Hobart President Vincent resigns on Friday, April 13, 2018 after plagiarism charges

President Vincent at Hobart has resigned. Previously, IPBiz had discussed accusations against Vincent of plagiarism in his Ph.D. thesis:
Anonymous accuser asserts copying in doctoral thesis of Gregory J. Vincent

The New York Post/AP noted on 14 April 2018:



Hobart and William Smith Colleges announced Friday that Gregory Vincent has resigned as president effective immediately.


The Finger Lakes Times gave some background on plagiarism:



And by a college president? It’s exponentially worse.

The 1983 HWS graduate took over as president in July 2017 after serving most recently as a law professor and vice president at the University of Texas at Austin.

It was a sweet homecoming to Geneva for Vincent to be named the first HWS graduate and first African-American to be president of the Colleges.

Besides his HWS bachelor’s degree, Vincent earned a law degree from Ohio State and an education doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania. The dissertation for that EdD is at the center of the HWS trustees’ plagiarism investigation.



Students at the campus newspaper (Herald) provided some further detail, as given in the FL Times article:


But the students landed a big journalistic fish by getting Vincent to explain publicly what he believes might have happened.

“As my dissertation advisor recently confirmed, I had to change the citation style within a very short period of time after my committee approved the dissertation, which led to inadvertent errors in how some of the work was quoted and paraphrased,” Vincent told The Herald. “I deeply regret the extent to which this has caused confusion or misled anyone. I eagerly await the findings of the investigation.”

Anyone who ever dipped their toe into the murky waters of graduate-level academic writing knows citations and references can be logistical nightmares, requiring mind-numbing attention to detail to avoid plagiarism as well as the confusion Vincent cites.



Article in Finger Lakes Times on 13 April 2018. The plagiarism thicket at HWS