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Following a three-week internal investigation of plagiarism allegations against SIU President Glenn Poshard, the university leader said he hoped SIU would be better prepared to deal with similar allegations in the future.
Poshard said he hoped the university would adopt a standard practice - possibly appointing a standing committee - to address any future allegations of plagiarism against faculty or administration.
He said the SIU faculty could vote to include standard procedures in the final version of a report on plagiarism policies at the university. A 10-member blue ribbon panel released an initial version of the report - which includes a definition of plagiarism to be used at the university - last month.
"I think the whole faculty and student body deserves to have something in place where we all know what the ground rules are and we all know what to expect and if something like this occurs we all know the right way to deal with it," Poshard said.
Joan Friedenberg, a retired linguistics professor who has said she is associated with Alumni and Faculty Against Corruption at SIU, said she believes the group knows of nearly 100 other cases of plagiarism by those within the university.
Friedenberg said she does not do the research to find suspected plagiarism and therefore she does not have a complete list of the cases. She said she doesn't know of plans to release more information relating to the other cases in the near future.
Last week a seven-member panel of elected university leaders released a report that said Poshard committed "inadvertent plagiarism" in his 1984 doctoral dissertation and should correct the document. The SIU Board of Trustees voted to accept the committee's recommendations and Board Chairman Roger Tedrick said the trustees did not believe Poshard plagiarized and the president would keep his job.
The report attributed many of the instances of what appeared to be plagiarism to Poshard's use of an "informal style" that is no longer used at SIUC but was used by many of Poshard's contemporaries. The committee concluded that other errors in citation were due to "carelessness or misremembering."
Poshard said at a press conference last week that SIUC has a policy that allows students accused of plagiarism to correct their mistakes. The committee's recommendation that he be allowed to correct his dissertation was appropriate, he said.
"We can't be a university that only decides things on the basis of our head," he said. "We also have a heart."
Poshard said at the conference that he was unclear about the definition of plagiarism when he was writing his dissertation in the early 1980s.
"I don't ever recall a discussion in my classes about plagiarism. I know it wasn't discussed with my (dissertation) committee," he said.
However, Poshard said in a statement published in the Southern Illinoisan newspaper in July 2006 that he was trained in the subject.
"I am a proud graduate of Southern Illinois University where I received my doctorate in the Administration of Higher Education and studied under some of the finest scholars in America," he said in the statement. "There were several courses in which the issue of plagiarism was discussed."
Gerald Nelms, an English professor, also reviewed the dissertation at Poshard's request and he said none of the 40 "infractions" he found constituted plagiarism.
"I concluded that really there was no evidence of any academic dishonesty whatsoever," he said.
Joe Crawford can be reached at 536-3311 ext. 254 or jcrawford@siude.com.
