Email Address:

Password:

Poshard to answer plagiarism claims

Chicago Sun Times August 31, 2007 Friday Final Edition Poshard to answer plagiarism claims; Accused of lifting text for '84 Ph.D.

dissertation Dave Newbart, The Chicago Sun-Times NEWS; Pg.

5 745 words Southern Illinois University President Glenn Poshard, a former Democratic gubernatorial nominee, is to meet with faculty and staff leaders today to respond to allegations he plagiarized parts of his doctoral dissertation.

He is to "provide his perspective" on the allegations, according to SIU spokesman David Gross.

The allegations were reported Thursday in the Daily Egyptian, the student newspaper at SIU, where Poshard received a Ph.D.

in 1984.

He has been the system president since 2005 and was a congressman when he ran unsuccessfully for Illinois governor in 1998.

The newspaper reported that 14 sections of Poshard's 111-page paper on education for gifted children included verbatim text from other sources that aren't credited.

Another 16 sections are properly cited but don't include quotation marks to indicate they are not Poshard's own words, the paper said.

Poshard declined interview requests Thursday.

But in an interview Wednesday with the Egyptian, he denied he intentionally lifted other writers' ideas but said he could have made citation errors.

"I could have made a mistake," he told the Egyptian.

"I'm not saying I didn't." Roger Tedrick, chairman of the SIU board of trustees, said the board was "fully supportive" of Poshard.

"Although we take any allegations of this nature seriously, we believe this has less to do with what happened 24 years ago and more to do with the current litigation," he said.

That litigation involved Chris Dussold, a former professor at SIU's Edwardsville campus fired for allegedly plagiarizing a two-page teaching statement.

After he was let go, a group called Alumni and Faculty Against Corruption at SIU formed to show that Dussold was treated too harshly.

The group raised plagiarism allegations against former Carbondale Chancellor Walter Wendler, since removed from his post (although Poshard said the allegations did not play a role in the demotion), and against SIU-Edwardsville Chancellor Vaughn Vandegrift, who did not attribute some statements from other sources in a speech he made on campus last year.

The newspaper said someone close to the group had tipped them to the story.

But Dussold's attorney, Jeff Ezra, vigorously denied he or his client had anything to do with the allegations becoming public.

Dussold "is unhappy they were made public," he said.

"It was not his intent and never was his intent to hurt the university." Gross said Poshard intends to seek the "advice and counsel" of faculty and staff.

"He will use the input from the university community to make a determination as to what, if any, impact this matter will have on his leadership role at the University," Gross said in an e-mail.

Earlier, Gross said Poshard would review the charges more fully over the weekend.

Gross said SIU legal staff did a preliminary review of the allegations over the summer after Ezra told a university board member about them.

Ezra declined to comment on that.

At the time, the school ran the paper through Turnitin, plagiarism detection software, and didn't find any major problems, Gross said.

But it's possible the sources Poshard is accused of copying -- which are more than 30 years old -- weren't in the Turnitin database.

AN EXAMPLE: SIU's student newspaper, the Daily Egyptian, cited 14 sections of Glenn Poshard's dissertation that aren't credited to their sources.

This example is from page 39: "A problem which further confounds the issue is the wide range of differences that exist among school districts themselves.

For some schools, the addition of programs for the gifted is simply an extension of an already existing rationale and set of provisions for able students.

In other schools, a modest innovation in content or teaching method represents a major change which stands in conflict with traditions and practices." A passage in "Instructional Climate in Illinois Gifted Classes," published in 1970, reads: "Another problem which further confounds the issue is the wide range of differences that exist among school districts themselves.

For some schools the addition of programs for the gifted is simply an extension of an already existing rationale and set of provisions for able students.

In other schools a modest innovation in content or teaching method represents a major change which stands in conflict with the traditions and practices of most teachers in the district." The Daily Egyptian notes the paragraph "appears nearly verbatim with no quotes and no citation." dnewbart@suntimes.com August 31, 2007 ENGLISH GRAPHIC: Photo: (See microfilm for photo description).

; Photo: Stephen Rickerl, AP; SIU President Glenn Poshard discusses the allegations Wednesday.

; DOCUMENT-TYPE: News Newspaper Copyright 2007 Chicago Sun-Times, Inc.

All Rights Reserved