President of Alabama's Jacksonville State U. Can't Shake Plagiarism Charges

President of Alabama's Jacksonville State U. Can't Shake Plagiarism Charges

Ouch!!!

Many of the highlighted portions are standard phrases, such as in the table of contents and elsewhere. However, much of the rest of the paper appears to be cut-n-pasted, with hardly any modifications. As a result, William Meehan’s political ship is sunk. Anybody can easily recognize that it IS plagiarism – and Meehan got caught. Turnitin and other electronic plagiarism-detector-devices did NOT exist when Meehan submitted Carl Boening’s work as his own. With 21st Century technology being applied to dissertations from the 20th Century, it will be interesting to see who else gets caught for plagiarism.

 

I like your registered name ....

"Me again" -- very cool. Anyway, what with most of us who do this distance learning thing and work ourselves to death staring at that blank word processor screen trying to do *real* writing of our own, I think plagiarists should be horsewhipped! Well, maybe a little strong for the average student but not for a university official. I guess we can take solace that God in His infinite wisdom offers justice for such people. I wonder how common this problem is with today's students? Thoughts, anyone?

 

With today’s technology, plagiarism is usually (but not always) identified fairly quickly. It is also aggravating to point out plagiarism to a student, only to have him repeat it in a subsequent paper.

There are still ways for students to beat the system.

 

It is pretty easy to spot when a paper looks like this:
i really like the new microsuft word. it has alot of cool features and Microsoft Office Word 2007 helps you produce professional-looking documents by providing a comprehensive set of tools for creating and formatting your document in the new Microsoft Office Fluent user interface.

Can you spot what has been copied? I really see papers like this!

 

Sheesh!

Those anecdotes aren't surprising. They're funny yet pathetic ... too bad the students are only cheating themselves. But if they cared about that they wouldn't be plagiarizing in the first place, eh? Guess that's why I've only taught classes in the work environment. Y'all must have the patience of saints.

 

The simple solution would be to revoke his degree. Why should he be treated differently than any othter student who plagiarises? To my knowledge, there is no statute of limitations for Universities to deal with issues such as this. Revoke.

 

Here's the poster, showing, highlighted in yellow, the portions of the dissertation that were copied verbatim.


Intriguingly, three of the members of the committee that approved the plagiarized dissertation were also on the committee that approved the dissertation, three years earlier, that was copied from.

Plagiarism aside, the Ph.D. dissertation is less than 120 pages long, discussing the efficacy of sabbaticals for teachers in the area.

 

The image that Dr. Bear provided is hard to see, but it does provide a snapshot view of how much yellow there is in the paper. To see an even better view, click here and scroll down and you will be shocked as you read through the plagiarized dissertation.

Initially, many of the similarities seem innocuous. For example, the table of contents has some significant similarities, but it isn't (in itself) proof of plagiarism because many universities require doctoral students to use a standardized table of contents (at least for chapters 1-3). However, as you read deeper into the dissertation, you will begin to find gross word-for-word, cut-n-pasted, exacted similarities. In some cases, large blocks of text are exactly the same, except the numbers have been switched with new numbers i.e. new data was inserted. Thus, the qualitative writing is plagiarized while the quantitative data is new. How would you handle that as an executive academic administrator for a dissertation that was granted 10 years ago?

 

me again - seems to be a broken link?

 

A quick scan of the pages shown suggests approximately 40 pages worth of content for the 130 page dissertation (title page, table of contents, body, et al.) was verbatim copied from the original source document. Academic fraud.

 

Do you have PDF in your computer?

 

Me too!

Broken for me also and I have Adobe Reader as well as Adobe Acrobat, both 9.1. The link points to an error on the server.

But, very grateful for your help anyway.

 

Here's a working link to the full dissertation, with plagiarized parts highlighted

 

Why are individual words highlighted? I can understand entire sentences, phrases, and paragraphs being called into question but individual words or two-word sequences are questionable in terms of alleged plagiarism. Moreover, the table of contents seems fairly generic and might be a standard template required of or recommended to the dissertation write. I am not going to take the time to read all 130+ pages but if entire sentences and paragraphs are duplicated from another source without attribution any instructor I have had would call it plagiarism.

 

Why are dates that are beyond the original study (1996) included in the highlighted areas for plagiarism. Further, the author clearly states his intent to replicate the original study but with marginally new dates.

"This study replicated the investigation conducted by Boening (1996) in
his study Faculty Renewal through Sabbatical: An Analysis of
Sabbatical Application Patterns, 1986-1996 at The University
of Alabama, Tuscaloosa."

"replicated" seems to be the operative word. Lazy work on both the author and the committee. I wouldn't think it appropriate to conduct a similar study two years past the original without some good justification. Essentially a third of the dissertation was already written. But, since I have never served on a dissertation committee I wouldn't know what is considered common practice with a continued study.

I did do a cursory review using the following search: plagiairism charges, site:xxxxxx.edu (where xxx was the school of choice) of many major schools and plagiairism seems to be a problem for all schools.

I thought this one from Harvard was interesting:

use chached version

"Harvard constitutional law scholar Laurence H. Tribe ’62 apologized yesterday for not properly crediting another professor’s work in his popular 1985 book God Save This Honorable Court, one day after a conservative political magazine accused him of plagiarism.

The Weekly Standard posted an article on its website Saturday charging Tribe with using language that closely mirrors sections of Henry J. Abraham’s 1974 book on Supreme Court appointments, Justices and Presidents.

And at one point in his 1985 book, Tribe lifts a 19-word passage verbatim from Abraham’s text.

Tribe could not be reached directly for comment yesterday, but issued a statement to The Crimson via e-mail.

He said he recognized his “failure to attribute some of the material The Weekly Standard identified.”

“I personally take full responsibility for that failure,” Tribe said.

Tribe’s mea culpa comes just three weeks after another prominent Harvard faculty member—Climenko Professor of Law Charles J. Ogletree—publicly apologized for copying six paragraphs almost word-for-word from a Yale scholar in a recent book, All Deliberate Speed.

Last fall, Frankfurter Professor of Law Alan M. Dershowitz also battled plagiarism charges. And in 2002, Harvard Overseer Doris Kearns Goodwin admitted that she had accidently copied passages from another scholar in her bestseller The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys."

 

This is definitely a political and academic quagmire because the plagiarized qualitative material is apparently being legitimized simply because new quantitative data was used.

 

Here is more scoop, regarding the politics behind it:

 

Of dissertations and such

Interesting thread! I have a book called "Education's Smoking Gun" by Reginald Damerell, who taught classes at UMass-Amherst -- classes in multimedia that education majors took as part of their requirements. His book essentially rips how we purportedly "educate" future teachers in our colleges. Quite the fascinating read. His assertion was that there is no pedagogy in education, that those who wish to teach should major in a real academic subject, or multiple subjects, and not just take classes on how to follow a curriculum, keep order in the classroom, choose materials for media presentations, etc. He had some provocative ideas, for sure.

He was also very familiar with the process of Bill Cosby's dissertation because Damerell was on Cosby's dissertation committee at UMass-Amherst. He didn't have good things to say about that specific approval process either either! He writes that the dissertation committee gathered at Cosby's house, they had a nice little party, chatted and joked, and thus approved the dissertation and Cosby's Ed.D. The title was: "An Integration of the Visual Media Via Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids in the Elementary School Curriculum as a Teaching Aid and Vehicle to Achieve Increased Learning." Hey, at least Cosby did the work and it was his own!

However my girlie hat is off to anyone who even begins the process of working on a doctoral program. I sure wouldn't tackle it. Too bad Bill Cosby didn't become a teacher. I'm sure he would have been a great one.

 

me again: "This is definitely a political and academic quagmire because the plagiarized qualitative material is apparently being legitimized simply because new quantitative data was used."

John: So very true, I think. The Mad Libs approach to a dissertation.
(http://madlibs.org/)

 

Thats a good one.