Never Ending Plagiarism

The search for status has its costs. The rush to climb the rankings ladder has produced many distortions in university policies and practices throughout the world and may even be a significant contributor to the current plague of academic dishonesty.

There has been a spate of plagiarism accusations at Southern Illinois University (SIU). One involves Chris Dussold who apparently copied his two page teaching philosophy statement from a colleague and was sacked. Such statements are seen by many as a waste of time and are usually totally insincere. Committing plagiarism in producing such things is on about the same level as submitting an unoriginal letter of application or admissions essay. The Dussold case is still sub judice so all I can say is that he has my sympathy. He should, I suppose, have been told to go and write the statement again but dismissal seems far too draconian a step.

The President of the university, Glenn (why was it Glendal on his dissertation?) Poshard, has been accused of plagiarising his doctoral dissertation on the education of gifted children, which was submitted to SIU's Carbondale campus's Department of Educational Administration and Higher Education, from which he received his Ph D. According to the Chicago Sun-Times:

'He will ask the department -- now under his command as president of the SIU system -- to review the document "and to advise me on corrections necessary to make this dissertation consistent with the highest academic standards.

"I will make whatever changes are recommended by the department, and by doing so I hope to fulfill the highest expectations that you have of me as your president," the former congressman said.

The allegations first surfaced Thursday in the student newspaper, the Daily Egyptian, which said it found 30 sections of Poshard's paper that contained verbatim text from other sources that either wasn't placed in quotation marks or wasn't cited properly.

Poshard said at a news conference Friday it's possible he made some mistakes in the 111-page paper, but they were "unintentional." Nevertheless, "they need to be promptly acknowledged and remedied," he said.'

Note that the department has not been asked to consider whether Poshard should suffer the same fate as Dussold whose offense was surely much less.

There was another case of plagiarism at SIU, one which seems related to the current fashion for getting as high up the rankings as possible.. In 2001 SIU produced a plan called Southern at 150. The idea was for SIU to get into the top 75 public universities in the US (presumably as ranked by the US News and World Report) by its 150th anniversary. It seems that much of the plan was very similar to one called Vision 2020 published by Texas A and M University at College Station in the late 1990s as part of its drive to be a top ten university by 2020.

A university committee found that SIU's Chancellor, Walter Wendler, admitted "lifting" parts of the plan from the Texas A and M text. It seems that Wendler "sincerely believed he was acting ethically by lifting what he considered his intellectual property." The panel also stated that Wendler ought to have indicated that parts of SIU's propramme had been taken from Texas A and M's..

Something that nobody seems to have noticed is that the idea of calling a strategic plan "Vision 2020" was apparently not original to anyone in Texas. It has been used to describe long-term plans by the cities of Bakersfield and Hamilton and the governments of India and Trinidad among others. It seems to have been first used by the Malaysian prime minister, Dr Mahathir Mohamed, in February 1991 to refer to his country's aspirations to economic and social development.

I doubt that anyone could be disciplined for plagiarising two words but still an acknowledgement of Dr Mahathirs's prior use of the phase would have been polite.

Maybe everyone at Texas A and M will say that the idea of "Vision 2020" was completely original, perhaps occurring after a visit to the optician's, and that this is simply a coincidence. This is possible but in some ways more disturbing. Malaysia in the 1990s was one of the world's fastest growing economies and it says a lot about the parochialism of the army of Texan experts if none of them had ever come across a reference to Malaysia's strategic plans.

Incidentally, there is a reference to the local governments around Puget Sound off Washington State adopting a Vision 2020 in October 1990 but but it is not clear that this was published at the time and it certainly never got the attention of Dr Mahathir's statement.