The newly appointed director of the University of South Australia’s Hawke Research Institute has resigned following the revelation of his role in a plagiarism scandal in South Africa.
Appointed three months ago. Exposed as a veteran plagiarist five days ago. Immediately fired. (They haven’t had time to change the website.)
But why didn’t the Hawke Research Institute know about Abebe Zegeye’s long history of plagiarism? Two years ago, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Stuart Hall, and David Theo Goldberg wrote a letter to Zegeye’s last place of employment, South Africa’s Wits Institute, complaining that he’d been plagiarizing their work, and the work of others, for years. Apparently these three (or perhaps others) had “warned [Zegeye] explicitly in the past of its unacceptability,” but he kept at it.
Wits investigated, found him guilty, and canned him.
Zegeye, like scads of miscreants before him, blamed it — all of it — on a research assistant.
Then he packed up and took an excellent job as director at Hawke.
How was he able to do this?
Nobody told Hawke about the man they had hired to direct their institute. Only because the Mail and Guardian newspaper got hold of the investigative report on Zegeye and wrote about it did Australia learn about his past.
Universities have to release information about faculty plagiarists. Otherwise, like Zegeye, they’ll keep bouncing around.
“I cannot be accused of cogently borrowing any intellectual capital from other writers, although, as admitted, their text was sometimes reproduced in my works,” [Zegeye’s] statement said.
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Update: They’ve now changed the webpage.
April 20th, 2011 at 1:54PM
It’s the old underling defense again. Where have we seen that before… Charles Nemeroff?
April 20th, 2011 at 4:16PM
Oh, well… it’s only ‘their text’ not their ‘intellectual capital’– and it was only ‘reproduced’, not actually appropriated– and it was only ‘sometimes’, not habitually– and it was, after all, someone else’s fault.
I declare a verdict of ‘Not guilty, much.’
April 20th, 2011 at 4:37PM
MattF: Yes – an amazing statement.
April 28th, 2011 at 5:53AM
ZEGEYE was known all along a serialist plagiarist. He was appointed at Wits as “a viable black candidate” against the advice then given by those who knew his record. He went on and destroyed the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research, which for ten years was one of the few intellectual hubs in South Africa.
He was hired at The Hawke Institute via the patronage of his ‘friend’ Pal Ahlaluwa who now plays a major role in the University of Southern Australia.
The scandal is bigger than we think. I am sure that this trickster who parades as an academic will pop up elsewhere pretty soon, unfortunately.
April 28th, 2011 at 5:57AM
This serial plagiarist worked at UNISA (University of South Africa) for many years. He was known in that institution as a plagiarist. Wits hired him because of their stinky ‘black transformation’ policy. And for sure, he left Wits stinking.
Now it is true he destroyed WISER in the process. But so did the funding agencies that funded WISER, especially Mellon. Mellon withdrew funding once they saw a black director coming. They gave the money to the former director who went and set up a phony African Humanities Institute in Cape Town. This phony Institute is not African at all, nor is it interested in Africa.
This corruption and patronage by funding agencies is just as stinky as Zegeye’s plagiarism.
February 17th, 2016 at 8:36AM
OMG! he is now working in newly established University in ethiopia named Woldia university.i think he is hiding himself in this university because no one know he was plagiarist)