Conservative Activist’s Plagiarism Crusade Zeros In on a Federal Reserve Governor

The next target of an anti-plagiarism campaign being conducted by a conservative activist, Christopher Rufo, is one of the nation’s most powerful economists: Lisa Cook of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors. Ms. Cook’s career, on its face, is an academic’s dream. She holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of California at Berkeley, has taught at Michigan State and Harvard, and served as an economist for President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors. In 2022, she was nominated to serve on the Fed’s Board of Governors and she was reappointed in February of this year. Her term as a board member does not end until 2038.Mr. Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and member of the board of the New College of Florida, alleges that Ms. Cook’s resume and scholarly work is embellished to a degree that constitutes plagiarism. Her half-truths and lies by omission, Mr. Rufo argues, represent serious academic misconduct.In a joint publication with City Journal and Daily Wire, Mr. Rufo and journalist Luke Rosiak point to a number of inconsistencies in Ms. Cook’s resume to back up their allegations of academic dishonesty. They note that Ms. Cook’s “most heralded” work, which examined the drop-off of Black patent filings during the Jim Crow era, was rife with errors. That work has been debunked by other scholars, who say Ms. Cook used faulty data in order to justify her claims about anti-Black racism in patents. She also misrepresented where her scholarly works were published. In one instance, she claimed that a paper of hers was published in the American Economic Review, a prestigious academic journal. Instead, her work had been published in the American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings, which is “a less prestigious, non-peer-reviewed magazine,” Messrs. Rufo and Rosiak argue. “In a series of academic papers spanning more than a decade, Cook appears to have copied language from other scholars without proper quotation and duplicated her own work and that of coauthors in multiple academic journals without proper attribution,” they write. “Both practices appear to violate Michigan State University’s own written academic standards.”In two papers from 2021 — just one year before being nominated to the Fed’s board — Ms. Cook used nearly similar language to that of other scholars, and while she does cite those scholars, the use of quotes without proper attribution violates academic standards of most universities — including Michigan State and Harvard. “Does the deliberate recycling of old material, including material from coauthors, constitute academic misconduct?” the two men ask rhetorically. “It is true that journalists, for example, often adapt previous reporting into a compilation or a book. But the standard in academia is more rigorous.”In response to the allegations, officials at the Federal Reserve directed the Sun to her February 2022 confirmation hearing before the Senate Banking Committee. “I certainly am proud of my academic background,” she said during the hearing. “I know that I have been the target of anonymous and untrue attacks on my academic record.”Mr. Rufo has been on this anti-plagiarism crusade for months, starting with the now-former president of Harvard, Claudine Gay. After she testified before Congress and refused to say that calling for the death of Jews violated her school’s code of conduct, Mr. Rufo found that Ms. Gay had plagiarized parts of her scholarly work. The head of Harvard’s board, Penny Pritzker, later made it clear to Ms. Gay that she would have to step down from her position. In a New York Times opinion piece, Ms. Gay claimed that she was the victim of unfair scrutiny because she is a Black woman. In a column on Tuesday for the Harvard Crimson, student Maya Bodnick argued that there was a “witch hunt … targeting Black Harvard faculty.” She called out Mr. Rufo by name, saying his plagiarism investigation was “racially motivated.”“Clearly, the right has an agenda: crafting a narrative that Black academics, particularly women and those who study race, disproportionately plagiarize,” Ms. Bodnick wrote. She called for a complete audit of all Harvard faculty members’ scholarly works in order to search for potential incidents of plagiarism. Mr. Rufo says he has already asked his colleagues to do so. “One of the ironies to this accusation is that I have explicitly asked my sources to review the work of white and Asian scholars and, thus far, the verified plagiarism cases have been predominantly from black women,” he wrote on X in response to Ms. Bodnick. “It is not implausible that CRT/DEI fields would have higher rates of plagiarism, particularly in specified demographics, given that these fields are heavily populated by affirmative action policies and have lower scholarly standards.”

Conservative Activist’s Plagiarism Crusade Zeros In on a Federal Reserve Governor

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