LaVar Charleston accused of doling out over $200,000 to staff

Before he was stripped of his role as the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s chief diversity officer, LaVar Charleston had been accused of assaulting a police officer and engaging in a decades-long pattern of research misconduct. Now he can add financial mismanagement to his rap sheet.

In a letter to university officials last week, the school’s top finance administrator, Rob Cramer, said that Charleston had displayed “poor financial judgment” as head of the Division of Diversity, Equity and Educational Achievement, which became the subject of an internal probe in January after concerns surfaced about the division’s finances.

The probe found that Charleston engaged in a pattern of profligate spending that strained the university’s budget. In 2023, for example, he doled out over $200,000 in bonuses, “without consultation,” to the university DEI staff.

“Dr. Charleston did not discuss his plan with anyone in senior leadership, and the timing of this decision, in the context of the 2023 [budget], shows a thoughtless attitude in decision-making,” Cramer’s letter reads. “This lack of consultation and disregard for the broader financial context highlights a significant lapse in leadership and fiscal responsibility.”

The letter also states that Charleston, a professor in the university’s education school, “lacked important documentation to support many of these decisions,” which included pay raises as well as bonuses. He was removed from his DEI role in January as the probe got underway. While Charleston is no longer “vice chancellor for inclusive excellence,” he is still employed by the school, albeit at a lower salary.

“Under the terms of his appointment and consistent with state law, Dr. Charleston is able to remain an employee as an academic staff instructor and researcher, a separate, non-administrative position,” said university spokesman John Lucas. “His salary in this position has been reduced by two-thirds.”

The letter is the latest in a string of embarrassing revelations about Charleston, who in 2011 was charged with attempting to strangle a police officer—an incident that only became public in 2022 after the MacIver Institute, a conservative think tank, published documents showing that Charleston had sought to conceal his arrest by enrolling in a program that expunges the records of first-time felons who agree to do community service work.

Two years later, Charleston was hit with a research misconduct complaint that implicated eight of his publications. The complaint alleged that Charleston had not only plagiarized other authors but also recycled his own research without attribution, presenting it as new work—a form of résumé-padding that can result in retractions and is considered a serious scholarly offense.

One of the duplicate papers was coauthored with Charleston’s wife, Sherri Ann Charleston, the chief diversity officer of Harvard University. That paper, published in 2014, had the same methods, findings, and survey subjects as a study LaVar Charleston had published on his own two years earlier.

“It is academic misconduct to publish essentially the same paper twice with no acknowledgment of the duplication,” Alexander Riley, a sociologist at Bucknell University, told the Washington Free Beacon at the time. “It seems fairly clear that Charleston is gaming the system in order to get more on his CV than is merited by the amount of research he has actually done.”

The university did not discipline Charleston over that complaint. Lucas, the UW-Madison spokesman, said review of the allegations “concluded with no finding of research misconduct.”

The financial scandal comes as the Trump administration is investigating UW-Madison, along with 50 other schools, for sponsoring race-based fellowships and scholarships. The university is also the target of a separate probe related to its handling of anti-Semitism, which was announced days after the Education Department cut $400 million in grants and contracts to Columbia University over what it described as the school’s failure to protect Jewish students.

“The Department is deeply disappointed that Jewish students studying on elite U.S. campuses continue to fear for their safety amid the relentless antisemitic eruptions that have severely disrupted campus life for more than a year,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a statement announcing the probe, which covers 60 universities. “U.S. colleges and universities benefit from enormous public investments funded by U.S. taxpayers. That support is a privilege and it is contingent on scrupulous adherence to federal antidiscrimination laws.”