CARBONDALE Ill.
Seven senior Southern Illinois University faculty members will investigate allegations of plagiarism against the system’s president, the school’s chancellor announced Friday.
The group will review Glenn Poshard’s master’s thesis and doctoral dissertation and “determine the pervasiveness and significance of any source attribution problems that are found to exist,” the school said.
“The members of this group are among the most respected faculty members on our campus,” Chancellor Fernando Trevino said in a statement. “Each is well known for their integrity, their scholarship and their commitment to the academic reputation of this university.”
The members will meet with Poshard to review his use of literature, data and other materials, said Trevino, who will hear the panel’s recommendations, then forward them to the university’s board of trustees Poshard’s boss.
The procedures follow SIU’s policies regarding allegations of academic dishonesty against former students, officials said. Poshard completed both the 1974 master’s thesis and 1984 dissertation at SIU.
Poshard, a former five-term congressman and one-time Democratic candidate for Illinois governor, has said he would not resign, insisting he may have made mistakenly left out some citations but didn’t plagiarize. Poshard spokesman David Gross has said the flap involves “technical disagreements on how attribution and references were cited in style 30 years ago.”
