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UCLA School of Medicine's radical DEI czar clumsily plagiarized vast portions of her dissertation on DEI: Report
Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

UCLA School of Medicine's radical DEI czar clumsily plagiarized vast portions of her dissertation on DEI: Report

Harvard is not the only woke university whose top race obsessives are unrepentant plagiarists. The University of California's David Geffen School of Medicine apparently also has at least one identitarian hack on staff earning hundreds of thousands of dollars annually at taxpayers' expense thanks in part to stolen scholarship.

Manhattan Institute fellow Christopher Rufo and Luke Rosiak of the Daily Wire have revealed in a damning new report that the medical school's DEI czar plagiarized a significant portion of her dissertation on DEI. What little of the publication Natalie Perry ostensibly wrote on her own was largely spoiled by error and incoherence.

Perry, formerly an associate dean for academic programs at the American International College's School of Education in Springfield, Massachusetts, presently serves as the DGSOM's so-called "Cultural North Star Lead." The Cultural North Star initiative is the product of a 2017 culture audit conducted by the Dean's Office, serving to advance the cause of DEI at the school.

Perry's biographic statement on the school's website references her 2014 doctoral dissertation, "Faculty Perceptions of Diversity at a Highly Selective Research-Intensive University," noting that her "wealth of experience in understanding and improving the culture of higher education, including at an academic health system, will be invaluable to our ongoing efforts to embed our aspirational Cultural North Stars [sic] value in our organizational DNA."

It turns out that others may instead deserve credit for the "wealth of experience in understanding" Perry has submitted as her own.

Rosiak noted on X that Perry, "the DEI czar at UCLA School of Medicine, which blamed opiates on 'whiteness,' had doctors praise 'revolutionary suicide,' taught about 'two-spirits,' and led a class in chanting 'Free Palestine,'" is responsible for the "most egregious case of plagiarism" he and Rufo have so far encountered.

According to Rosiak, Perry's wealth of published knowledge, reducible to a single paper, "stole thousands of words from 10 other papers." In one instance, the DEI czar ostensibly directly copied five continuous pages of material from someone else's work.

Perry apparently wasn't even stealthy when stealing other people's ideas, having lifted the first pages of her dissertation from the first page of other published works, including more than 100 words from the first page of a paper by Angela Locks, Sylvia Hurtado, Nicholas Bowman, and Leticia Oseguera.

In addition to sometimes porting over the exact text formatting from the works she was plagiarizing, Perry apparently also copied the parenthetical citations from uncredited authors without even factoring their source material into her final list of references.

The only significant alterations Perry appears to have made to the elements she lifted from other writers were errors.

Rosiak noted, for instance, that when plagiarizing a paper from John C. Smart, the DEI czar "changed a few words, and added errors almost every time (e.g. changing Smart's 'distinguishes between X and Y' to 'distinguish between X from Y')."

The medical school's future Cultural North Star lead was afforded a chance to shine in a section in her dissertation devoted to original research. However, she instead cobbled together a few half-baked sentences containing spelling and grammatical errors.

"The positionality of the participants informed the perspective on the origins of the commission. /in response to the needs of the varios [sic] stakeholders within the university, the commission addressed issues of diversity on the faculty, undergraduate, graduate, and university level," she wrote in the ostensibly original section.

The Daily Wire indicated that neither the university nor Perry returned requests for comment.

Perry is the latest and perhaps the most brazen among the university professionals recently outed for passing off other people's work as their own.

Christina Ross, a race obsessive and assistant sociology professor at Harvard University, was accused last month of various form of plagiarism, including "verbatim plagiarism, mosaic plagiarism, uncited paraphrasing, and uncited quotations from other sources."

Harvard Extension School administrator Shirley R. Greene was accused in February of 42 instances of plagiarism — just in her 2008 University of Michigan dissertation.

In January, Claudine Gay resigned her post as Harvard's 30th president in disgrace after nearly 50 plagiarism complaints had been filed against her, implicating nearly half of her published works, including her doctoral thesis.

That same month, affirmative action expert Sherri Ann Charleston, the university's chief DEI officer, was slapped with a complaint identifying 40 examples of alleged plagiarism in two of her academic works.

Rufo and Rosiak reported earlier this month that Lisa D. Cook, a tenured professor at Michigan State University who was successfully nominated to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors in 2022, was also guilty of academic dishonesty, having based her most celebrated article on flawed data and misled about the quality of one of her other publications.

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Joseph MacKinnon

Joseph MacKinnon

Joseph MacKinnon is a staff writer for Blaze News. He lives in a small town with his wife and son, moonlighting as an author of science fiction.
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