Panel says SIU chief shouldn't lose his job

CARBONDALE -- The 1984 doctoral dissertation of Southern Illinois University's president included "inadvertent or unintended" plagiarism that can be easily remedied without costing him his job, a review panel said Thursday.

Glenn Poshard, at times choking back tears, welcomed the findings by the seven-member panel as resolution of plagiarism claims that have dogged him for weeks and prompted unsuccessful calls by some for his ouster.

"I feel a sense of relief that this is finally coming to a close," Poshard, a former five-term congressman and one-time Democratic candidate for Illinois governor, told reporters.

The university's board of trustees -- ardent backers of Poshard throughout the flap over his graduate work decades ago -- agreed that Poshard would stay put.

"Dr. Poshard is a man of great personal integrity and he will remain our president with full board support," said Roger Tedrick, the board's chairman. "His energy, passion and commitment to this university is unsurpassed, (and) he continues to be the right man to lead the SIU system" of roughly 35,000 students.

Under his five-year contract, Poshard could have been fired if the trustees found that his conduct constituted "moral turpitude, or that would tend to bring public disrespect, contempt or ridicule upon the university."

Siding with Poshard's insistence that he made "honest mistakes," the review panel of members of key faculty constituency groups at the Carbondale school found that many problems with his dissertation reflected citation styles back then.

"While the (citation) style was agreed to between Dr. Poshard and his dissertation committee at that time, it would not be recommended today," said Ramanarayanan Viswanathan, the school's Faculty Senate president who headed the panel created by the chancellor, Fernando Trevino.

The issue "must be understood in its historical context," according to the panel's report.

"Our examination of some theses and dissertations completed in Dr. Poshard's department in the same general time period, found that the citation style he used appears to have been commonly accepted by different dissertation committees in his college," the report read.

The panel found similar use of citations -- or lack thereof -- in other dissertations of Poshard's contemporaries.

The group recommended that Poshard publicly recognize the dissertation's incomplete citations and correct them using current standards, along with a public mea culpa that Poshard delivered Thursday.

"Even though the review committee says these mistakes were unintentional and inadvertent, they are my mistakes. And I take full responsibility for them," he said.

The plagiarism allegations surfaced Aug. 30 when SIU's student newspaper, The Daily Egyptian, reported that at least 30 sections in Poshard's 111-page doctoral dissertation were not attributed to their original sources or put in quotation marks to show they weren't Poshard's writing.

On Sept. 10, The Chronicle of Higher Education also reported Poshard's master's thesis contained sentences found nearly verbatim in sources published earlier, without attribution.

The panel focused the vast majority of its attention on the dissertation, with only a few minor questions on the master's thesis, Viswanathan said.

Still, Tedrick, the rest of the trustees and Poshard pledged to draft a comprehensive, thorough plagiarism policy that Tedrick hopes will become a model elsewhere across the country.

A Southern Illinois University panel tapped by the Carbondale school's chancellor to resolve claims university President Glenn Poshard plagiarized parts of his 1984 doctoral dissertation found he committed "inadvertent" or "unintentional" plagiarism. Among its recommendations:

• That Poshard's dissertation be withdrawn from the school's library and from its microfilms and be replaced with a copy corrected by Poshard.

• That Poshard publicly accept responsibility for errors and mistakes. Poshard did so Thursday.

• That Poshard's statement offer "strong support" for an educational effort to strengthen awareness of and conformity to accepted citation practices. Poshard and the university's board of trustees did so Thursday.