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Monday, October 01, 2007

Pulitzer Material


Against an institution staunchly indifferent to academic and moral values, the student newspaper at Southern Illinois University Carbondale stands firm. The Daily Egyptian is an inspiration. I hope it's on the short list for some journalism prizes.


'...The Board of Trustees has [suggested] that it has known about these plagiarism accusations for some time. Not only were they not forthcoming, they took it upon themselves to determine whether the allegations were true.

Their method? Plugging the dissertation into Turnitin.com, a popular database educators have used in recent years to see if content within a paper matches up with published works.

Now, we may just be a bunch of gangly, fledgling student journalists, but common sense tells us, "Duh, you're not going to find anything because the books Poshard used in his dissertation are way older than a database born in the 90s."

The DAILY EGYPTIAN even put the dissertation through Turnitin.com's sister database, iParadigm, and had the same results. The sites' owner said the disputed works might not exist in his database.

Yet the BOT accepted its findings as fact and swept it under the rug.

...The committee Poshard charged with developing a working definition of plagiarism submitted its review Sept. 21. Its report stated that plagiarism can be unintentional, and a sloppy regard for citation style could be one way such an allegation could occur.

Poshard has said such a mistake may be the correct way to categorize what he did.

Yet the DAILY EGYPTIAN ... found such "mistakes" at least 30 times during its investigation. In many cases, there were no citations or quotations.

We don't know about you, but we're thinking that's a lot of mistakes for someone who was deemed a doctor of his field.'