuckin' scholars, don't it?

It's almost as if the entire "academic field" was invented to give semi-literate morons who barely earned a HS diploma an easy-peasy way to collect a fake-ass degree and land Didn't Earn It jobs.

In June 2021, a year into the cultural aftershocks of George Floyd's death, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology set out to meet the moment, as so many other schools had, by hiring more diversity officers.

MIT welcomed six new deans of diversity, equity, and inclusion, one for each of the institute's main schools, as part of a "DEI Strategic Action Plan" launched the previous year. Aimed at boosting the representation of women and minorities, in part by developing DEI criteria for staff performance reviews, the plan pledged to "make equity central" to the university "while ensuring the highest standards of excellence."

But according to a 71-page complaint filed with the university on Saturday, at least two of the six DEI officials may not be living up to those standards. The complaint alleges that Tracie Jones-Barrett and Alana Anderson are serial plagiarists, copying entire pages of text without attribution and riding roughshod over MIT's academic integrity policies.

In her 2023 dissertation titled "Cite a Sista"...

We're off to an uhhhhmazing start right here.

... which explored how black women in the Ivy League "make meaning of thriving," Jones-Barrett, MIT's deputy "equity officer," lifts a whole section on "ethical considerations" from Emmitt Wyche III, her classmate in Northeastern University's Graduate School of Education, without any sort of citation.

"Make meaning of thriving?" Is this an academic field or Oprah Winfrey's Favorite Things?

Norman MacDonald speaks for me on this.

The section is one of several long passages taken from Wyche's 2020 thesis, "Boyz in the Hoods: (Re) Defining the Narratives of Black Male Doctoral Degree Completers," which does not appear in Jones-Barrett's bibliography. Wyche and Jones-Barrett did not respond to requests for comment.

"Boyz In the Hoods"? Can these DEI grifters write a single paper without screaming, "grade me on the curve, because I'm black, y'all!

And a lot of DEI "graduates" have been running the same scam since their college entrance exam, in which they blew off the actual question proposed for discussion to instead write about their experiences with oppression.

Anderson, who served as the diversity czar for MIT's computer science college until last year, when she left to become Boston Beer Company's inclusion and belonging program manager, likewise copied copious material from other scholars. Her 2017 dissertation, "#BLACKONCAMPUS: A Critical Examination of Racial and Gender Performances of Black College Women on Social Media," lifts over a page of material from Mark Chae, a professor of counseling at Pillar College, who is not cited anywhere in her dissertation.

"It would have been nice to at least get a citation!" Chae told the Washington Free Beacon in an email. "Anderson seems quite comfortable in taking credit for large portions of another writer's scholarly work."

Anderson, who held DEI posts at Boston University and Babson College before coming to MIT, lifts another long passage from Jarvis Givens, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, without an in-text citation. The omissions appear to violate MIT's plagiarism policy, which states that scholars must cite their sources any time they "use the words, ideas, or phrasing of another person."

MIT did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

In total, the two diversity deans lifted about 10 full pages of material without attribution, according to the complaint, as well as dozens of shorter passages sprinkled throughout their theses.

Like former Harvard University president Claudine Gay, who resigned in January amid her own plagiarism scandal, Anderson even stole language from another scholar's acknowledgments, copying phrases and sentences used by Khalilah Shabazz, now a diversity official at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, to thank her dissertation advisers.

Anderson's acknowledgments contain several typos not seen in Shabbaz's, including missing words and commas and a lack of subject-verb agreement.

Givens and Shabbaz did not respond to requests for comment. Anderson, who received her Ph.D. from Boston College's school of education, did not respond to a request for comment. Boston Beer Company did not respond to a request for comment.

Andrerson even copied a dust-jacket blurb from another "DEI Scholar's" book.

Like many of the authors plagiarized by Gay, Wilder defended Anderson's decision to copy his work, writing in an email that he didn't think a citation was necessary.

"I cannot imagine why anyone would cite a dust jacket, nor do I see the urgency of criminalizing the failure to do so," Wilder told the Free Beacon. "I'm honored," he added, when other scholars "find inspiration from my publications."

I think what it shows is that she didn't really read the book, just skimmed the dust jacket.

Quick, let's give her the Nobel Prize for Outstanding Achievement In Laziness.

Is there some good news on the way?

The board of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill just voted, unanimously, to slash $2.3 million from the school's DEI budget -- and give it all to the police.

The campus police, I mean. Apparently, the pro-Hamas protests were the last straw that told them they needed to spend more on maintaining order and less on sinecures for revolutionaries.

Please let this be a harbinger of the End of Days of DEI.

Today the UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees cut DEI spending by more than $2 million and transferred the money to the campus police.

[NBC "News":] The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Board of Trustees approved a change that would divert $2.3 million of diversity funding to go toward public safety and policing at a special meeting to address the university's budget. The board's vote would only impact UNC-Chapel Hill's diversity funding, which could result in the loss of its diversity office.

The vote to shift more funding to public safety comes as continued pro-Palestinian protests on UNC's campus have resulted in several arrests in recent weeks. The budget committee vice-chair Marty Kotis said law enforcement has already been forced to react to protests, but they need more funding to keep the university "safe from a larger threat."

"It's important to consider the needs of all 30,000 students, not just the 100 or so that may want to disrupt the university's operations," Kotis said. "It takes away resources for others."

The board said this move had been under discussion even before the campus protests which popped up over the past couple weeks. Still, it sounds like the protests were the last straw.

[WUNC:]

Many members specifically mentioned recent pro-Palestinian demonstrations on campus. Last month, police detained more than 30 people at an encampment where protesters removed the U.S. flag and replaced it with a Palestinian one.

"When you destroy property or you take down the U.S flag and you have to put up gates around it -- that costs money," Kotis said. "It's imperative that we have the proper resources for law enforcement to protect the campus."

He's referring of course to this moment when a group of students refused to let the protesters take down the US flag.

Sexton reports further that it is expected that DEI will be cut at all UNC campuses, not just at Chapel Hill.

posted by Disinformation Expert Ace at 04:39 PM

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