Experts Advise University President to Update His Thesis, Keep His Job

CHICAGO _ Southern Illinois University President Glenn Poshard lifted portions of his master’s and doctoral theses, an investigation has concluded, but the professors who reviewed the improper and missing citations recommended that Poshard keep his job and his academic degrees.

Poshard was following the same loose standards employed by some of his peers when he did his graduate work in the 1970s and 1980s, the committee said Thursday. Rather than disciplining the former congressman and gubernatorial candidate, they suggested that Poshard correct the doctoral dissertation based on today’s academic standards.

The university’s board of trustees, which has maintained its support for the beleaguered president since the allegations were raised six weeks ago, said Thursday that Poshard will continue as the leader of the state’s second-largest university.

Pausing twice during a news conference to choke back tears, Poshard said that any mistakes in his works were “unintentional and inadvertent,” but acknowledged that the accusations have been embarrassing and distracting for himself and the university, which already had been at the center of several plagiarism controversies.

“This has been a blow to our name and our family, but more importantly to the university,” Poshard said. “That is what concerns me more than anything.”

The allegations surfaced in August, when the student newspaper published similarities between Poshard’s 1984 doctoral thesis on education and previously published scholarly works. The Chronicle of Higher Education then revealed alleged problems with Poshard’s 1975 master’s thesis on student drug abuse.

The chancellor of SIU’s Carbondale campus last month appointed a 7 seven-member faculty committee to review Poshard’s two theses and decide whether he did anything wrong.

The committee found that Poshard’s writing style in his doctoral dissertation, which included unattributed passages, was consistent with the style used at the time by other graduate students. In some instances, paragraphs were lifted verbatim or borrowed heavily from other sources without quotation marks, and sometimes without footnotes.

There was no conduct code or definition of plagiarism in the SIU graduate student handbook when Poshard was a student, according to the report. Poshard said he didn’t remember ever discussing plagiarism in his classes or with his dissertation advisory committee.

The committee called the errors in Poshard’s thesis “inadvertent plagiarism,” but concluded they would not be acceptable today. “There are numerous instances in which the words of others are present in a continuous flow with words written by the author of the dissertation, so that readers cannot distinguish between those two sources,” the report states.

“The bulk of the allegations pertain to unquoted and uncited texts,” according to the report. “These are pervasive. Some of these instances are significant.”

The committee recommended that the 111-page dissertation, on educational opportunities for gifted children in Illinois, be removed from the library and replaced with a corrected copy written by Poshard. Most of the errors were in a section that reviewed previous literature on the topic.

The corrections should be consistent with the style used in “A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses and Dissertations,” committee members said.

Engineering professor Ramanarayanan Viswanathan, president of the school’s Faculty Senate and chair of the review panel, said the group focused on the dissertation because there were only minor issues with the master’s thesis, which he said does not need to be revised.

While Poshard said he hopes the attention will help clarify what constitutes plagiarism, he also said that there is no clear-cut answer. He said students accused of plagiarism should have an opportunity to correct mistakes.

“We can’t be a university that only decides things on the basis of our head. We also have a heart,” he said. “I can’t imagine wanting to be a student or teach in a university that felt that every line was so hard and so fast that people can’t sit down together and figure out what the right thing to do is.”

The committee recommended that the university work to make students more aware of the definition and consequences of plagiarism, and perhaps require students to sign a statement that they understand the university’s plagiarism policies.

The plagiarism scandals that have rocked the SIU campus began in 2004 with the firing of Edwardsville campus professor Chris Dussold, who was accused of copying from another professor’s teaching philosophy statement as part of his tenure review.

Dussold and his supporters claim he was unfairly singled out for a common practice, and they formed an informal plagiarism patrol, calling themselves Alumni and Faculty Against Corruption at SIU, and seeking out examples of copying in speeches and writings by other faculty and administrators. The student newspaper said it received copies of Poshard’s dissertation and other scholarly works from a source close to that group.

Dussold is suing SIU, alleging wrongful termination.

Former SIU professor Joan Friedenberg, a supporter of Dussold’s, said that while Poshard has an opportunity to correct his work, the same opportunity was not offered to Dussold.

“Does this imply that Chris Dussold will get an opportunity to correct his teaching statement?” she asked.

A separate analysis of Poshard’s dissertation, written by SIU English professor R. Gerald Nelms and released by the university Thursday, called the errors “minor” and “easily correctable.” He said there should be “high standards” when citing others’ writings, but that “overreaction . . . could have a chilling effect on scholarship generally.”

“The world can withstand a few unprosecuted citation infractions,” Nelms wrote.

Stephen Satris, executive director of the Center for Academic Integrity at Clemson University, questioned whether that sends students a bad message.

“That seems to contradict the high standards. I think that’s partly what high standards are all about, not overlooking stuff,” Satris said. “The norms don’t seem to have any teeth if big shots can skirt around them and get away with them.”

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