Black "noose professor" accused of plagiarism

From The New York Times:

A professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College who was propelled into the national spotlight when a noose was found on her office door last fall has been found to have plagiarized the work of a former colleague and two former students, the college has announced.

The college, in statements to the faculty and the news media, said an 18-month investigation into charges against the professor, Madonna G. Constantine, had determined there were “numerous instances in which she used others’ work without attribution in papers she published in academic journals over the past five years.”

Susan H. Fuhrman, the college’s president, and Thomas James, the provost, informed the faculty of the case, and said that Dr. Constantine had the right to appeal.

The college said Dr. Constantine was being penalized, but did not say what the penalty was. A spokeswoman for the college, Marcia Horowitz, said Teachers College did not have set rules governing plagiarism or how it should be punished.

Dr. Constantine, in an e-mail message to faculty and students on Wednesday, called the investigation “biased and flawed,” and said it was part of a “conspiracy and witch hunt by certain current and former members of the Teachers College community.”

“I am left to wonder whether a white faculty member would have been treated in such a publicly disrespectful and disparaging manner,” she wrote.

She added, “I believe that nothing that has happened to me this year is coincidental, particularly when I reflect upon the hate crime I experienced last semester involving a noose on my office door. As one of only two tenured black women full professors at Teachers College, it pains me to conclude that I have been specifically and systematically targeted.”

Dr. Constantine’s lawyer, Paul J. Giacomo Jr., who made Dr. Constantine’s e-mail message available, said in an interview that his client was the one whose work had been plagiarized, and that she would appeal to the college’s faculty advisory committee.

Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman, said the newly imposed sanctions on the professor would have little or no influence on what he called “an ongoing investigation” into the hanging of the noose which had been referred last fall to the hates crime unit.

Ms. Horowitz said the college initiated the investigation more than a year before the noose incident. “It had no bearing on the way the investigation was conducted, its findings or the sanctions imposed,” she said. The sanctions were first reported by The Columbia Spectator, the student newspaper.

Dr. Constantine, a professor of psychology and education who specializes in the study of how race and racial prejudice can affect clinical and educational dynamics, came to Teachers College in 1998 as an associate professor and earned tenure in 2001.

In 2006, the chairman of Dr. Constantine’s department, Suniya S. Luthar, passed along to administrators complaints that Dr. Constantine had unfairly used portions of writings by a junior colleague, Christine Yeh, as well as a number of students, Dr. Luthar said in an interview. Teachers College eventually asked Hughes Hubbard & Reed, a law firm, to investigate.

Many things now become clear. In an academic environment plagiarism is a major crime. In today's colleges decisions on tenure, salary and departmental budgets are based more on the quality of professors' published works than on the quality of instruction they give to students.

It seems that Dr. Constantine who "specializes in the study of how race and racial prejudice can affect clinical and educational dynamics" knew that she was being investigated for plagiarism when she supposedly found the noose in her office.

Someone who makes their living studying how racism harms black people in educational settings (can anyone imagine any institution which prostrates itself more abjectly before the modern race grievance industry and bends over backwards more totally to accommodate even their most outrageous demands than the modern college or university?) finds out she is being investigated for the one thing that could cause her to lose her tenure and make it difficult or impossible to get another job at another college and suddenly a noose, the new trendy symbol of racism directed against blacks, shows up in her office.

What a coincidence! Especially since her strategy to defend herself against the charges of plagiarism was to claim that it was all a racist plot to rid the college of tenured black professors. Remember when the noose story first broke? Remember how in the pictures of her holding the noose she was beaming with pure joy - all the while talking about how terrified she was?