Columbia University Hospital DEI Chief Accused of Being a ‘Serial Plagiarist’
The chief of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) at Columbia University Hospital is a serial plagiarist who copies and pastes his material from Wikipedia.
According to an exposé by the Washington Free Beacon, Alade McKen seemingly plagiarized extensively in his doctoral dissertation submitted to the Iowa State University’s School of Education in 2021. McKen lifted pages nearly verbatim from Wikipedia’s entry on “Afrocentric education” into his dissertation titled, “‘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.”
Other pages from McKen’s work were lifted from well-known African scholars. Specifically, McKen ripped off the work of the University of Rwanda’s Chika Ezenaya-Esiobu. In a side-to-side graphic of McKen’s 2021 dissertation with Ezenaya-Esiobu’s 2019 paper, the two are nearly identical.
McKen seemingly copied and pasted the text and proceeded to change works such as “were” to “was.”
McKen oversees all DEI programs for staff at Columbia University Irving Medical School, including the university’s flagship medical school, the Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons. McKen obtained a certificate in diversity and inclusion from Cornell University.
Ironically, McKen’s favorite phrase in his DEI work is committing employees to “doing the work.”
The report on McKen’s academic plagiarism comes after several elite Ivy League scholars were outed for plagiarism. Most notably, former Harvard president Claudine Gay was outed as plagiarizing a litany of her books and papers. The accusations against Gay came as she was facing national pushback for stating it may not be a violation of Harvard’s bylaws to call for the genocide of Jewish people.
Harvard’s DEI chief, Sherri Anne Charleston, was also outed for plagiarizing her husband’s work. A total of 40 allegations of plagiarism were made against Charleston, beginning with her 2009 dissertation submitted to the University of Michigan.
Charleston seems to have stolen work from her husband’s 2012 study and recycled it as new revelations in her 2014 peer-reviewed journal article.
