SIU president disputes allegations he plagiarized his 1984 dissertation

~ Glenn Poshard said he might have mistakenly left some citations out of the dissertation.

Southern Illinois University's president, a former congressman and one-time candidate for Illinois governor, is facing allegations that he plagiarized parts of his 1984 doctoral dissertation, according to a published report.

SIU's student newspaper, The Daily Egyptian, reported Thursday that it analyzed Glenn Poshard's 111-page doctoral dissertation, obtained from an anonymous source, and reported that it found at least 30 sections that either were not attributed to their original sources or not put in quotation marks to show they weren't Poshard's writing.

Poshard, a one-time Democratic candidate for governor, said he might have mistakenly left out some citations in the dissertation but didn't plagiarize.

"I could have made a mistake," Poshard told the newspaper. "I'm not saying I didn't."

On Thursday, the chairman of SIU's board said the panel stands behind Poshard.

"We're very comfortable with the situation as is," Roger Tedrick said.

The allegations follow last year's ouster of the university's former chancellor Walter Wendler, who had been accused of lifting sections from a strategic plan for a Texas school where he worked, then using them in SIU's long-range plan. Three years ago, Chris Dussold was fired as an SIU professor in Edwardsville for reportedly plagiarizing his two-page teaching statement.

David Gross, a Poshard spokesman, said Thursday that Poshard's comments to the newspaper would stand, and any public comment from him would come after he had a chance to fully review the assertions.

Tedrick said the issue came out several months ago during an ongoing lawsuit against the university by Dussold. At that time, Tedrick said, the board vetted Poshard's dissertation matter through experts, "and we deemed that it was not plagiarism."

"We have dealt with this in the past, and we are standing behind president Poshard because this just comes as a demand for money in litigation," he said.

The newspaper reported that 14 sections of the dissertation, written in 1984 for Poshard's SIU doctoral degree in administration of higher education, have verbatim texts from other sources without a citation, and 16 sections have verbatim text with a citation but without quotation marks.

"This is not an excuse, and I would never offer it up as an excuse, but at that point in my life, I had a family," Poshard told The Daily Egyptian. "I worked two jobs. I was running for the Illinois State Senate. I was trying to get my dissertation finished."

Poshard was first appointed to the Illinois State Senate two weeks after his dissertation was completed following the death of Sen. Gene Johns. He later served five terms in Congress and ran unsuccessfully for governor in 1998, losing to Republican George Ryan. He subsequently spent four years as vice chancellor at the SIU-Carbondale campus.

Poshard, who was named president of the 35,000-student SIU system in late 2005, said his dissertation committee at SIU approved his method of citing that allowed him to use long sections without quotations.

"No one on my committee said that when you reference and cite something correctly that you have to go up and put quotes around it," he told the newspaper.

Tedrick cast the matter as old news.

"Although we take any allegations of this nature seriously, we believe this has less to do with what happened 24 years ago and more to do with the current litigation" involving Dussold, Tedrick said in a statement later Thursday.

Rob Benford, the former SIU faculty senate president who has butted heads with Poshard over various projects, said The Daily Egyptian pointed out "probably some carelessness" in Poshard's dissertation citations.

But by calling such actions inadvertent, Poshard, Wendler and other SIU administrators accused of plagiarism set poor examples to students "who almost always claim that it wasn't intentional," Benford said.

"What would be better in President Poshard's case is to stand up and say, `I made a mistake, it was wrong and this is not the way we want folks to do their scholarship,"' said Benford, a sociology professor. "I worry about how students will interpret this in terms of their own practices."

Still, he said, the claims against Poshard should not suggest he lacks the moral integrity to remain president.

"I think this would probably be a tragedy at SIU if we lost his talents over this," Benford said. "All the other fine work he does should not be tarnished by this particular mistake."

Marvin Zeman, a math professor and president of the SIU Faculty Association, deferred comment Thursday, saying he planned to convene a meeting of the group's executive committee within days to discuss the "very serious charges."