NEW YORK
Last October, hundreds of students, faculty and community activists rallied on Columbia University’s campus to protest the hanging of a noose on the office door of a popular African-American professor. Now this same professor, Dr. Madonna G. Constantine, has been fired from her teaching post amid charges that she repeatedly plagiarized the work of two former students and a colleague.
Constantine, 45, a tenured professor who has taught psychology and education at Columbia’s Teachers College for the past decade and is an expert on race relations, had originally been sanctioned by the university back in February after an 18-month investigation into the plagiarism charges.
Though she was able to hold onto her job at the time, Constantine immediately appealed the sanctions and hired an attorney to defend herself against the allegations, claiming that she had been “specifically and systematically targeted” by university officials. She later filed a grievance against Dr. Susan Fuhrman, who is president of Teachers College.
Sources say that the decision by Constantine to challenge the plagiarism findings ultimately forced university officials to reject Constantine’s appeal and to suspend her, effective immediately. Constantine has until July 15th to challenge her termination, but the decision to fire one of only two Black women full professors at Teachers College came as a blow to her longtime supporters.
“During the months since the college levied sanctions against her, professor Constantine continued to make accusations of plagiarism, including in at least one instance to the press, against those whose works she had plagiarized,” officials wrote in a letter sent out earlier this week to the entire faculty.
Officials at Teachers College point to the investigation of Constantine’s work by the law firm, Hughes Hubbard & Reed, which concluded that there were “numerous instances in which she [Constantine] used others’ work without attribution in papers she published in academic journals over the past five years.”
