Thursday, March 05, 2009

Higher education and its methods

6 comments:

Tecumseh said...

Over the course of about a year, starting in December 2004, he wrote letters — to the accreditors, to the chairman of the State Board of Regents, to the chairman of the university's Board of Trustees, to the university's president, even to the governor. He sent an e-mail message to a professor whose textbook had been copied. He wrote the dean of the libraries and cornered circulation librarians about the outrage on the shelves. He spoke out against rampant plagiarism before a graduate-student senate meeting. No one seemed to listen.

Gee. What a place. Outrageous.

Mr roT said...

Yes, impressive. I wonder how common it is. You remember those papers you asked me to referee that looked like their authors didn't quite understand their subject matter?

Tecumseh said...

Yep. But this is much worse than that. Things are falling apart. Think Pitcairn.

Mr roT said...

Well, totally think Pitcairn, but those guys with those weird papers have moved over here. Any time one gets held up by the INS it's called a national disgrace!

My Frontier Thesis said...

Good story, Rot. I forwarded this along to some old profs (they may hate me even more, now).

My Frontier Thesis said...

And also I've been thinking about this more, setting up the question like this: a chair trying to pull a department together loses sight (or time) of properly checking graduate theses? Not an excuse for the chair, but perhaps an explanation. And then there's the old story about certain profs wanting to churn out legions of disciples that think exactly like their mentors... Plagiarists suck, no matter what country they hail from. Or maybe they are just taking the plagiarist lead from politicians.