Just Deserts?

Plagiarizing professors face a variety of punishments

Article: Four Academic Plagiarists You've Never Heard Of: How Many More Are Out There? (12/17/2004) Article: A Plagiarized Writer Speaks Out About Her Case Printer friendly E-mail article Subscribe Order reprints

By THOMAS BARTLETT and SCOTT SMALLWOOD

Discovering that someone copied is just the beginning. When a professor is suspected of plagiarizing another scholar's work, the matter usually is assigned to an investigative committee, reports are written, and some sanction may be imposed. Meanwhile, the victim who brought the matter to everyone's attention is often left wondering whether it was worth the hassle.

In a special report in December, The Chronicle reported on several suspected plagiarists: a cultural geographer, a political scientist, a biologist, and two historians. In some of those cases, universities have since concluded investigations and punished the plagiarists. Two have lost their jobs, another has been removed from the classroom. But not every academic plagiarist is shown the door. In one case, for instance, a university committee agreed that plagiarism had occurred but decided that no action was necessary.

Barred From the Classroom

Over a 36-year period, George O. Carney swiped passages from numerous authors without crediting them. In one case, the professor of geography at Oklahoma State University's main campus took a 350-word passage nearly verbatim from a source he never cited. In another paper, he borrowed the structure, language, and most of the footnotes from an article he didn't even mention.

None of that hurt his career. Mr. Carney was made a regents professor at Oklahoma State, a distinction given to faculty members whose scholarship has received national recognition. And his work did receive national attention: Mr. Carney was once referred to as "American geography's leading musicologist."

After The Chronicle reported on Mr. Carney's borrowings, Oklahoma State investigated and came to the conclusion that Mr. Carney was indeed guilty of plagiarism. The university barred him from the classroom and stripped him of his regents title. He did not appeal the decision. In addition, Mr. Carney's book, The Sounds of People and Places, was declared out of print by its publisher, Rowman & Littlefield, because it contains several lengthy passages that Mr. Carney had plagiarized. A secretary in the geography department said the professor was "in the process of retiring."

In an interview last year, Mr. Carney acknowledged that he might have plagiarized from others and said that he felt "professionally embarrassed." However, the Tulsa World later reported that Mr. Carney said he wasn't sure if he had committed plagiarism and called the university's penalties "a little bit harsh."

Out of a Job

For several years, Donald Cuccioletta continued to teach at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh even though another university 60 miles away in Canada had let his contract expire after charges of plagiarism surfaced.

Now the copying has caught up with him.

In 2001 Mr. Cuccioletta edited a book called L'Américanité et les Amériques. In a chapter he wrote for the book, the first few pages appear to be copied from the introduction to a 1964 book, Do the Americas Have a Common History?, by Lewis Hanke, a Columbia University historian.

When another history professor at the University of Quebec discovered the similarities in 2002, Mr. Cuccioletta was not rehired. He had been a part-time lecturer there for 10 years. Nevertheless, he kept working as an adjunct professor of history at Plattsburgh, where he has taught on and off for the past seven years. And in 2004 he was named interim director of the university's new Institute on Quebec Studies.

In the fall, administrators at Plattsburgh learned of the alleged plagiarism from a brief article in Le Devoir, a Montreal newspaper.

A misconduct committee investigated the charges and "basically, his contract was not extended after the fall-2004 semester," says Keith Tyo, executive assistant to Plattsburgh's president. Mr. Cuccioletta was removed as interim director, although he was allowed to continue to teach his courses for the fall. He is now not employed by the university in any capacity, Mr. Tyo says.

"We were surprised by the situation when we learned of it," he says. "But I think we acted appropriately."

Mr. Tyo says the university was also reviewing its procedures and policies regarding academic misconduct -- a review that had been planned before news of Mr. Cuccioletta's borrowings broke.

Attempts to reach Mr. Cuccioletta were unsuccessful. In December he told The Chronicle that he had admitted his mistake, was troubled by it, and chalked it up to confusion caused by writing many articles at one time.

A Hollow Victory

When Dwayne D. Kirk discovered that his paper had been plagiarized, he decided to fight back. The decision was not easy. For one thing, Mr. Kirk is a graduate student and the person who stole his work is a professor. What's more, the professor was his mentor.

Last year Mr. Kirk filed a complaint against Charles J. Arntzen, a professor of plant biology at Arizona State University at Tempe. Mr. Arntzen is a pioneer in the creation of edible vaccines, a former editorial-board member at the journal Science, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He was also appointed by President Bush to the President's Council on Science and Technology in 2001.

About one-third of a book chapter Mr. Arntzen wrote had been published two years earlier in a paper by Mr. Kirk. The professor acknowledged that he "did some cutting and pasting" but said that he was entitled to use Mr. Kirk's work because they were part of the same research team. Mr. Kirk disagreed and said he had complained before Mr. Arntzen's chapter was even published.

The two differ on what happened next. Mr. Arntzen says he contacted the editor of the book after it was published and asked him to add Mr. Kirk's name. Mr. Kirk says he was the first to call the editor and that Mr. Arntzen agreed to make the change only after it came to the editor's attention. The editor of the book, Ciro A. de Quadros, backs up Mr. Kirk's version of events. Eventually Mr. Kirk's name was added to the chapter.

In January Arizona State completed its investigation of the matter and wrote that the evidence "supports a finding of plagiarism," according to a copy of the decision obtained by The Chronicle. However, it went on to say that "much of the work in question arose during a previous collaborative relationship." It appears that no action will be taken by the university against Mr. Arntzen.

That sends a confused message, according to Mark S. Frankel, director of the program on scientific freedom, responsibility, and law at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. "If you find that plagiarism occurred, it seems to me that it warrants some action," Mr. Frankel says. He also worries that the ruling suggests to students that "oh, OK, if I get caught then maybe I can redo the paper and add the footnote that should have been there. And then everything will be OK."

Mr. Kirk, who spent months complaining to Mr. Arntzen and the university before going public, agrees. "From the beginning, it was stressed how serious they were taking this, and this doesn't seem to be a very serious result," he says. "Plagiarism seems to be OK if you can fix it with co-authorship after the fact."

An Arizona State official says it is "a confidential personnel matter."

Says Mr. Kirk: "I'm surprised at how ethics didn't seem that important in the end."

Is It Ever Over?

In early 2004, a Harvard University undergraduate stumbled onto a case of plagiarism while working on his senior-thesis proposal. He noticed that a section of a 1996 book by Neil Winn, a professor at the University of Leeds, in England, was nearly identical to part of a 1992 paper by Steven G. Livingston, an associate professor of political science at Middle Tennessee State University.

The student contacted Mr. Livingston, who was shocked to find five pages of his paper reproduced nearly verbatim in someone else's book. There were only a few telltale changes in the copy -- for instance, some of the words now had British spellings ("crystallize" became "crystallise," for example). He found it all "weird and depressing."

Mr. Livingston contacted the International Studies Association. They told him to contact Blackwell Publishing, the company that produces the journal that published his article. Blackwell sent him back to the association. Everyone was sympathetic but reluctant at first to get involved in the case. But Mr. Livingston pressed on.

He contacted the University of Leeds, which began an investigation. The university later said it had disciplined Mr. Winn; he remains a professor there. In December Mr. Livingston's publisher, Blackwell, sent a letter to the publisher of Mr. Winn's book (Blackwell has declined to release the letter). The issue still has not been resolved, according to Mr. Livingston. (Incidentally, a new book by Mr. Winn, European Intelligence Cooperation Beyond the Nation-State (Sussex Academic Press), is scheduled to be published this year.)

What's the message here? For Mr. Livingston, perhaps it is that fighting a plagiarist can be a draining and time-consuming ordeal. "You never know when you're at the end of it," he says. Even so, the professor says he doesn't regret pressing his case: "Doing nothing -- that would have been worse."