Tuesday, September 25, 2007

SIU plagiarism matter good for legal recruiting?

An article in the SIUDE contains the lines:

Not all students agree that the reputation of the university [SIU] is on the line, though.

Lance Camp, a second year law student from Loda, said he has actually seen an increase in employers seeking students from the law school.

"I think our administration has done a great job to increase SIU's profile, both at the law school and at the university wide level..."


The SIUDE also notes:

Jones and Adams said large portions of plagiarized text tend to be obvious because the style and language change.

"It would be easy to catch since we have the Internet," Adams said.

Adams teaches 100-level English classes and said he uses Turnitin.com to check his students' work, which was not available when Poshard's 1984 dissertation and 1975 master's thesis were written.

"It's hard to see how it's going to play out and what the implications will be," he said. "We live in a time when Brittany Spears and Lindsay Lohan's latest exploits or Paris Hilton's latest stint in jail are seemingly more important than anything else," he said. "It's hard to know how long these issues will last."


IPBiz agrees with the last line. Who remembers the Laurence Tribe plagiarism matter these days? Fewer still recall the matter with the Ph.D. thesis of Martin Luther King at Boston University.

***
A letter to the Southern Illinoisian made the following point:

bugler wrote on Sep 25, 2007 12:50 PM:

" Whether Poshard "is well-educated" is the whole question. Jerianne has a good point, the dissertation section is supposed to be analyzing the work others have done. But the words he is accused of stealing consist of other people's ANALYSIS of the literature. If his accusers are correct, he stole analysis. He is not being accused of stealing original results, he's being accused of stealing his literature/research summary. That would be plagiarism, if true. You can't assert that he's innocent without more information. It is possible to plagiarize in your "Review of the Literature." That's why an investigation is necessary. "


IPBiz previously noted that one Poshard non-quote was NOT in the "Review of the Literature," and that is problematic. Hopefully, the original aspects of the Poshard Ph.D. thesis are NOT in the section on "review of the literature" and SIU could do a Boston University/King defense to the thesis.

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