I am currently living through a disaster. While nothing on the
scale of Hurricane Katrina, it is a disaster all the same. Glenn
Poshard, the President of the Southern Illinois University system,
was recently found to have plagiarized parts of his 1975 thesis
and his 1984 dissertation - both completed while a student
at the Carbondale campus of Southern Illinois University. Now,
I have never met President Poshard. I was not on the panel tasked
to adjudicate the case. His degrees came neither from my department
nor my discipline. I do not even work in Carbondale. I am simply
a member of the faculty at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.
And yet, since late last August, these acts, committed before
most of my present-day students were even born, have been with
me daily. I know I am hardly alone in this, and it is about
this that I wish to write. You see, we all know why plagiarists
do it -- because it is easier. And we all know what happens
to plagiarists -- they get caught. In the brief discussion that
follows, I will review the manner in which one person’s
plagiarism then has affected the lives of thousands
of people now.
At the very end of August, I received an e-mail from one of
my graduate students. It contained the link to a newspaper article
alleging that President Poshard had plagiarized parts of his
doctoral dissertation.[1] She wondered what
such a thing, if true, might mean for our university. I said
I had no idea, but that the key word was “alleged.”
I told her it would likely blow over. Sadly, it did not. It
is important to point out that we’d been through this
before. We had a faculty member fired from our School of Business
in 2004 for plagiarizing his statement of teaching philosophy
in his mid-tenure review documents.[2] Things
got ugly. This faculty member claimed that such “boilerplate”
material was both unimportant and commonly plagiarized, and
to help make his case, he and his supporters, who called themselves
“Alumni and Faculty Against Corruption,” or AFAC,
set about finding other such examples. The first they found
was on the School of Business’s web site. The next was
in a strategic plan written by the Chancellor of our Carbondale
campus. The third was in a speech by the Chancellor of the Edwardsville
campus. It got bad enough that the President of the system referred
in a November 30th, 2006 SIUC Graduate Council meeting to "academic
terrorists" who "lay in the weeds and throw bombs
at everybody." However, since each allegation brought with
it an increasing sense of shame and embarrassment, and a deepening
worry over our reputation, President Poshard formed a bi-campus
task force to review our respective policies and procedures
and make recommendations to bring them, if necessary, up to
the highest standards possible. In spite of this, the AFAC,
whether “terrorists” or simply fulfilling their
obligation to bring plagiarism to the attention of the administration,
eventually scrutinized President Poshard’s dissertation
- written while he was a student at our own Carbondale
campus - and contacted the media. This brings us back
to the end of August 2007.
What happened next came as quite a surprise to many on our campus.
First, our Board of Trustees, even as they were creating the
panel to investigate the as-yet unconfirmed allegations against
our President, came out in public support of him. They then
asked the department originally granting his degree to investigate,
but when that department declined, a panel was formed entirely
from ranking faculty from across the Carbondale campus. While
there were policy-based reasons for making this decision, it
struck many as creating a serious conflict of interest given
that all those doing the investigation both worked for the person
alleged to have committed the acts of plagiarism, and for the
university alleged to have allowed this plagiarism to go undetected.
When members of our faculty spoke up about these concerns at
a faculty senate meeting, we were rebuked by a spokesperson
for the Board of Trustees who told us that our opinion didn’t
matter because
a)
President Poshard worked for the Board and not us, and
b)
the dissertation was written at Carbondale and not Edwardsville.
Not
surprisingly, many on our campus were incensed by this. Still,
the faculty senate took up the issue and released a simple statement
that we had faith in the system and would await the results
of the inquiry and the Board’s response before making
any additional comment. We thought this would be enough to calm
the waters. We were wrong.
At first, there were simply “water-cooler” conversations.
However, fairly quickly, a small group of faculty at my campus
seized on this event as evidence to support their particular
view of the state of our university. It is accurate to say that
many here would call this group “disgruntled,” though
to be fair, they are all faculty in good standing and have what
they feel are good reasons for their particular views. Still,
it was very useful for these folks to have more of what they
claimed to be “evidence” of bad faith and corruption
at the highest levels of the university. We have a very liberal
faculty listserv policy, and this small group of faculty took
every opportunity to forward every new newspaper article, every
editorial, and every blog to the entire faculty and staff, along
with their own commentaries. Each time this happened (which
was as often as several times per day), other faculty would
respond to them, carbon-copying their return responses to all
faculty and staff as well. The result was an absolute deluge
of e-mails pouring in to a listserv usually used to communicate
important university information to faculty and staff. As a
result, ignoring these e-mails was almost impossible. Many of
the initial postings took the form of an enthusiastic “I
told you so.” Those who disagreed with these negative
assessments often responded with equal vigor to the contrary,
leading to heated and at times rather unprofessional exchanges.
Others then waded in and advised restraint and patience, while
still others urged everyone to get off the listserv and go back
to work. This took place on and off for three months. For perspective,
the most vocal participant in these e-mail exchanges wrote in
excess of 30,000 words of commentary during this time period,
and posted all of it to the entire faculty. Simply keeping up
was a full time pursuit, and yet it was important to keep up,
because actions impacting the faculty were being proposed via
these exchanges.
Perhaps the most obvious examples of proposed actions were the
various petitions introduced, refined, and eventually circulated
via the listserv. Principle among these was one demanding that
President Poshard resign, another calling for an independent,
outside review, and a third calling for the Edwardsville campus
to be formally separated from the Carbondale campus. All of
these had potentially serious ramifications, but none originated
from any campus body with any authority. Each, however, was
eventually leaked to the press, which set off yet another round
of stories, leading to yet another round of listserv discussions,
further fueling the various petitions, and on and on ad infinitum.
Finally, the Carbondale panel tasked to review the case released
its findings, and things went from bad to worse.
The “good news,” so to speak, was that the panel
did indeed find that President Poshard had committed plagiarism.
I say good news because by this time, there had been multiple
well-reported, if unofficial, reviews, all of which had found
significant plagiarism (most report finding 54 specific examples),
and a copy of the original dissertation itself had been placed
in our library for our own review. The bad news, however, was
that the panel went to great lengths to show that the particular
plagiarism found in the document was “unintentional”
on the part of the author, and that the plagiary’s not
being discovered was an unfortunate oversight on the part of
the committee. These findings said, in essence, that no one
was really at fault, and that there had been no egregious ethical
lapses by anyone involved. The even worse news was that the
panel then went beyond just issuing these findings to recommend
that President Poshard be allowed to re-write his dissertation.
No other punishment (save for the obvious public humiliation)
was meted out. Not surprisingly, the Board accepted the panel’s
recommendations.
Back in Edwardsville, this news set off another firestorm of
listserv and water-cooler discussions, and stoked the fires
beneath the two still-relevant petitions (the time to call for
an external review had clearly passed). At this point, the faculty
senate now re-engaged with the discussion and held an emergency
meeting, which turned out to be highly unusual for several reasons.
First, there was only one item on the agenda. Second, we had
requests to address the senate by both faculty and students.
And third, the press, both print and television, was there in
force. Faculty representing the various petitions spoke. The
call for the separation of the campuses was raised. I spoke
against this because of my concerns over the long-term costs
of such a move. It took me several hours to research for and
prepare my remarks. Fortunately (at least in my opinion), this
issue was tabled. However, the call for President Poshard to
resign received considerable traction, and eventually won the
support of a majority of the faculty senate as well. We voted
to ask for his resignation, but then needed to figure out exactly
how to ask. Several senators put forth possible approaches,
and we voted on the one we thought was the closest. Then, over
the course of the next two weeks, a sub-committee passed this
statement back and forth repeatedly and wrangled over the wording
until everyone could live with it.
Our colleagues at Carbondale were unhappy with us. They requested
that we come down to meet with them. When the day came, we checked
two vans out from the motor pool and most of our senate executive
committee plus several other senators made the hours-long drive
to our south campus, and we spent one whole day there in meetings.
They were very gracious, and we all managed to say what we needed
to say, but I’m not sure much of substance was accomplished.
We returned to Edwardsville still convinced that President Poshard
should resign, and so we went forward with our plan and eventually
released our call for his resignation to the press, as well
as to the President and the Board. Our senate president sent
the document to Springfield to the Board, and drove once again
to Carbondale for the next Board meeting. Neither the President
nor anyone on the Board so much as mentioned it. To be honest,
no one was surprised.
During this same time, there were parallel discussions going
on among the students. Many who had been caught and severely
penalized for lesser offenses wondered if the new “do-over”
rule applied to them. The student paper was filled with editorials
lamenting this apparent double-standard. Many participated in
blogs in which they mused about how this might diminish the
value of their diplomas. Some looked for the humor in the situation.
Instead of our official mascot, the SIUE cougar, or our unofficial
one, the goose (by virtue of the great many geese nesting all
over our campus), students created T-shirts such as the following:
Figure
1. "Go Copycats!" T-Shirt Created by SIUE Students
[3]
At least this was
pretty funny. Less funny are the many anecdotal reports of potential
students choosing to look elsewhere for fear of wasting their
money earning a “tarnished” degree.
So, a disaster. Certainly not Katrina, to be sure, but not as
far-fetched an analogy as may at first appear. Consider that
virtually everyone in this academic community of nearly 15,000
was affected. Consider that the effects were widespread, and
overwhelmingly negative. Consider that, through no fault of
our own, we were all obligated to spend considerable amounts
of our limited time and energy cleaning up after this mess.
Consider that our smaller campuses in Springfield, Alton, and
East St. Louis were affected too. And consider that the academic
community in Carbondale, more than twice our size, was arguably
hit even harder than we were. In all, some 42,000 people have
been dealing directly for over 3 months now with plagiary committed
by one person over twenty years ago. One can only imagine the
actual dollar value of the work this has obligated us all to
do, or of the losses, both direct and indirect, that we must
now absorb. What might have been accomplished with this time,
energy, and money had it all been directed toward something
constructive and of our own choosing? And finally, consider
that no matter what, for all those involved, things will never
be the same again.
Truly, a disaster.
Notes
1.
This story first appeared in and was covered extensively by
the Southern Illinois University Carbondale student newspaper,
The Daily Egyptian. <http://www.siude.com/>
2.
See Bartlett, T. (2006). The rumor: What really cost Chris Dussold
his dream job? Chronicle of Higher Education, 52 (23),
A8.
3.
T-Shirts featuring this slogan are available at cafepress.com:
<http://www.cafepress.com/buy/SIUE/-/pv_design_details/pg_1/id_23245337/opt_/fpt_/c_666/>
