Latest on Southern Illinois Plagiarism case


Inside Higher Ed reports that Southern Illinois University (SIU) president Glenn Poshard has been cleared of deliberate plagiarism. It seems that a panel appointed by the university found that the president did not intentionally plagiarise his doctoral dissertation awarded by SIU in 1984.

The seven-person committee of senior faculty, whose report on Poshard was unveiled Thursday, recommended that the university take no action against the president. It calls for the dissertation to be withdrawn from the university library and be replaced with a corrected copy prepared by Poshard, and for the president to write a statement that expands on why his errors occurred and speaks more broadly about the “culture of integrity” at the university. (The panel noted that allegations of Poshard plagiarizing his master’s thesis follow the same pattern as those in the dissertation, so it chose to focus on the latter.)

Still, the report is far from a ringing endorsement of Poshard’s past work. The committee notes that there are many cases in the dissertation in which “the words of others are present in a continuous flow with Student Poshard’s own words, so that readers cannot distinguish between those sources.” Given the modern-day definition of plagiarism at Southern Illinois’s Graduate School as “representing the work of another as one’s own work,” the report says the allegations against Poshard would be “sufficiently supported,” were it not for the historical context of the case.

But that context is vital, the report notes. At the time when Poshard was a graduate student at Southern Illinois, the graduate school’s student handbook lacked a definition of plagiarism. The panel found that Poshard had used an “informal style” of citing sources that was commonly embraced by other graduate students. Faculty members advising him on the dissertation approved the style then, and no one asked him to clarify anything at the time of submission, the report finds.

The mistakes were most likely products of “carelessness” and fall into the category of “inadvertent plagiarism,” according to the committee.

Poshard has denied the allegations of intentional wrongdoing but left open the possibility that he made accidental errors. During a meeting with the faculty panel, the president said his dissertation committee had no qualms with his style of citation, which often included scant inclusion of quotation marks.

“Even though the Review Committee says these mistakes were unintentional and inadvertent, they are my mistakes. And I take full responsibility for them,” he said at a news conference Thursday. “They are not the fault of my committee, my department, my college or my university.” He added that “whether one wants to argue whether what I did constitutes plagiarism depends on how you feel about me.”

The main points that emerge from the panels findings would seem to be that:

• a large part of Poshard's literature review consisted of bits of other people's writings some of which were cited but not quoted and some of which were neither quoted nor cited

• but, while corrections should be made, Poshard is excused because it was common for graduate students at SIU to use an "informal style" of citation (does that mean anything other than copying?) with the approval of their instructors and supervisors, because the graduate student handbook did not have a definition of plagiarism and because his dissertation committee did not find anything wrong with his citation style.

I hope that what follows is an accurate summary of the committee's findings. Poshard committed technical errors but was not seriously at fault because graduate students at SIU routinely constructed dissertations by copying pieces from other works.

I hope that somebody will examine a sample of dissertations from the Southern Illinois Education Faculty and find out whether the faculty has in fact been condoning mass plagiarism over the years.

It also might be an idea to take a close look at the dissertations and see whether SIU also had an "informal style of data collection".

This report is a remarkable document. If taken seriously it ought to make graduates of SIU over the last two and a half decades unemployable and call its accreditation into question.