Wednesday, January 28, 2009

"errors and mistakes" were made (cont'd)

From today's Chronicle of Higher Education...

In 2007, after several high-profile plagiarism scandals, Southern Illinois University released a 17-page report on how to deal with the issue. The report includes a lengthy definition of plagiarism, explaining exactly what does and does not merit the dreaded "p" word.

One problem: That definition appears to have been plagiarized.

The 139-word definition used in the report is nearly identical to the definition adopted by Indiana University in 2005. . .

In recent years, Southern Illinois has had more than its share of plagiarism cases. In 2006, the chancellor of the Carbondale campus was asked to step down after it was discovered that portions of a strategic plan he wrote for Southern Illinois had been taken from a strategic plan he helped write for another university.

The following year it was revealed that the president of the system, Glenn Poshard, had copied large sections of his 1984 dissertation without citation. A university committee deemed the copying "errors and mistakes" rather than plagiarism. . .

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