Celebrity Leftist Prof Busted for Plagiarism

Phil Magness of the American Institute for Economic Research, a repeat podcast guest, is a thorough and indefatigable researcher, and especially likes to refute the errors and distortions of ideologically biased academics like Nancy MacLean — but also Princeton’s Kevin Kruse, a celebrated leftist historian whom the Chronicle of Higher Education once called “History’s Attack Dog” for his spirited attacks on conservatives.

Kruse has 500,000 followers on Twitter. Back in 2017, Kruse was quick to jump on the leftist bandwagon attacking right wing celebrity sheriff David Clarke, whose possible appointment to a post in the Trump Administration was scuttled by provable plagiarism charges.

Magness gives some background on Kruse:

Kruse’s doctoral research on Atlanta during the civil rights era put him on a fast track to the elite ranks of an Ivy League history department. Princeton offered him an appointment as an assistant professor directly out of grad school, primarily on the basis of this dissertation. Five years later, he converted his doctoral research into a book published by Princeton University Press, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism. The monograph won awards from the Southern Historical Association and the American Political Science Association, as well as a string of promotions in the Princeton history department.

But now Magness has caught out Kruse with some heavy duty plagiarism from several sources for his Cornell doctoral dissertation, and Phil has the receipts. He’s been rolling them out on Twitter in recent days to crowd-source verification.  Phil tells the whole story in Reason magazine, but here is some of the visual evidence he has assembled:

Princeton, which just fired Joshua Katz, ought to start an investigation, as should Cornell. I doubt either will do so, because your politics are more important than your honesty in the Ivy League, as Joshua Katz found out at Princeton recently. Unlike Kruse, Katz didn’t enjoy leftist privilege.

Kruse has not acknowledged Magness’s allegations, which you’d think someone with 500,000 Twitter followers would be anxious to do if the charge wasn’t true. I’m sure Kruse may well go with the Doris Kearns Goodwin’s “inadvertent error/mistaken labeling in my notes” excuse. But Kruse deserves to be known henceforth as a fraud and and a hack.

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