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.

“It would have been nice to at least get a citation!” Chae told the Washington Free Beacon in an email. “Anderson seems quite comfortable in taking credit for large portions of another writer’s scholarly work.”

Anderson, who held DEI posts at Boston University and Babson College before coming to MIT, lifts another long passage from Jarvis Givens, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, without an in-text citation. The omissions appear to violate MIT’s plagiarism policy, which states that scholars must cite their sources any time they “use the words, ideas, or phrasing of another person.”

MIT did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

In total, the two diversity deans lifted about 10 full pages of material without attribution, according to the complaint, as well as dozens of shorter passages sprinkled throughout their theses.

Like former Harvard University president Claudine Gay, who resigned in January amid her own plagiarism scandal, Anderson even stole language from another scholar’s acknowledgments, copying phrases and sentences used by Khalilah Shabazz, now a diversity official at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, to thank her dissertation advisers.

Anderson’s acknowledgments contain several typos not seen in Shabbaz’s, including missing words and commas and a lack of subject-verb agreement.

Givens and Shabbaz did not respond to requests for comment. Anderson, who received her Ph.D. from Boston College’s school of education, did not respond to a request for comment. Boston Beer Company did not respond to a request for comment.

Saturday’s complaint, which was submitted to Boston College and Northeastern University alongside MIT, is the latest in a string of plagiarism allegations against campus diversity officials. Since Gay’s resignation, DEI officers at Harvard, Columbia, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the University of California, Los Angeles, have been accused of research misconduct. Some, such as Columbia medical school’s Alade McKen and UCLA medical school’s Natalie Perry, copied pages of material from various sources—including Wikipedia—while others passed off old studies as new work.

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