Landing at Liberty gets Brat back into academia at an institution where the university president, Jerry Falwell Jr., has been a die-hard supporter of President Trump. “We are excited to have Dave Brat joining our team at Liberty and especially in our School of Business,” interim provost Scott Hicks said in a news release. “Dave’s experience in the private business sector, in higher education, and most recently as a U.S. Congressman, offer a unique blend of applied experience that brings additional value and depth to our business faculty.”

Brat drew criticism last year when charges surfaced that he had borrowed heavily from the work of others in an economic paper several years ago. The paper was a critique of an essay co-authored by former Federal Reserve chairman Ben S. Bernanke and included long passages of Bernanke’s article without quotations or attribution. A fellow at the London School of Economics noticed the similarities and brought it to the attention of Randolph-Macon. The university said it would not investigate because Brat had left the college after winning his seat in Congress in 2014.

Other academics criticized the practice. “This is so lazy as to be dishonest,” David Rettinger, chairman of the International Center for Academic Integrity and a psychology professor at the University of Mary Washington, told The Washington Post. “It’s not just a sentence here and there.”

In a statement, Falwell said, “Liberty evaluated Dr. Brat as we do all of our academic leadership and faculty. The campaign allegations of plagiarism were determined to be unfounded months ago. We did not see anything of significance in Dr. Brat’s critique of prior writings, which .?.?. are fully consistent with academic traditions. We are excited to have Dr. Brat join our team.”. .
“Liberty continues to hire brilliant people who bring with them a wealth of knowledge and life experience,” Falwell said Wednesday in a news release. “Both Dr. Brat and Professor Tony Nobles .?.?. have established themselves as leaders. I’m thrilled to have them join our faculty.”

Brat’s 2005 paper is seven ­pages, not counting the refer­ences and tables in the back. Nearly every sentence in the first three pages is directly from a paper that Bernanke and his co-author, Refet Gurkaynak, wrote in 2001. . . a “lazy” piece of scholarship because he should have summarized the original paper in his own words or used quotation marks to make it clear that the words were not his own. “This is so lazy as to be dishonest,” said David Rettinger, chairman of the International Center for Academic Integrity and a psychology professor at the University of Mary Washington. “It’s not just a sentence here and there.”
. . .
. . . Gurkaynak was more dismissive of Brat’s economic theory — that religion is why Protestant countries have grown richer than others — than his citation failures.

“I am not going to defend a congressman and his dinky paper,” Gurkaynak said in an email. “An undergraduate here at Bilkent would have received a slap on the wrist for bad academic style but would not be sanctioned for plagiarism if they turned in this paper. (They would hear an earful for the poor economics.) . . ."