SIU president denies he plagiarized dissertation

Glenn Poshard admits he wouldn’t be Southern Illinois University’s president without his 1984 doctorate.\nA day after questions arose over whether Poshard plagiarized parts of his dissertation, he asked for an internal review that might determine if he can keep his job.\n“Would I be president of this university without the Ph.D.? No, I could not be,” Poshard said at a news conference Friday. “This is the second-largest university in this state and one of the great universities in the nation, and there is no way the board of trustees would hire someone here without a Ph.D. to run the university.”\nPoshard rejected the plagiarism claims and insisted he has no plans to step down, but he acknowledged “unintended mistakes” in citations in his thesis and asked for the head of department where he got the degree to review the matter and recommend any actions to the university’s board of trustees.\n“Any decision about my future with the university lies with my bosses, which are the board of trustees,” Poshard said. “That’s as much as I can say about that at this point in time.”\nw soon the Department of Educational Administration and Higher Education would make its recommendations.\nRoger Tedrick, the chairman of SIU’s board, has said the panel learned of questions involving Poshard’s thesis months ago, scrutinized the matter and stands “very comfortable” behind Poshard, a former five-term congressman and one-time Democratic candidate for Illinois governor.\nWhen asked whether he feared possibly being stripped of his degree, Poshard quickly replied, “Absolutely not. I’m not worried about that at all.\n“Whatever the future holds, it holds.”\nPoshard’s comments were his first publicly since the student newspaper at the Carbondale, Ill., school, The Daily Egyptian, reported Thursday that its analysis of Poshard’s 111-page dissertation, obtained from an anonymous source, found at least 30 sections either not attributed to their original sources or not put in quotation marks to show they weren’t Poshard’s writing.\nPoshard said he might have mistakenly left out some citations in the dissertation – with the blessings of his doctoral committee – but he didn’t plagiarize.\n“I did not try to deceive anybody about where it came from,” he said.\nAs part of the internal review, Poshard said he wants the Department of Educational Administration to review the allegations, examine the dissertation and its cited sources and “to advise me on corrections necessary to make this dissertation consistent with the highest academic standards.”\n“When mistakes are made, even though unintentional, they need to be promptly acknowledged and remedied,” Poshard said. “Whatever their judgment is will be acceptable to me.”\nPoshard had planned to meet Friday with faculty and staff constituency groups at the Carbondale school, including the faculty senate’s executive committee. But Poshard said he scrapped those talks to avoid the appearance that wanted to manipulate the review’s outcome.\nPeggy Stockdale, a psychology professor and the faculty senate’s vice president, called the decision “unfortunate.”\n“I certainly hope that he does meet with us soon, the faculty and staff leaders, so we know the whole story,” Stockdale said. “It might be that this is all misunderstood and there’s a perfectly good explanation for it.”\nPoshard’s resignation “would be a very sad day,” Stockdale said.\n“I think Dr. Poshard is a man of great integrity, and I think he will find a way to help the campus move through this in an ethical and fair manner, and hopefully we’ll resolve the issue,” she said.\nThe allegations follow Poshard’s ouster last year of the Carbondale school’s 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. Poshard said Wendler’s failure to be a team player, not the plagiarism questions, cost him his job.\nWendler declined comment to The Associated Press on Friday.\nThree years ago, SIU fired professor Chris Dussold for reportedly plagiarizing his two-page teaching statement.\nAlong the way, both Wendler and the chancellor of SIU’s sister campus in Edwardsville, Ill., just east of St. Louis, apologized last year for what they called unintentional lack of attribution to portions of one public speech they made.