Phillip Baker resigns from deanship at UAlberta over plagiarism

Dr. Phillip Baker resigned as Dean at the University of Alberta over his plagiarism of a speech given by Dr. Atul Gawande at Stanford University.

The Montreal Gazette noted: [University of Alberta President] Samarasekera said the university will continue its investigation of the plagiarism allegations. She would not comment on the independent investigation of Baker's management practices launched earlier this year by the Canadian Association of University Teachers, calling it a separate matter.

Jonathan Bailey, owner of a New Orleans consulting company that deals with issues of plagiarism, said having this kind of thing occur in a graduation speech is more common than one might think.

Bailey is quoted: "Sometimes — especially with these academics — you're asking people who aren't natural speech givers to give talks. So they're not very comfortable with this idea of writing a speech and they see beautiful words written by someone else, and the talk went over extremely well. Maybe they think it's a good idea to copy from that."

One can only wonder about Joe Biden's adoption of the facts of Neil Kinnock's life in Biden's speeches.