Plagiarism Charges Against University President Are Irrelevant, Court Says

The Alabama Supreme Court ruled on Friday that plagiarism charges leveled against William Meehan, president of Jacksonville State University, could not be part of a lawsuit filed by R. David Whestone, a biology professor at the Alabama university. Mr. Whetstone’s lawsuit accuses Mr. Meehan of swiping 55,000 plant samples; the plagiarism allegations were included to persuade the court that Mr. Meehan has a history of academic thievery. The court did not say whether it considered the plagiarism accusation valid, only that it was not relevant to the allegedly purloined plant samples. Mr. Whetstone found portions of Mr. Meehan’s 1999 Ph.D. dissertation that were identical to a dissertation published several years earlier. A chart of the similarities has attracted attention on several blogs.