Media

Princeton University Waits Six Months To Investigate Left-Wing Professor’s Alleged Plagiarism

(Photo by William Thomas Cain/Getty Images)

Nicole Silverio Media Reporter
Font Size:

Princeton University waited six months to respond to reports of possible plagiarism by a left-wing professor, economics historian Phillip Magness told the Daily Caller on Friday.

Magness found signs of “possible” plagiarism in historian Kevin Kruse’s 2015 book, “One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America,” he told the Daily Caller. Magness first contacted Princeton’s Dean of Faculty, Gene Jarrett, and Kruse’s publisher in December pointing to several passages in the book that seemed to align closely with a 1956 New York Times article by reporter Elizabeth Fowler about former President Abraham Lincoln.

“I did not receive any response or even an acknowledgement from Jarrett’s office,” Magness told the Daily Caller.

Six months later, Magness contacted the university’s Dean of Research, Pablo Debenedetti, on June 7, who said the dean of faculty is responsible for conducting these investigations and forwarded the message to Jarrett’s office. (RELATED: University Quietly Alters Application That Excluded White People After Professor Files Complaint)

“I contacted Princeton directly about these discoveries out of a concern for academic integrity,” Magness told the Daily Caller before being contacted. “It was my hope that they would investigate these issues through the appropriate channels, and my intention [was] to give them an opportunity to do so. Unfortunately, they appear to have been unresponsive to multiple attempts to bring the issues to their attention. That is why I decided to publish my findings in Reason.”

Princeton contacted Magness on Friday and said they take these sorts of allegations “very seriously” and are willing to “carefully consider” the case, according to an email obtained by the Daily Caller.

“Your email of June 7, 2022, below, to the University’s Dean for Research has been forwarded to the Office of the Dean of the Faculty, as allegations of research misconduct on the part of a member of the Faculty are the concern of this office. We take such allegations very seriously, and we will carefully consider the concerns you have raised,” Toni Turano, deputy dean of faculty, said, according to the email.

In his blog post, Magness pointed to a few passages of Kruse’s text appearing to show similarities to the Times article.

Kruse allegedly wrote, “Lincoln, aware that the gold supply supporting ‘greenbacks’ was dwindling, joked that a more appropriate motto might be found in the words of the apostle Peter: ‘Silver and gold have I none, but such as I have give I thee,'” according to Magness’s post.

Mangess then pointed to the original article, which read, “But it is reported that President Lincoln, mindful of the dwindling gold supply, said that a more appropriate motto for the greenbacks might be the remark of the Apostle Peter: ‘Silver and gold have I none, but such as I have, I give Thee.'”

“It’s also a fair question to ask whether Kruse committed a more serious offense: plagiarism,” Magness wrote. “Due to the faulty but existent citation in Kruse’s footnotes, I’d say it’s a borderline case between an embarrassingly sloppy research faux pas and potential research misconduct.”

Magness alleged in an article for Reason that Kruse may have plagiarized passages from the 1996 book “Race and the Shaping of Twentieth-Century Atlanta” by retired historian Ronald H. Bayor, and “The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit” by Thomas Sugrue for his doctoral dissertation on the history of race relations in Atlanta. Magness compared the similarities between the books and Kruse’s thesis.

“A few sentences later, Bayor begins to summarize his book’s thesis, writing ‘While Atlanta, like any other city, is unique in certain ways, I do not believe Atlanta is unique in regard to the impact of race,'” Magness wrote. (RELATED: Professor Faces Termination After Opposing Wokeness)

“Compare that to how Kruse lays out his dissertation’s thesis, which holds that Atlanta’s experience may be representative of other southern cities in the era of segregation: ‘While Atlanta, like any other city, is unique in certain ways, I do not believe it is unique in regard to its struggles over race and rights.’ The only difference in this case appears to be a cosmetic change of the last few words,” he continued.

Kruse — a notable figure among the “academic left” who has contributed to The New York Times’ “The 1619 Project” — condemned former Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke, who joined the Trump administration, for plagiarizing books in his master’s thesis for the Naval Postgraduate School, according to Magness’ Reason article.

“If he wants someone with more credentials to say it: I’m a professor. This is textbook plagiarism. We’d expel a student who pulled this,” Kruse said.

The university previously fired classics professor Joshua Katz after investigating a consensual relationship with a student 15 years ago. The professor had condemned the university’s claims of being systemically racist in a 2020 Quillette op-ed.

Jarrett referred the Daily Caller to Princeton’s media relations department, but did not comment further. The Daily Caller contacted both Kruse and his publisher. Neither responded immediately for comment.

PREMIUM ARTICLE: Subscribe To Keep Reading

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign Up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
BENEFITS READERS PASS PATRIOTS FOUNDERS
Daily and Breaking Newsletters
Daily Caller Shows
Ad Free Experience
Exclusive Articles
Custom Newsletters
Editor Daily Rundown
Behind The Scenes Coverage
Award Winning Documentaries
Patriot War Room
Patriot Live Chat
Exclusive Events
Gold Membership Card
Tucker Mug

What does Founders Club include?

Tucker Mug and Membership Card
Founders

Readers,

Instead of sucking up to the political and corporate powers that dominate America, The Daily Caller is fighting for you — our readers. We humbly ask you to consider joining us in this fight.

Now that millions of readers are rejecting the increasingly biased and even corrupt corporate media and joining us daily, there are powerful forces lined up to stop us: the old guard of the news media hopes to marginalize us; the big corporate ad agencies want to deprive us of revenue and put us out of business; senators threaten to have our reporters arrested for asking simple questions; the big tech platforms want to limit our ability to communicate with you; and the political party establishments feel threatened by our independence.

We don't complain -- we can't stand complainers -- but we do call it how we see it. We have a fight on our hands, and it's intense. We need your help to smash through the big tech, big media and big government blockade.

We're the insurgent outsiders for a reason: our deep-dive investigations hold the powerful to account. Our original videos undermine their narratives on a daily basis. Even our insistence on having fun infuriates them -- because we won’t bend the knee to political correctness.

One reason we stand apart is because we are not afraid to say we love America. We love her with every fiber of our being, and we think she's worth saving from today’s craziness.

Help us save her.

A second reason we stand out is the sheer number of honest responsible reporters we have helped train. We have trained so many solid reporters that they now hold prominent positions at publications across the political spectrum. Hear a rare reasonable voice at a place like CNN? There’s a good chance they were trained at Daily Caller. Same goes for the numerous Daily Caller alumni dominating the news coverage at outlets such as Fox News, Newsmax, Daily Wire and many others.

Simply put, America needs solid reporters fighting to tell the truth or we will never have honest elections or a fair system. We are working tirelessly to make that happen and we are making a difference.

Since 2010, The Daily Caller has grown immensely. We're in the halls of Congress. We're in the Oval Office. And we're in up to 20 million homes every single month. That's 20 million Americans like you who are impossible to ignore.

We can overcome the forces lined up against all of us. This is an important mission but we can’t do it unless you — the everyday Americans forgotten by the establishment — have our back.

Please consider becoming a Daily Caller Patriot today, and help us keep doing work that holds politicians, corporations and other leaders accountable. Help us thumb our noses at political correctness. Help us train a new generation of news reporters who will actually tell the truth. And help us remind Americans everywhere that there are millions of us who remain clear-eyed about our country's greatness.

In return for membership, Daily Caller Patriots will be able to read The Daily Caller without any of the ads that we have long used to support our mission. We know the ads drive you crazy. They drive us crazy too. But we need revenue to keep the fight going. If you join us, we will cut out the ads for you and put every Lincoln-headed cent we earn into amplifying our voice, training even more solid reporters, and giving you the ad-free experience and lightning fast website you deserve.

Patriots will also be eligible for Patriots Only content, newsletters, chats and live events with our reporters and editors. It's simple: welcome us into your lives, and we'll welcome you into ours.

We can save America together.

Become a Daily Caller Patriot today.

Signature

Neil Patel