Ohio U. Professor Settles Lawsuit Stemming From Plagiarism Scandal

The headline is a little misleading, since it creates the impression that Jay S. Gunasekera had to settle. The article in the Columbus Dispatch provides a rather different image, “in October 2010, the U.S. District Court in Columbus granted his motion for summary judgment and set an April 25th hearing date to determine how much money he should be awarded in damages.” There is no doubt that he won his case regarding the way his hearing had been treated and agreed to settle. If he was simply out to maximize what he could get, it seems more likely that he would have waited until April 25th at which point his legal costs would have been higher. Of course, the questions of defamation related to claims that Gunasekera tolerated plagiarism have yet to be settled.

Those questions are among the most serious issues in academia since they cut to the core of the integrity of the academic process. Moreover plagiarism has a personal dimension in that it is at its heart a violation of the integrity of the body of another person’s work. Yet when there is consent, or proper citations, it becomes something else entirely. This point is often unclear to new students, especially to those who come from cultures where there is a tradition of copying and repeating the words of masters. There is a need for greater training in this regard, just as there is a need for more training in respect for the bodily and personal integrity of others. It is something most professors expect to normally occur early in students’ undergraduate careers. But it seems that it may need reinforcement in graduate orientation programs, just as general cultural sensitivity training in respect for others may need to be reinforced then as well. Hopefully faculty will become more involved in such processes.

It is most notable in countries that follow a Confucian ethic of scholarship. Within that ethic there is no tradition of the private ownership of ideas. Instead it emphasizes the concept of incorporating received knowledge into one’s way of thinking. The idea of generating original scholarship or intellectual property for one’s own personal claim to acclaim or profit is alien to the practice of the scholar’s way of life. This is one of the roots of the public complacency toward software and other “media pirates” that aggravates American corporations operating in many parts of East Asia.