(Jacob Bruns, Headline USA) A Diversity, Equity and Inclusion official at the University of California, Los Angeles plagiarized parts of her dissertation, which was about DEI programs, according to a Daily Wire report by prominent investigative reporters Chris Rufo and Luke Rosiak.
The official in question, Natalie J. Perry, who currently leads UCLA’s medical school DEI program called “Cultural North Star.”
In her 2014 dissertation, “Faculty Perceptions of Diversity at a Highly Selective Research-Intensive University,” written for the University of Virginia, Perry argued that state institutions should be coerced into having larger DEI departments. But the paper contains many passages that she did not write at all.
According to her professional biography, Perry’s objective a is to “embed our aspirational Cultural North Stars value in our organizational DNA.”
The DEI officer even received honors from UCLA last month in recognition of her “empathy” and her “radical listening.”
Unfortunately for Perry, she holds a prestigious academic position at a major university despite having only published one academic paper. And that paper—her dissertation—is flooded with blatant plagiarism.
Reviewers recently discovered that she took text directly from at least 10 other papers without attribution, including entire paragraphs that contained only minor alterations from the original texts that she found elsewhere.
In one instance, she took a paragraph from a paper written by Adalberto Aguirre and Ruben Martinez and simply replace the word “types” with the word “examples,” and left the rest the same without any acknowledgement or attribution of the real authors of the rest of the paragraph.
In another embarrassing incident, Perry copied and pasted a passage nearly 1,000 words in length from a paper written by Chad Hartnell, Amy Yi Ou and Angelo Kinicki, and did not credit the authors at all.
Meanwhile, as its upper-level administrators fail to complete basic tasks with integrity, the UCLA School of Medicine requires students to take courses on “structural racism,” “indigenous womxn” and “two-spirits.”
According to the report, Perry and UCLA did not return requests for comment.
Headline USA reached out to Evan Pivonka, the special assistant to the Honor Committee at the University of Virginia to inquire whether the school intended to address the egregious violation in any way and will update with any response.
