Michigan State Declines To Punish Ed School Dean Accused of Serial Plagiarism

Michigan State University has dismissed plagiarism allegations against the dean of its College of Education, Jerlando Jackson, claiming he was "the target of racist, vile, and despicable attacks."

The university said this month that a "preliminary assessment" did not find "sufficient credible evidence to support" the allegations, which included lifting entire pages of material without attribution and improperly duplicating his own research. In a letter obtained by the university’s student newspaper, MSU president Kevin Guskiewicz said that Jackson’s work meets the "highest standards of academic integrity."

"In alignment with the university's exoneration policy, we recognize the importance of restoring the reputation of individuals involved in unsubstantiated misconduct allegations," Guskiewicz wrote. "Michigan State University will continue to actively support Dean Jackson and his distinguished career in education."

The letter also condemned the attacks on Jackson, a black scholar whose work focuses on diversity in higher education, and reiterated its support for him "as a valued member of leadership at Michigan State University." MSU did not respond to a request for comment.

News of Jackson’s acquittal comes amid a blitzkrieg of White House executive orders targeting diversity programs at corporations and universities. The Trump administration declared on Tuesday that many DEI programs are unlawful and instructed each federal agency to identify potential targets—including universities with endowments over $1 billion—for civil rights investigations.

Some schools have bent the knee preemptively and begun scrubbing their diversity initiatives. The University of Colorado, for example, renamed its DEI office the "Office of Collaboration" in the wake of Trump’s orders. The University of Wisconsin-Madison stripped its chief diversity officer, LaVar Charleston, from his post at the Division of Diversity, Equity, and Educational Achievement, citing concerns about the "financial operations" of the office.

Charleston was a frequent co-author of Jackson’s, including on papers alleged to have improperly recycled research findings. Both men were the subject of separate research misconduct complaints last year amid the wave of plagiarism allegations that followed the resignation of former Harvard president Claudine Gay and implicated some of the top diversity officials in academia, including White Fragility author Robin DiAngelo. Other officials caught in the deluge included the chief diversity officer at Columbia Medical School, Alade McKen, who lifted over two pages of material from Wikipedia without attribution.

The complaint against Jackson, which was first reported by the Washington Free Beacon, drew particular concern because of his role at MSU’s education school, the top-ranked teacher training program in the country. Steve McGuire, a fellow at the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, said it made a "mockery of the whole enterprise of education to have someone who appears to be a serial plagiarist running a school of education." Peter Wood, who led multiple research misconduct probes as a former provost at Boston University, said that Jackson had "failed all ordinary standards of academic honesty."

"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," Wood told the Free Beacon at the time. The complaint spanned 68 pages, single-spaced, and described several cases in which Jackson appeared to have lifted entire pages without attribution, tweaking some sentences and details while maintaining the bulk of source material.

The examples appear to meet the definition of plagiarism on MSU’s website, which defines plagiarism as "copying another person’s text or ideas and passing the copied material as your own."

Though Jackson is not technically a DEI official, he has a long record of affiliations with the sort of bureaucracies that the Trump administration is seeking to dismantle. He founded the Equity and Inclusion Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where Jackson worked for more than a decade before joining MSU, and serves as chief research scientist of the Organizational Disparities Laboratory, which seeks to "advance organizational equity."

His academic work is also focused on DEI issues. Between 2008 and 2020, for example, Jackson’s professional biography claims that he produced "75% of the research exclusively on African American/Black individuals in computing."

Jackson is not the first diversity scholar to be exonerated of plagiarism charges. In September, the University of Washington dismissed a similar complaint against DiAngelo on the grounds that it did not identify "sufficiently specific and significant" evidence of misconduct.

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