… the Central Michigan University math professors not guilty of plagiarizing a grant they took part in have begun to identify themselves.
One of the seven mathematics faculty members listed on the original National Science Foundation proposal that was found to be plagiarized confirmed she did not participate in writing the proposal.
Mathematics associate professor Lisa DeMeyer was one of the seven faculty members on the investigative staff for the grant proposal and was a senior staff member on the project.
She said in a letter e-mailed to Central Michigan Life she did not participate in writing the grant proposal.
“I assisted the co-principal investigators developing course materials, that was going to be my job but the project was stopped before the work was complete,“ DeMeyer said…
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Update: The plagiarists have been revealed: Manouchehri — now sharing her gifts with another university, Ohio State — and Lapp.
Manouchehri, now a professor at Ohio State University, could not be reached for comment Thursday.
You bet.
For years on this blog I’ve followed journalists and professors who plagiarize. I’ve learned that almost all of them do it for a living. They’ve done it before; they’ll do it again. They are lifers. Taking the work of others is what they do.
So UD wasn’t surprised by this follow-up article to the case of Patricia Linn, who has written pieces for an Australian law society journal.
After a reporter uncovered an initial plagiarized piece of hers (and after the predictable refusal of the law society to face up to what The Australian had uncovered), the society itself checked her other pieces.
The [organization] has consistently refused to give any explanation to The Australian but it seems that somebody inside the society has gone back and checked Ms Linn’s articles…
A curious item appears in the October edition, which is now being mailed to Queensland’s solicitors. Buried on page 12, it is headed “Errata: People and Performance Articles” and it deserves a full public release.
It reads: “Parts of the content of the People and Performance article Talking to yourself — self-help or self harm? (Proctor, June, 2009) are attributable to Shelley Holmes, founder and CEO of the Centre for Breakthrough Leadership.
“Some parts of the content in the People and Performance article, Believing is doing — you can empower yourself (Proctor, July, 2009) are attributable to Shelley Holmes, Elizabeth Scott MS of About.com and Associate Professor Susan Santo of the University of South Dakota.
“Some parts of the content in the People and Performance article, Candidate Interviews — How to use behavioural questions (Proctor, August, 2009) are attributable to the Australian Institute of Management — Queensland and the Northern Territory.
“The Queensland Law Society apologises for these omissions.”
As the reporter points out, errors and omissions doesn’t quite say it.
But my point here is that no one should be surprised that Linn’s a lifer.
An official in an Australian legal society has resigned after plagiarizing much of an article that appeared in the society’s journal, Proctor.
The organization, the Queensland Law Society, has been profoundly uncooperative with the Australian, the newspaper that uncovered the copying, refusing to comment at all even as its director of “people and organisational performance” leaves the organization in disgrace.
Why did it take a newspaper to catch flagrant plagiarism on the part of one of its officials? Why, faced with obvious malfeasance, did the organization react with tight-lipped annoyance to a newspaper’s questions about it?
At the very least, the QLS ought to have released a statement about how the journal’s editors will do a better job of reviewing its manuscripts.
Its pompous denials, and then its clipped, reluctant admissions, make clear that while the QLS considers plagiarism perfectly okay, it finds its disclosure a disgrace.
A paper reporting the creation of sperm-like cells from human embryonic stem cells has been retracted by the editor of the journal Stem Cells and Development. The work had garnered headlines worldwide after being published three weeks ago …
The journal’s editor-in-chief Graham Parker says he took the radical step on 27 July because two paragraphs in the introduction of the paper, entitled ‘In Vitro Derivation of Human Sperm from Embryonic Stem Cells’, had been plagiarised from a 2007 review published in another journal, Biology of Reproduction.
He had been alerted to the plagiarism on 10 July — three days after the article had been published online — by the editors of Biology of Reproduction. Parker says that the corresponding author, Karim Nayernia of the North East England Stem Cell Institute in Newcastle, UK, and the University of Newcastle, had failed to provide convincing evidence that the two paragraphs had been included in the submitted version of the manuscript by mistake…
Nature News
New human rights agency chief Hyun Byung-chul came under fire Sunday for allegedly plagiarizing his own academic papers in 1989 and 2002.
The allegation is expected to deal a fresh blow to President Lee Myung-bak …
Hyun, a law professor at Hanyang University, allegedly copied many paragraphs from his papers published in 1986 and 1998 for other papers published by different journals in 1989 and 2002, respectively, the Hankyoreh newspaper reported.
The original papers and the copied ones had different titles and some different sentences, but virtually are the same, it said, quoting legal experts. Hyun failed to identify quotations or reveal the source of information in the copied papers.
Hyun denied the report, saying he wrote about different subjects in the papers, but they could carry the same sentences…
Hyun had been president of Hanyang Cyber University, an Internet unit of Hanyang, since March 2006…
Earlier, presidential secretary designate for social affairs Park Mee-seok, a former professor at Sookmyung University in Seoul, resigned for plagiarizing her student’s thesis for one of her past research papers.
In 2006, then education minister Kim Byong-joon stepped down from his post, taking responsibility for a thesis plagiarism scandal only 12 days after taking office…
… with UD’s immediate, uncensored, unedited reactions in parenthesis:
New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has admitted to using a paragraph virtually word-for-word from a prominent liberal blogger without attribution. [Wish I’d been that blogger.] [And they wonder why newspapers are dying.]
Dowd acknowledged the error in an e-mail to the Huffington Post on Sunday, the Web site reported. [A moral error, to be sure. Hard to see – paging Doris Kearns Goodwin! – how it could have been done in error. We call this plagiarism.] The Times corrected her column online to give proper credit for the material to Talking Points Memo editor Josh Marshall. [I read him all the time during the presidential election.]
The newspaper is expected to issue a formal correction Monday. A request for comment made by The Associated Press was not immediately returned by the Times late Sunday. [Sluggish, as always. Bloggers are quicker. And they usually come up with their own material.]
The error appeared in Dowd’s Sunday column, in which she criticized the Bush administration’s use of interrogation methods in the run-up to the Iraq war.
In the original column, Dowd wrote: “More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when the Bush crowd was looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq.”
Marshall last week wrote virtually the same sentence. But where Dowd’s column used the phrase “the Bush crowd was,” Marshall used “we were.” [The “Bush crowd” change makes it clear that this was not a mistaken importation of someone else’s sentence. She — UD bets it was one of her assistants — took the sentence and gussied it up a bit. UD bets that, like all those Harvard law professors who plagiarize, Dowd’s a victim of her dependence on assistants who do much of her writing for her. She sweeps in toward deadline, perhaps, and Dowdizes it here and there, and she relies on her staff to write the body of the thing and not to plagiarize while they’re doing it. This is the most elite form of plagiarism, if that’s any comfort to Dowd.]
Dowd, who won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1990, told the Huffington Post that the mistake was unintentional. She claims she never read Marshall’s post last week and had heard the line from a friend who did not mention reading it in Marshall’s blog. [Well. Now we’re paging Nancy Pelosi. UD‘s a big fan of Pelosi, but she doesn’t believe her version of events in terms of what she knew about torture.]
In the updated version on the Times’ site, Dowd’s column had this note: “An earlier version of this column failed to attribute a paragraph about the timeline for prisoner abuse to Josh Marshall’s blog at Talking Points Memo.”
… to direct your attention to this Google News page rather than summarize the contents of these articles, make snide remarks about how badly some of them are written, and compare in detail the president of Jacksonville State to the president of Southern Illinois University, who also plagiarized his education degree.
Our entire budget has been directed to sports stories.
… is that only the powerless get punished for it.
Doris Kearns Goodwin, a plagiarist who, as Slate‘s Timothy Noah writes, lied about what she did, has suffered nothing for her behavior; on the contrary, she continues to be honored with awards of the sort Vanderbilt’s about to give her. The only people at Vanderbilt pissed off about this are its students.
Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs Richard McCarty maintains his support for Vanderbilt’s decision to honor historian Doris Kearns Goodwin in spite of criticism from students.
Goodwin, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and well-known historian, is the recipient of the 2009 Nichols-Chancellor’s Medal and will be the keynote speaker on Senior Class Day. Goodwin was also the center of a plagiarism scandal…
In 2002, Goodwin was accused of plagiarism in two news articles. Goodwin addressed the accusations in Time Magazine, asserting the errors were unintentional. Although Goodwin provided footnotes for her sources, she attributed her failure to “provide quotation marks for phrases I had taken verbatim” to mislabeling in her notes due to the large-scale nature of her research. She also confessed to having previously reached a “private settlement” with an author of one of her sources.
Senior Meghana Bhatta, an investigative member of the honor council, said Goodwin provided a “feeble excuse that would not even stand up in a high school classroom, much less in the world of academia.”
“Vanderbilt is sending a flawed and hypocritical message to its students and to other institutions by hosting an admitted plagiarist,” Bhatta said. “I hope that the administration realizes that we risk losing credibility in the eyes of the public by demonstrating support for a woman who does not stand for the ideals of our school.”
The allegations resulted in her resignation from several positions, but she still retained the support of many scholars and readers.
“I think she has answered those accusations and she gave ample credit to a source that she used,” McCarty said. “She worked out an arrangement with that author, but she in no way attempted to present that work as her own.” [Er. Yes she did. That’s why she paid said source an ample sum of money to shut her up.]”
“I find it odd that Vanderbilt, a university that makes every freshman sign the honor code, would reward her for work that was admittedly taken without notation from other sources,” [said a student] in regard to Goodwin’s past….
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Update: The DKG Plagiarism Archive at University Diaries. Note that she ran into exactly the same trouble at the University of Virginia. Those pesky damn students.
But you also know that they’re all pretty much alike. They feature Harvard law professors and overseers (Ogletree, Tribe, Dershowitz, Goodwin) using slave labor to write their books for them (a technique fraught with dangers, of which plagiarism is only one); or they’re about desperate illiterates (Glenn Poshard, president of Southern Illinois University) drawing upon their betters…
Very straightforward, these plagiarism tales. But here’s one that’s really twisted.
A loving, demented son decides to defend his father’s controversial research by assuming the identity of one of his father’s critics and making the critic out to be a plagiarist.
[Raphael] Golb is accused of using stolen identities of various people, including a New York University professor who disagreed with his father, to elevate his father’s theory and besmirch its critics, Robert M. Morgenthau, the Manhattan district attorney, said at a news conference.
Mr. Golb, 49, was arrested Thursday morning and charged in Manhattan Criminal Court with identity theft, criminal impersonation and aggravated harassment. He faces up to four years in prison if convicted.
Prosecutors said Mr. Golb opened an e-mail account in the name of Lawrence H. Schiffman, the New York University professor who disagreed with Mr. Golb’s father. He sent messages in Professor Schiffman’s name to various people at N.Y.U. and to others involved in the Dead Sea Scrolls debate, fabricating an admission by Professor Schiffman that he had plagiarized some of Professor Golb’s work, Mr. Morgenthau said. Raphael Golb also set up blogs under various names that accused Dr. Schiffman of plagiarism, Mr. Morgenthau said.
Raphael Golb, who lives in Manhattan and received his law degree from N.Y.U., also created e-mail addresses using the names of other Dead Sea Scrolls scholars, Mr. Morgenthau said.
“This exemplifies a growing trend in the area of identity theft,” Antonia Merzon, an assistant district attorney, said during the news conference. “It’s very easy to open an account using any name you want on the Internet. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that. But when you start using another person’s true identity for some purpose, you’re crossing the line into a possible identity theft crime or impersonation crime.”
The district attorney’s office began investigating the case after Professor Schiffman, who is chairman of the Hebrew and Judaic studies department at N.Y.U., came to them saying he believed that Mr. Golb was impersonating him on the Internet.
Golb’s father, an 81 year old University of Chicago professor who seems to share the paranoid tendencies of his son, thinks these charges are all part of the larger conspiracy against his work.
The president of University of Texas Pan American announced Tuesday she will retire at the end of the month, citing “pressures” that taxed her health and distracted her from leading the university. [Background here.]
Blandina “Bambi” Cardenas will step down after 4 1/2 sometimes turbulent years at the university. Last October, anonymous allegations mailed to the University of Texas System and media outlets around the state suggested Cardenas had plagiarized portions of her dissertation. The senders claimed to be UTPA faculty.
The UT System said in late October it would investigate. But David Prior, the system’s executive vice president for academic affairs, said the inquiry was halted before concluding.
“Once we understood Dr. Cardenas’ intention to resign we abandoned it,” Prior said. Asked if Cardenas was pressured to step down, Prior said, “not to my knowledge.” In a letter to the campus, Cardenas said she informed UT System Interim Chancellor Kenneth Shine of her decision in late December.
Under Cardenas, the university in Edinburg increased the number of students receiving degrees by 58 percent, to more than 3,200 annually. It also raised the number of graduate degrees offered, the number of nursing graduates, the amount of available financial aid and the freshman and sophomore retention rates, according to Cardenas’ letter.
But in 2007, Cardenas had to pay back more than $7,000 to the university she used to pay for landscaping service and install an air conditioning unit, sprinkler system and alarm in her home. She had also been billing the university for mileage for her commute to work…
This story is about faculty persistence. They kept at her, writing anonymously about her, um, unorthodox billing practices, her plagiarism… And she finally decided it would be better for her if the plagiarism investigation didn’t happen. Good call.
Her nickname’s Bambi.
An investigation begun in October of a plagiarism allegation against Blandina Cardenas, president of the University of Texas at Pan American, is still under way.
Barry Burgdorf, vice chancellor and general counsel of the UT System, said today that the system’s Board of Regents was briefed on the review during a closed-door session on Friday. Burgdorf is overseeing the investigation along with David Prior, executive vice chancellor for academic affairs.
The review was prompted by a packet of materials, sent anonymously to UT System administrators and news organizations, alleging that Cardenas plagiarized her doctoral dissertation. She received her doctorate in educational leadership from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1974, according to UT System records.
In 2007, Cardenas reimbursed UT-Pan American for more than $7,000 in improvements to her home and for use of a campus vehicle after auditors found UT System rules were violated…
Background here.
Neale Donald Walsch, author of the best-selling series “Conversations with God,” recently posted a personal Christmas essay on the spiritual Web site Beliefnet.com that was nearly identical to a 10-year-old article originally published by a little-known writer in a spiritual magazine. He now says he made a mistake in believing the story was something that had actually happened to him.
… Except for a different first paragraph in which Mr. Walsch wrote that he could “vividly remember” the incident, his Dec. 28 Beliefnet post followed, virtually verbatim,… previously published writing, even down to prosaic details like “the morning of the dress rehearsal, I filed in ten minutes early, found a spot on the cafeteria floor and sat down.”
… In a telephone interview, Mr. Walsch, 65, who said he regularly gives 10 or 20 speeches a year, said he had been retelling the anecdote in public as his own for years. “I am chagrined and astonished that my mind could play such a trick on me,” he said.
… In a statement, Beliefnet said that Mr. Walsch had withdrawn from the Web site’s blogging roster. “As a faith-based web portal, Beliefnet will continue to hold ourselves and our writers to the highest standards of trust,” the statement read….