Aaron Sibarium of the Washington Free Beacon reports on the latest high-profile Ivy League plagiarism scandal.

The chief diversity, equity, and inclusion officer of Columbia University’s medical school, Alade McKen, plagiarized extensively in his doctoral dissertation, lifting entire pages of material, without attribution, from sources that include Wikipedia, according to a complaint submitted to the university on Wednesday.

The allegations implicate approximately a fifth of McKen’s 163-page dissertation, “‘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,” submitted to Iowa State University’s School of Education in 2021. More than two of those pages are a near-verbatim facsimile of Wikipedia’s entry on “Afrocentric education,” which is not cited anywhere in the dissertation.

Other pages lift paragraphs from well-known African scholars, including the University of Rwanda’s Chika Ezeanya-Esiobu, while making small tweaks to their prose, such as reordering certain clauses or changing a “were” to a “was.”

Some of the scholars McKen allegedly plagiarized appear in the dissertation’s bibliography but not in in-text citations. Others, like Ezeanya-Esiobu, an expert on “indigenous knowledge” who has worked with numerous international agencies, including the World Bank, aren’t cited at all.

“The passages you shared can definitely be classified as plagiarism,” Ezeanya-Esiobu told the Washington Free Beacon. McKen lifts pages worth of material from Ezeanya-Esiobu’s 2019 chapter “A Faulty Foundation: Historical Origins of Formal Education Curriculum in Africa,” published in the Frontiers in African Business Research book series.

Columbia’s research integrity officer, Naomi Schrag, did not respond to a request for comment. Iowa State University did not respond to a request for comment.

McKen, who holds a certificate in diversity and inclusion from Cornell University, oversees all DEI programs for staff at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, which includes Columbia’s flagship medical school, the Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, and is the largest campus of NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital. The center’s DEI initiatives include mandatory “antiracism” training for faculty and admissions officers, as well as an expedited hiring process for minority scholars.