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.
January 20th, 2009 at 6:07PM
Man is in the forest.
January 21st, 2009 at 4:20PM
Whether she leaves office or not, UMass ought to have enough concern about the integrity of its own degree programs to conduct its own inquiry into the charge of plagiarism in her dissertation. If she’s guilty, her doctorate should be revoked.
January 21st, 2009 at 4:23PM
I agree, Ralph. But I don’t think anything like that’s going to happen.
January 26th, 2009 at 5:36PM
As someone who’s sent evidence of a plagiarized dissertation (multiple pages copied almost verbatim) to the University of Michigan, and received a response of "we don’t see any reason to question the originality…." I think avoiding lawsuits now trumps integrity as a consideration in these decisions.