Mehta sues Ohio University in plagiarism mess

Further to an earlier report on IPBiz, Professor Bhavin V. Mehta filed suit against OU, so we now have a least 3 lawsuits (Gunasekera filed two).

The Athens News reports:

Mehta's suit claims an OU Academic Honesty Oversight Committee, which investigated about 50 theses suspected to contain plagiarized material, found 12 students in the group who had had Mehta as their thesis adviser.

Of these 12, the suit claims, four had theses with identical material because it was their own writings, which they had co-authored and cited in their theses.

The News also stated:

The alleged defamation against Gunasekera and Mehta came from a report authored by two internal investigators, the so-called Meyer/Bloemer report, which found a long history of "rampant and flagrant plagiarism" in the mechanical engineering department.

Though this report did not name Gunasekera or Mehta, their identities were readily ascertainable by their descriptions in the document, the suit says. (In fact, media reports promptly named both men, a fact the suit points out.)

Adding to the alleged defamation, the suit claims, OU Director of Legal Affairs John Burns told reporters in July that Mehta's contract was not renewed because of the plagiarism allegations, and in September, Russ College Dean Dennis Irwin told reporters that Mehta had contributed to a "culture of plagiarism."

The earlier IPBiz post:

http://ipbiz.blogspot.com/2006/09/flipping-filippo-batman-gunasekera.html