These people must have been caught out committing plagiarism earlier in their careers. Obviously, their fraudulence was covered up by DEI Fellow Travelers, and the lesson learned was "fraud and plagiarism are academic research, you just have to be crafty about it, and have the right advisors advising you how to get away with it if you get caught."

This isn't just a few DEI "bad apples" spoiling the barrel. Obviously the people filling the barrel are all in on it.

It's almost as if this is a massive grift in which all of the "professors" and all of the "students" are conspiring to pretend that DEI is not just a naked political grift for academic failures who cannot rise by their own merits, but is some kind of "real academic field" with citations and footnotes!