| Username |
Post |
| Kali Prasad |
Posted
on 19-Jul-01 02:11 PM
Ashu: Another one for your reading pleasure. Are we learning something??
Cheers,
SOURCE: CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION
Texas A&M Fires Professor on Accusations of Plagiarism
By JENNIFER JACOBSON and ROBIN WILSON
A professor of agricultural economics at Texas A&M University who had accused two junior colleagues of plagiarizing her work has herself been fired for plagiarism and for trying to cover it up.
Ronald G. Douglas, the university's provost, said in a statement Friday that he had fired Mary A. Zey for committing "flagrant and serious scientific misconduct," although her termination will not take effect until July 2002. Mr. Douglas declined Wednesday to comment on the situation because it involves a personnel matter.
Ms. Zey also declined to comment, but released a statement of her own on Friday that proclaimed her innocence. She suggested that the university has a "vendetta" against her for a study she worked on that found that leaders of many companies believed that the university's lack of student diversity limited the perspective of its graduates.
"I did not believe that Texas A&M administrators would retaliate against me," she wrote. "I did not believe that an institution's leadership could be so vindictive. I have been terribly wrong."
In his statement, Mr. Douglas agreed with a finding of the university's investigation committee that Ms. Zey, who has been at the university since 1982, falsified and plagiarized data belonging to John L. Boies, a former assistant professor of sociology, and Harland N. Prechel, an associate professor of sociology still at the university.
The investigation into Ms. Zey's conduct resulted from her own accusations in 1999 that Mr. Boies and Mr. Prechel had used her data in a scientific paper published in 1998 in the journal Sociological Forum. That same year, Ms. Zey published a paper using the same data in Research, Corporate Change, and Development.
In March, the investigative committee found that Ms. Zey's article contained falsified data and that, because it had not cited Mr. Boies as a co-author, she had plagiarized his work. The committee also decided that Mr. Boies and Mr. Prechel sufficiently proved that the work was, in fact, theirs.
Andrew S. Golub, Ms. Zey's lawyer, disagreed with the committee's findings, since his client had initiated the investigation. "Does it make any sense at all that if she were as deliberately corrupt as they say she is that she would call any attention to her misconduct?" he said. "Of course not."
Ms. Zey's 1999 accusation against Mr. Boies and Mr. Prechel was not the first. She complained to the university in 1995 that the two men had plagiarized her as well.
Mr. Boies said that after Ms. Zey's 1999 charges against him, she was nonetheless allowed to vote on his tenure case and influence the decision against him. He left the university in October of that year and now works as a mathematical statistician for the U.S. Bureau of the Census.
Mr. Prechel declined to comment on the matter.
Mr. Golub said that Ms. Zey was given only 10 minutes to defend herself during the investigation and that she plans to appeal Mr. Douglas's decision to Ray M. Bowen, the university's president.
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Posted
on 19-Jul-01 02:30 PM
Kali dear, what is your problem? Why are you flooding this site with your oft-repeated "plagariasm is bad?" I, for one was convinced when you pasted material on this subject THE FIRST TIME. Please paste something else for a change, will you? Or is it some sublime message to somebody? What do I know.
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| the real ashu |
Posted
on 19-Jul-01 11:47 PM
Hi Kali,
Enjoyed reading it. Thanks for posting it.
On another note, I have been doing relentless word-of-mouth marketing of this site to editors/reporters of various English dailies and magazines and newsletters in Kathmandu.
My hope is that those editors/reporters visit this site from
time to time, read our discussions on plagiarism, and learn to
think differently about plagiarism, which is, alas, rampant,
in Nepali media.
After all, the degree of open-ness sites like this
enocurage is all for the better.
oohi
"on with this campaign against plagiarism"
ashu
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| sally |
Posted
on 20-Jul-01 10:01 AM
Well, I'm doing an article right now for an internal university publication on Web plagiarism, so I do find it useful. (Hmmm ... maybe I can just cut and paste it into my article :-) )
Anyone who's interested in this subject may want to check out a book, "Student Cheating and Plagiarism in the Internet Era: A Wake-up Call," by Ann Lathrop and Kathleen Foss.
The focus of the book is mainly on helping instructors recognize plagiarism and design assignments to reduce the likelihood. Could be useful to budding professors. It doesn't really focus on scholars, but some of the discussions are interesting in that they could help students just learning to do research figure out the limits between appropriate and inappropriate use of sources. Some of this stuff I'd never thought about myself--obviously just downloading something is wrong, but there are lots of other ways to misuse sources that students may do unintentionally. Cultural issues, too.
So far my interviews are showing that there's greater concern about unintentional misuse of sources than blatant plagiarism.
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