Chicago State University's interim provost earned her Ph.D. after submitting a dissertation riddled with passages lifted from other sources.
Sometimes the original author is credited, though not precisely; sometimes not. Sentences and paragraphs from elsewhere appear verbatim, or almost verbatim, without quotation marks.
Is that plagiarism? Yes. We reached that conclusion after consulting (1) the academic integrity policy at the University of Illinois at Chicago, which awarded Angela Henderson a doctorate in nursing in August, and (2) a dictionary.
But we're having flashbacks to 2007, when a faculty review committee at Southern Illinois University shrugged off a mountain of similar indiscretions by its president, Glenn Poshard. Reporters at the student newspaper, the Daily Egyptian, found at least 30 cribbed passages in Poshard's 1984 doctoral thesis. His apologists on the committee called them "infelicities in attribution."
SIU's board of trustees decided Poshard had committed "inadvertent plagiarism," an oxymoron if ever there was one. Instead of firing him, they allowed him a do-over.
In the process, the trustees undermined the value of every degree ever awarded by SIU.
That sort of thing is doubtless on the mind of UIC Graduate College Dean Karen Colley, who is expected to act soon on a confidential recommendation from a faculty committee. The committee reviewed Henderson's dissertation after Chicago State history professor Robert Bionaz reported the unattributed passages.
Bionaz is a frequent contributor to a faculty blog that has been scathingly critical of the administration at "Crony State University." Some of his posts accuse Henderson of inflating her resume and note her close ties to Chicago State President Wayne Watson, who served on the committee that approved her thesis.
Henderson was vice president for enrollment for two years before taking over as interim provost, the university's senior academic post, last July.
These days it's easy to lift someone else's work, accidentally or on purpose, through the miracle of cut and paste. But it's also easy to get caught, thanks to plagiarism-detection software. Bionaz ran Henderson's thesis through one such program, which flagged the similarities.
Tribune reporter Jodi S. Cohen ran a similar check and asked three independent experts to review the paper.
"It is not sloppiness here or there, or plagiarism here or there, it is quite often," said Tricia Bertram Gallant, editor of a book on academic ethics. "It is clear that this work is problematic enough that it needs to be looked at and perhaps withdrawn."
Teddi Fishman, director of the International Center for Academic Integrity at Clemson University, said the examples ranged from "really sloppy or poor citation" to "quite problematic."
Daniel Wueste, director of the Rutland Institute for Ethics, also at Clemson, noted "significant problems" that suggest Henderson lacks "a full and complete understanding of academic protocols and scholarly expectations."
"That is a problem if that person is provost of a university," Wueste said. Exactly.
For UIC, the question is whether its doctoral students are held to the same standards as the average high school sophomore.
For Chicago State, there's a bigger question: Do those academic standards apply to the person whose job is to enforce them?