The black Columbia University professor who last fall found a hangman’s noose pinned to her office door plagiarized the work of another faculty member and two students, according to a school investigation released yesterday.
The plagiarism probe was already under way last year when a 4-foot twine noose was discovered on the door of psychology and education professor Madonna Constantine’s office, officials at the university’s Teachers College said.
They said they disciplined Constantine for stealing other people’s work for articles she published in academic journals.
They cited two dozen instances of plagiarism over the past five years that were substantiated in an 18-month investigation by a Manhattan law firm.
Teachers College spokesman Joe Levine would not say how Constantine was punished, but college officials said her position is secure.
In a statement e-mailed to Bloomberg News Service yesterday, Constantine said she was the victim of a racist conspiracy.
The school accused her of plagiarism because of the “structural racism that pervades this institution,” she charged. “As one of only two tenured black women full professors at Teachers College, it pains me to conclude that I have been specifically and systematically targeted.”
Constantine said she would appeal to a faculty committee.
Cops have not been able to identify a suspect in the noose incident. They have not ruled out people close to Constantine or others who might have had an ax to grind with her.
After the October incident, cops were rebuffed – by Constantine herself – in their efforts to catch the person behind the alleged hate crime.
The professor was one of several faculty members who objected to the idea of posting surveillance cameras in her hallway, according to sources familiar with the campus investigation.
At Teachers College earlier this week, a memo that circulated among faculty members about the plagiarism probe thanked a former professor, Christine Yeh, and two former students – Tracy Juliao and Karen Cort – for cooperating.
Juliao, now a health psychologist in Detroit, said she was “shocked” when, as a Columbia student, she saw an article published by Constantine that contained “direct phrases” from her own 2004 dissertation.
“It was unbelievable to me to see my own work published by someone else who I had essentially trusted,” she said. “You go in as a student thinking you should be able to trust your faculty.”
Yeh, who left Columbia in 2006 and now teaches at the University of San Francisco, said she told college administrators that year that Constantine had used her work without citation or permission.
“It’s been a very long and difficult investigation, and I’m hopeful that this is a first step – and that maybe other people will feel comfortable coming forward as a result of this,” she said.
Additional reporting by Brigitte Williams-James and John Mazor