The dean of Michigan State University’s College of Education, Jerlando Jackson, plagiarized extensively over the course of his career, according to a complaint filed with the university on Thursday, lifting text without attribution and raising questions about his fitness to lead one of the top teacher training programs in the country.
The complaint includes nearly 40 examples of plagiarism that span nine of Jackson’s papers, including his Ph.D. thesis, and range from single sentences to full pages. It adds to the allegations of research misconduct already facing the embattled dean, who was a coauthor on several papers implicated in complaints against diversity officials earlier this year, including Harvard University’s chief diversity officer, Sherri Ann Charleston.
"Jackson has failed all ordinary standards of academic honesty," said Peter Wood, the head of the National Association of Scholars and a former provost at Boston University, where he helped lead plagiarism investigations of faculty and alumni. "As long as he remains as a dean, the university has no legitimate basis to hold students and faculty to basic standards of intellectual integrity."
Michigan State University defines plagiarism as "copying another person’s text or ideas and passing the copied material as your own." And Jackson—who can expel students for "academic misconduct," per the university’s handbook—has a decades-long record of doing just that.
In a 2002 paper, for example, he lifts pages of material from Lorraine McDonnell, a political scientist at UC Santa Barbara, and Richard Elmore, a professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, without attribution, keeping the order of their sentences while swapping out synonyms and details.
He does the same thing to Gary Orfield, a professor of law at UCLA, in a 2003 paper. None of those scholars appear in the bibliography of either article.
The complaint raises serious questions about the academic standards at one of the top education schools in the nation, which has topped the U.S. News & World Report rankings of K-12 teacher education for 30 years straight—an achievement Jackson celebrated in an April press release.
"We always innovate and engage in high‐quality research," he wrote. "We work with and for our local, national and global communities to create meaningful change for learners of today and tomorrow."
The allegations against Jackson come as teachers are confronting a wave of AI-generated plagiarism in student writing. Demand for AI detection tools has surged since the release of ChatGPT, according to data from the Center for Democracy and Technology, jumping by 30 percentage points in just one year and corresponding to an increase in student discipline.
That context makes the allegations all the more galling, said Steve McGuire, a fellow at the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, given that graduates of Jackson’s program will inherit a plagiarism crisis with no precedent in modern memory.
"It makes a mockery of the whole enterprise of education to have someone who appears to be a serial plagiarist running a school of education, especially in an age in which teachers and professors are increasingly encountering extensive academic dishonesty facilitated by the rise of artificial intelligence," McGuire wrote in an email. "How can educators combat this very real crisis if students can point to academic leaders and accuse them of plagiarism too?"
Jackson and Michigan State University did not respond to requests for comment.
Thursday’s complaint follows a string of plagiarism allegations against prominent university officials, including former Harvard president Claudine Gay and University of Maryland president Darryll Pines. Other allegations have targeted diversity deans at Harvard, Columbia, and UCLA.
Unlike most of those officials, however, Jackson has direct oversight of both academic programs and student discipline. And he is not just an administrator but a scholar—with hundreds of papers under his belt and grants from the National Science Foundation—albeit one who studies diversity programs for a living.
Before arriving at Michigan State in 2022, Jackson led the department of Education Leadership and Policy Analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. There he founded the Equity and Inclusion Laboratory, which conducts research on "equitable and inclusive learning," and the International Colloquium on Black Males in Education.
Between 2008 and 2020, he also produced 75 percent of the research "exclusively on African American/Black individuals in computing," according to his bio on Michigan State’s website. It is not clear how that statistic was derived.
At Wisconsin, Jackson met Sherri and LaVar Charleston—now the top diversity officials at Harvard and UW-Madison, respectively—and coauthored several papers with them, two of which contained survey results that they had already published in other journals.
Neither paper acknowledged that its findings had been published elsewhere, a form of academic dishonesty known as duplicate publication. Sometimes considered a form of self-plagiarism, duplicate publication often leads to retractions and can even violate copyright law. Jackson was the most senior scholar on both papers, which were also accused of plagiarizing other authors.
Thursday’s complaint reiterates those allegations and adds 27 new ones that have not been previously reported, painting the most comprehensive picture to date of Jackson’s academic transgressions. It runs 68 pages, single-spaced.
"No professor who takes plagiarism seriously would accept this kind of work from an undergraduate student, let alone a dean," said McGuire, who previously taught political theory at Villanova University. "It is galling to see that someone who appears to have repeatedly made such liberal use of the work of others without giving them proper credit has risen through the ranks of the academy to become the dean of a college that is responsible for educating future teachers."
Many of the new allegations center on Jackson’s doctoral dissertation, submitted to the University of Iowa in 2000, which borrows liberally from Henry Mintzberg, a professor of management at McGill University.
The complaint describes over a dozen cases in which Jackson quotes or paraphrases Mintzberg without attribution, at times changing the subject of the passage while retaining its structure.
Some of those examples also come from a 2003 paper Jackson coauthored with Walter Gmelch—the dean of the School of Education at the University of San Francisco—which says it is using Mintzberg’s "parameters" but copies large portions of his work without footnotes or quotation marks.
While attribution is not always expected for methodological jargon in the social sciences, the passages from Mintzberg do not describe technical methods.
"This is very simple content," Wood said, "which makes me wonder why he would need the crutch of plagiarism to walk through it."
Reached for comment, Mintzberg sent the Washington Free Beacon a garbled email in which he waffled about whether Jackson had plagiarized his work, adding that there was "an awful lot to go through."
"A lot of it is clearly not plagiarism, but coming to the same conclusions," Mintzberg wrote. "I don’t know what he references of my work, but there are places where he could have. There may be some passages that are close, and should’ve been quoted; I’ll leave you to list what those are. Overall, this does not look to me to be a blatant example of plagiarism, certainly not much that you have highlighted."
Mintzberg added: "You do not have my permission to quote from the above selectively."
Other scholars named in the complaint did not respond to requests for comment.
In some cases, such as with UCLA’s Gary Orfield, Jackson peppers a passage with citations but not to the scholar he is actually quoting, creating the impression of attribution while omitting the most important source.
"Why does he cite all these supposed sources but not his main source?" Wood said. "The apparent answer is that he understood that citing Orfield would make it easy for readers to spot that his whole section is just Orfield's writing re-purposed and lightly camouflaged."
In other cases, Jackson cites the source in the passage but not in the relevant sentences. His dissertation borrows eight sentences from a 1936 monograph by C.A Milner, for example, but cites Milner in just four of them, attributing the remaining four to other authors or presenting them as his own work.
Such moves appear to violate the definition of plagiarism outlined by the ombudsman’s office at Michigan State.
"This definition of plagiarism applies for copied text and ideas," the office says, "regardless of whether the author(s) of the text or idea which you have copied actually copied that text or idea from another source."