Lisa D. Cook, a governor of the Federal Reserve System, has been accused by conservative journalists of having committed plagiarism in her academic articles.
EXCLUSIVE: Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook is one of the most powerful economists in the world. But @LukeRosiak and I have discovered that her academic work appears to contain plagiarism, according to her former university’s policy.
The plagiarism scandal hits the Fed. 🧵
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) April 10, 2024
On Wednesday, Manhattan Institute fellow Christopher Rufo and Daily Wire journalist Luke Rosiak released a report through Manhattan Institute’s City Journal on Cook’s history of apparent plagiarism. These acts include lifting passages without quotation marks or citations, duplicating her own work in multiple journals, and other erroneous methodologies.
Rufo posted screenshots of some examples, which see Cook taking entire sentences from other authors wholesale and passing them off as her own.
In "Rural Segregation and Racial Violence," Cook appears as the lead author, with Logan and Parman as coauthors. But this paper simply duplicates much of Logan and Parman's prior work, which appears to be a violation of MSU's policy on "self plagiarism." pic.twitter.com/4O5uEQCm6b
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) April 10, 2024
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These actions, Rufo underscores, fly in the face of the academic integrity rules set by her alma mater, Michigan State University (MSU), which includes the practice of “self-plagiarism” as seen in her unattributed duplications of her own work.
Cook was appointed to the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors in May 2022 for a term that would last until January 2024. But in September 2023 she was appointed for a fifteen-year term, set to end in January 2038. Cook’s initial confirmation by the Senate hit roadblocks when Republicans questioned her for lack of experience, her writings on social justice, and her racial equity approach to economics. At the time, Rep. Pat Toomey (R-PA) put out a press release arguing that Cook was “unqualified to fight inflation.”
Rufo and Rosiak note that Cook was involved in a left-wing activist effort to defenestrate celebrated University of Chicago economist Harald Uhlig for opposing the “defund the police” movement.
Paraphrasing from Uhlig’s 2022 Wall Street Journal op-ed, the authors ask: “Under the leadership of an ideologue such as Lisa Cook, would the Fed continue to pursue its mandate, or succumb to left-wing activism?”
They continue: “Time will tell if the gears of justice turn against Lisa Cook, or if repeated academic misconduct, defended by some as mere sloppiness or isolated mistakes, is fast becoming an acceptable part of the academic order—as long as the alleged author of that behavior is favored by the powerful.”
Shane Devine is a writer covering politics and business for VT and a regular guest on The Unusual Suspects. Follow Shane’s work here.
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