Poshard Accusation Third in Two Years for SIU

Accusations that SIU President Glenn Poshard used unattributed verbatim text from previously published sources make him the third high-ranking SIU administrator to be linked with plagiarism or academic dishonesty in the past two years.

Former SIUC Chancellor Walter Wendler was twice accused of plagiarism in 2006, while Southern Illinois University Edwardsville Chancellor Vaughn Vandegrift came under fire for similar allegations in February of the same year.

Wendler, now a professor of architecture, declined to comment on the matter, and Vandegrift's office directed all inquiries to Mike Ruiz, the SIU communications director for the president's office. Ruiz did not return multiple phone calls Wednesday. [Awful quiet in here...]

Wendler was accused of plagiarizing the university's Southern at 150 plan, which seeks to make SIUC a top-75 research institution by 2019, from work he did at Texas A&M.

Alumni and Faculty Against Corruption at SIU accused Wendler of lifting content directly from a plan called Vision 2020, a document Wendler helped write. Vision 2020 aimed to make Texas A&M a top-10 public university by 2020.

AFAC, as the group is commonly called, was formed after SIUE professor Chris Dussold was fired for plagiarizing his teaching statement in 2004. Since Dussold's firing, the group has sought out plagiarism amongst SIU administrators. [Turns out to be like shooting fish in a barrel.] Dussold has filed a wrongful termination lawsuit.

AFAC claimed both SIUC's plan and Texas A&M's plan listed similar goals and used verbatim text. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, both plans carried similar lists of concerns and used identical graphics.



Wendler insisted he had done no wrong because the portions he took from Texas A&M's Vision at 2020 were his own words.

"If I am the architect of the two of these planning processes, it would be odd if the two planning processes and the plans themselves looked very different," Wendler said in September 2006.

A month later, a three-person committee formed by Poshard concluded Wendler had committed academic dishonesty, not plagiarism. The committee was made up of Mike Lawrence of the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute; Wenona Whitfield, associate dean of the SIU School of Law and William Muhloch, chairman of the zoology department.

"We have concluded that the central issue is not whether acceptable or unacceptable plagiarism occurred but whether it was appropriate to use lifted words without attribution in a document produced on a university campus, where students, faculty and administrators must be sensitive to even the appearance of presenting another's thoughts and ideas as one's own," the committee wrote.

In October, former SIUC linguistics professor Joan Friedenberg, who had spoken out on behalf of Dussold in the past, handed the committee a stack of documents containing alleged plagiarized documents within the SIU system.

At the time, Friedenberg said the stack of material came from teaching philosophies, departmental mission statements and a Morris Library Web site segment on effective teaching.

Friedenberg said in 2006 that AFAC brought the documents to her attention.

"Why are we singling out Walter Wendler? Why was the professor on the Edwardsville campus singled out? What about the rest?" she asked.



In November, Poshard demoted Wendler from his chancellor position and formed a panel to review plagiarism policies throughout the university system. Poshard said Wendler's academic dishonesty had nothing to do with the demotion. While the panel is finalizing its report, a clear definition for plagiarism has yet to be given.

Wendler was also accused of plagiarism in January 2006 for his 2005 State of the University address.

He apologized to author Roger von Oech after unknowingly using a passage from Oech's book. Then-SIUC spokeswoman Sue Davis, who said she helped Wendler write the speech, said shortly after the chancellor's apology she unintentionally omitted the attribution.



Less than a month later, SIUE Chancellor Vandegrift apologized for plagiarizing a Martin Luther King Jr. Day speech, which he gave at a luncheon. Vandegrift's speech included unattributed excerpts out of documents from the White House, United Food and Commercial Workers Union and The King Center in Atlanta. [Are you able to keep track of all of this? A flow chart would help.]

Vandergrift's speech prompted Poshard to release a statement, in which he called plagiarism "intentionally taking credit for someone else's work." [He would know.] The SIUC Student Conduct Code states plagiarism is "representing the work of another as one's own work."

Vandegrift said he and his staff did not believe attributions were necessary because the speech was given in a non-academic setting. [How's that again? Concept of a Plagiarism-Free Zone emerging here...] The chancellor, though, said in a statement that he did approve the speech and claimed full responsibility for its content.

"I will say now that my integrity and the integrity of this university are very important to me," Vandegrift said in the statement. "If mistakes were made, we will take steps so that it doesn't happen in the future."

Poshard said August 1984 - when his dissertation was completed - was one of the busiest times of his life.

Just two weeks after his dissertation was completed, Poshard was appointed to the Illinois State Senate following the death of Sen. Gene Johns.

"This is not an excuse, and I would never offer it up as an excuse but at that point in my life, I had a family," he said. "I worked two jobs. I was running for the Illinois State Senate. I was trying to get my dissertation finished." [Quickest way is to plagiarize.]

Poshard said he would need more time before explaining why some pages have nearly identical text to works that are not cited.

...Poshard said his method of citing, which he said allowed for omitting quotes when information is cited in a footnote, could help explain several examples where he used long, verbatim passages without quotation marks. [Wait. Slow down.... omitting quotes when information is cited in a footnote... Hm...]

"No one on my committee said that when you reference and cite something correctly that you have to go up and put quotes around it," he said. [Poshard is the president of a university.]



Multiple academic experts said Poshard did not exercise enough caution while citing and attributing his 111-page dissertation.

Alan Perlman laid out a simple and widely accepted ground rule - if it's not original content, it needs to be cited.

Perlman holds a doctorate in linguistics from the University of Chicago and has assisted attorneys on plagiarism, copyright and authorship for more than 20 years. He said sloppy citing in lengthy papers is common. But absent citations and attributions go beyond what would be considered academically admissible, he said.

"(The author) went beyond error and took credit for what wasn't his," said Perlman, who viewed more than 20 pages of documents without knowing the author's name.

On page 54 of his dissertation, Poshard appears to have modeled his chapter summary, without citation or quotations, after a passage from author James Gallagher.

The last time Poshard cites Gallagher is on page 49, leaving Poshard at a loss to explain the nearly verbatim text on page 54.

"Unless I just failed to cite it," Poshard said. "What else can I say?"

That's plagiarism, says Dan Wueste.