We are deeply disturbed by the false allegations of plagiarism made against our colleague Christina Cross.  The allegations are absurd.  The claim that may sound most serious involves a description of a widely used dataset, in which Dr. Cross describes its features in the terms used by the people who assembled it – in the most accurate terms possible.  As the leaders of the construction of such datasets wrote in a public statement, “Dr. Cross’s writings do not constitute plagiarism.  Rather, her description of a large public dataset in this standardized way is simply good research practice.”  

We find these bogus claims to be particularly troubling in the context of a series of attacks on Black women in academia with the clear subtext that they have no place in our universities.  Dr. Cross is a brilliant scholar who we ranked at the very top of our pool of applicants when we hired her, from a field of hundreds, on the strength of her scholarship.  We are fortunate to have her on our faculty, and she has our full and unalloyed support.  

Harvard University Department of Sociology