The University of Washington has dismissed a complaint against Robin DiAngelo, the best-selling author of White Fragility who was accused of plagiarizing minority scholars, after an internal probe found that the university's rules allow for "the reuse of a moderate amount of language."
That conclusion came in a letter shared with the Guardian and the New York Times by DiAngelo's publisher, Beacon Press, in which an unnamed university official cleared the "antiracist" author of any wrongdoing.
The complaint "falls short of a research misconduct allegation that would give rise to an inquiry," the official wrote in the letter, dated September 11, according to the Guardian, because the school's rules permit "the reuse of a moderate amount of language to describe a commonly used methodology, previous research or background information."
That caveat comes from an obscure "presidential order" in the university's policy directory. It does not appear in the definition of plagiarism published on a student-facing website, which includes "borrowing the structure of another author's phrases or sentences" or "citing your source but reproducing the exact words … without quotation marks."
The dismissal appears to set a precedent that would let scholars copy large chunks of text from other authors, without attribution, provided that the passages summarize previous scholarship. In her doctoral dissertation, completed at the University of Washington in 2004, DiAngelo lifts full pages of material from Kristin Gates Cloyes, her classmate in the university's Ph.D. program, and Debian Marty, a professor emerita at California State University, Monterey Bay.
Both passages provide overviews of existing literature but do not appear in quotation marks or include in-text citations, creating the impression that they are DiAngelo's own summaries.
Peter Wood, the president of the National Association of Scholars and a former provost at Boston University, where he led several plagiarism probes, said that DiAngelo's exoneration would "undermine academic standards across the board."
"It is a major scandal that the University of Washington responded in this way to the clear evidence," Wood wrote in an email. "You can cite Einstein's formula E=mc2 without citing his 1905 paper in Annalen der Physik. But you cannot go around copying whole sentences and paragraphs of other writers and present their ideas as if they are your own."
A spokeswoman for the university, Dana Slote, referred the Washington Free Beacon to the school's policy. She declined to comment on whether students could be sanctioned for "borrowing the structure of another author's phrases."
The dismissed complaint, which was first reported by the Free Beacon and included 20 examples of plagiarism, all from DiAngelo's dissertation, undercut a key part of the diversity trainer's lucrative brand. She has gotten rich not just by charging thousands of dollars for her workshops but also by convincing her customers—from corporations and school districts to the House Democratic Caucus—that her lessons reflect academic expertise.
DiAngelo touts her scholarly credentials on her website, refers to herself as "Dr. DiAngelo," and states that she coined the term "white fragility" in an "academic article."
A professor at the University of Washington, she became a kind of racial Rasputin in the wake of George Floyd's death, educating white people on their privilege and promising—for a fee—to make them a little less racist.
Those efforts hinged on ideas that DiAngelo first developed in her dissertation, "Whiteness as Racial Dialogue," in which she plagiarized two minority scholars, Thomas Nakayama and Stacey Lee, according to the complaint.
The passages violate the guidance given to "fellow white people" on DiAngelo's website: "Always cite and give credit to the work of BIPOC people who have informed your thinking."
DiAngelo is not the first diversity official to be accused of plagiarism or let off the hook for it. Since the resignation of former Harvard president Claudine Gay in January, plagiarism complaints have been filed against diversity officers at Columbia; MIT; the University of California, Los Angeles; and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
None of those schools have announced any sanctions for the accused officials, though they have also stopped short of publicly acquitting them. DiAngelo is the first diversity guru to confirm that she was cleared as part of a university investigation.
"Anti-D.E.I. activists have been clear about their agenda to discredit D.E.I. efforts," she told the Times in a statement. "Claiming that progressive scholars who write about race have engaged in plagiarism is one of their more predictable strategies."