University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) DEI official Natalie Perry allegedly plagiarized her Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Ph.D. dissertation.
Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Christopher Rufo has reported that large sections of Perry’s dissertation were taken directly from the writings of other authors, without citation, and that she failed to even mention some of the authors whose works she included within her dissertation. Perry has made a name for herself at UCLA as head of the Cultural North Star DEI program and has been praised in a Facebook post by UCLA’s school of medicine.
“The plagiarism here is shocking,” Rufo wrote in a social media post announcing his findings.
For Perry’s most egregious acts of plagiarism cited in his report, Rufo provides passages from Perry’s dissertation alongside passages from the papers which were utilized in her thesis, showing word-for-word sameness between the passages.
Rufo also discovered that lifting multiple authors to compose her dissertation is not the only problem plaguing Perry’s dissertation. In places where Perry did engage in original writing, Rufo found it to be “jumbled” and containing prominent spelling errors.
Perry is the latest prominent official to come under Rufo’s scrutiny for plagiarism. Last December, Rufo published a report concerning allegations of plagiarism against then-Harvard president and DEI proponent Claudine Gay.
Rufo provided documentation revealing that Gay had allegedly plagiarized substantial portions of her dissertation, without providing citations or quotations. In fact, Gay apparently went so far as to lift “an entire appendix in the dissertation directly taken from Gary King’s book, A Solution to the Ecological Inference Problem. While she cites King’s book—in fact, King was her dissertation advisor—Gay does not explicitly acknowledge that Appendix B is entirely grounded in King’s concepts.” Gay subsequently resigned from her position on January 2.
In light of Rufo’s latest expose, it seems that, at least in the case of Gay and Perry, DEI advocacy and academic malfeasance are correlated.