Aaron Sibarium of the Washington Free Beacon highlights another plagiarism controversy at a high-profile elite university.

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,” 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.

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.

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.