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Tuesday, January 04, 2005
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SICK PUPPY
Harvard University is currently setting the gold standard for how to deal with faculty plagiarists (do nothing), but less glorious universities, like SUNY Plattsburgh, continue to do things the old-fashioned way. Plattsburgh has just dismissed the head of its Quebec Studies program, Professor Donald Cuccioletta (his last name, UD is pretty sure, translates into “puppy bed”): The school said it learned from a Montreal newspaper in October that Donald Cuccioletta was terminated at the University of Quebec in 2002, accused of plagiarism in a chapter he contributed to a book he edited. … A Canadian colleague said two passages in Cuccioletta's chapter, about 180 and 85 words, were identical to those in "Do the Americas Have a Common History?" by Columbia University historian Lewis Hanke in 1964. Cuccioletta named Hanke in the bibliography but never directly attributed the passages to him. At SUNY Plattsburgh, Cuccioletta was interim director of the Institute of Quebec Studies and an adjunct instructor in Canadian studies. He could not be reached for comment Monday. As the Chronicle of Higher Education (via History News Network) points out, the tendency of universities to hush this sort of thing up allowed Cuccioletta to jump from his Canadian university to oblivious Plattsburgh: “After the [Canadian] department chairman learned of the alleged plagiarism, … Mr. Cuccioletta was not rehired. But the news did not travel 60 miles down the highway, where Mr. Cuccioletta was also teaching at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh.” The only question left is: Where will Cuccioletta go next? And the answer, mes chers lecteurs, is obvious: Harvard. |