You forgot to include the UNC athlete's defenses: "Everyone else is doing it". "My tutor wrote this paper and they said it was ok". "The fifth grader I copied it from said they didn't want to be citied". "No one is going to grade it anyways, so big deal". "What paper? I didn't know I took that class, what? I made an A. Must have been a good paper".

They're no Jordan Vanderberg.

http://deadspin.com/5586930...

At least we can assume he wrote that, as opposed to a tutor or maybe just plagiarizing something found on the web.

You mean this same paper in Mary Willingham's hand from OTL, which she admitted came off HER computer, and which follows the same plagiarism "style" of Mary?

http://dy.snimg.com/image-s...

Even she had to retract her assertion that this was a final paper by a student athlete for a course that received an A-. Her fraud has been so complete as to make idiots of otherwise reasonable people.

If it was McAdoo's paper, he was punished. Now it's Mary's turn.

How long have you been working for the UNCCHeat PR firm, Liam? Either that or you live in a make-believe fairy tale where athletes graduate without knowing how to read and write.

One doesn’t need to be mentally challenged to plagiarize. One can be a brilliant member of the clergy and still plagiarize too: Reverend Martin Luther King.

Vanderberg and Willingham are no Rev. King, not even close, of course, but they all do have something in common besides being human, etc.

and, yet, you have no issues with the widespread academic fraud that has stained UNCCHeat? Poor writing style and overlooked citations in a thesis are pitiful defense when one considers, if they are ethical and honest, the immense corruption that has already been uncovered at UNCCHeat.

He was punished. The team also received a one-year bowl ban. Do you have a point to make about Mary Willingham?

He being? Erik Highsmith? Rashad McCants? Julius Peppers? Brandon Bishop?

I was just adding to the list of things plagiarists say, which seemed to be the point of this post. I'm still wondering about Highsmith's 100% copy and past job from a 5th grader. Carolina football players are not smarter than a 5th grader! LOL!

Perhaps you have trouble distinguishing an 18-22 year-old college student plagiarizing from a middle-aged grad student plagiarizing the very thesis she used to support her cause.

The team did not receive a bowl ban because of that plagiarism alone. 9 (NINE) major violations and UNC got off light. The plagiarism was a very small part of the punishment. UNC should have gotten Loss Of Institutional Control. (The grownups in Chapel Hill lost control of their institution to the sports boosters and athletic department).

"The fifth grader I copied it from said they didn't want to be citied" - LOL!

Quick response to Mary Willingham's admission, let me guess where you went to University...oooh, quick LinkedIn search shows UNC. I'm shocked.

She attended UNCG.

Are you dense? "You" = the author of this piece, how was the Editor in Chief of the Daily Tar Heel.

What an embarrassment for anyone, especially those in the media like Dan Kane (N&O), Paul Barrett (BusinessWeek) and Sara Ganim (CNN), who ran their Mary Willingham stories without vetting her. She lied on her IRB application, fabricated numbers, manufactured statistics, displayed a confusion between LD/ADD and reading levels, refused to release her methodology (we now know why), and - now- has been shown to have committed plagiarism in the master's thesis from which originated (she says) her complaints about academic misconduct. That the academic misconduct was with her all along is a plot-twist finally worthy of the big screen treatment she once thought she deserved.

All of which does nothing to change the fact that UNC has, for the past 20 years, utilized a system of fake courses that require no class time and no real academic work to keep their star revenue athletes eligible.

The Martin Report showed that claim to be just what it is, a rival fan's wet dream. The Wainstein report will finally put that lie to rest.

It's interesting watching the Pack Pride morons going through the stages of grief online. Remember when you denied this was plagiarism at all over the weekend?

Kübler-Ross model:

1. Denial
2. Anger
3. Bargaining
4. Depression
5. Acceptance

You're at bargaining already. Get some exercise and eat well to get through step 4 okay.

Liam, smear tactics and personal speculation might accomplish things where you're from, but where I live, conclusions are based on data. The data overwhelmingly supports academic fraud to keep athletes on the playing field.
"In God we trust, all others bring data". Sir, you are not God; please bless us with your data.
Before starting, please recognize one universal truth; if the findings of a report are redacted, the report no longer a valid source. Again, not sure where you reside, but this would be true even in fairy land.

Did you seriously just use the Martin Report as proof of anything? Do you tour? You must have quite a few of these jokes to keep the crowd rolling in the aisles!

So the Martin report was so thorough and fact filled that you are now doing another "independent" investigation... what will this one be number 6 or 7?. It would be easier to admit the truth of your cheating than to keep having to pay for a PR firm and fake investigations to try and whitewash your past.

Wow, the UNC boosters are really in full blowback mode, aren't they?

The farce is strong with Liam! LOL! You UNC-CHeater fans are so desperate to preserve the status quo that you would use this as evidence that your ignorant athletes weren't steered into fraudulent courses? So Willingham didn't give credit for several passages in her thesis. Somehow, that is your salvation? She is still a trained and experienced teacher. She certainly knows how to read and write, and is capable of recognizing a significant deficiency of those academic skills in others.

Poor cheaters! You all must be crying in your pillows every night with the thought that your cheating school might be forced to play by the same rules as most other programs....so sad. But dry those tears. There are powerful forces at work with the task of preserving the corruption that had gone unnoticed and unchallenged for many decades. You all just might get away with this yet!!!

Liam Ottway is another one of a large group of folks who only post about Mary Willingham. Creepy.

That's got to be a new record for getting wolpfack spittle in the comments section of an article.
Here we are, years later, and we're still agonizing over a professor that taught lecture courses as independent study and used a soft curve. No evidence of steering. No evidence of special treatment for athletes. The only source - who consistently refused to provide any verifiable specifics - is exposed as an academic fraud.

what color is the sky in your world? You defend the biggest ring of academic corruption ever uncovered in NCAA history and choose to defame the one person who has had the courage to stand up to your big dirty machine? I envision the Tiananmen Square protester that stopped the tank. The Chinese army had more compassion than the UNCCHeat thugs.

There is so much evidence. You won't see it but it has been seen.

You are completely dishonest, "Jon". Those of you who aren't familiar with this UNC academic scandal just need to know that UNC admitted about 200 "academic exceptions" (mostly football and basketball) over the time that the fraud professor gave them nearly 100% A's and B's for virtually nothing. Those A's and B's offset the D's and F's the athletes got in actual classes so that they maintained a requisite C average, thus staying eligible to play. Yet, UNC expects us to believe that athletics had nothing to do with it because, (get this) they added some non-athletes in the classes to try to cover up what they were doing.

Furthermore, numerous emails obtained by the News & Observer indicate that there certainly was steering. It is exactly what it looks to be, as David Ridpath said: "The worst academic scandal in the history of college sports".

All that is lacking is for the higher-ups at UNC to admit to the obvious. Willingham's wrongdoings, whatever they are, have nothing to do with the fact that UNC's athletic department has defrauded many others for many years for many tainted $millions of ill-gotten gains.

Search "Dan Kane".

If you have evidence of the content of those classes, let's see it.
With respect to those emails, I have seen nothing more nefarious than support staff asking whether or not classes would be conducted in upcoming semesters. It is unsurprising that those folks would be looking for classes with the flexibility to accommodate an athlete's schedule, and other emails establish that Dr. Nyang'oro had a reputation for providing that kind of flexibility for all manner of non-traditional studuents.

There is no correspondence about the content of those classes, for good reason - professors do not take kindly to tutors questioning their pedagogy.

Of course, all of this was already known for some time before Ms. Willingham made her allegations - first regarding the academic ability of student-athletes and their literacy levels, and then about the relationship between athletic support and Dr. Nyang'oro. She never released her findings about literacy, even in the face of an external review that dismissed her findings. She similarly never provided verifiable information to corroborate her allegations about athletics' role in Dr. Nyang'oro's academic scandal.

Since she has staked the resurrection of this scandal solely on her reputation, your argument that her wrongdoings are irrelevant is disingenuous. And her wrongdoings are well documented and multifaceted: FERPA and HIPAA violations, fraud against the IRB, plagiarism and fraud in obtaining her masters degree.

In sum, I am perfectly comfortable with the summary of events in my original post. If you had some evidence to bring to bear to disrupt that summary, I expect you would have done so. Instead, like Mary, you are happy to rely on conjecture and hyperbole to condemn UNC. That just isn't good enough.

Silly little pirate with a powder blue sweater tied around his waist. Amazing you get a side gig with CHE and the best you can do is attack someone who dares calls out your fabled Carolina Way. Duke is kicking your ass on the basketball court and recruiting; all you swishies see is the impact on your basketball wins and not the travesty perpetuated by UNC cheating to sell merchandise. Here's an idea for your next piece: Roy Williams is the highest paid public employee in the state of NC. On camera one day he says he's proud of the work his players do and is on top of it 24/7, then he claims the university told him to stay away from the professors and not be involved in any way with his player's academics...so which is it? Keep up the high pitched barking and nipping at ankles. Go back to writing your blog in the corner of Caribou Coffee and pretend you're a grown up for a while and try to resist kissing Bradley Bethel on the mouth in public until you're ready to tell your parents.

And the best person you could come up with to attack the "Carolina Way" is someone who needs to retake freshman comp. Congrats.

well, we certainly can't ask a UNCCHeat athlete to read or write anything, can we?! I am not certain that any UNCCHeat student is qualified to judge another's academic credentials. How many AFAM courses did you get credit for taking, mfer?

Now with Duke fan spittle, high school level personal attacks, and revisionist history of the 2013-2014 NCAA basketball season!
I think we all appreciate being reminded that it isn't just the aggie fans that are frothing anti-socials.

I'm surprised no one yet has tried "GMTA! LOL!"

If someone reading this does decide to use it, I guess it's pointless to ask I get attribution for the idea.

yawn...

As I recall, Goodwin too used the "research assistants" defense. I ask: what historian copies-word for-word notes by any research assistant that are not quotations? (that's why I tell my assistants to transcribe things and always use quote marks even though everything they give me is essentially a quote.) I only send them to primary sources. I handle all secondary sources personally.
And then there was the historian a few years back (I mercifully forget his name) who stole the intellectual structure of not one but two different books, rather than the exact words. Fortunately university presses caught onto him after the first and by word of mouth among them essentially prevented publication of the second, as I understand it. He was denied tenure after the first instance surfaced and left academe, thank goodness.

“Whatever I did, I did, and, you know, whatever." Impenetrable assertion; almost a Zen koan. I guess it takes a "literacy specialist" to craft a sentence like that.

Or the Terry Deacon defense "it was subliminal influence" regarding works that somehow his PhD student knew to cite but Deacon felt not worthy of mention. Or the Yaneer Bar-Yam offense "“The range of topics discussed in this text does not allow for a comprehensive bibliography.” (in a book of more than 800 pages)

I can understand many of the comments in response to the responses of the famous and not-so-famous plagiarists. As an academic in my 25th year at a Doctoral I university, I would have been equally surprised up to five years ago. However, not so today.

In 2009, I discovered that a junior colleague had extensively plagiarized her doctoral dissertation. I produced a detailed document providing evidence of the plagiarism and sent it off to the Ivy League university that awarded the doctoral degree. Her supervisor is an internationally known scholar in her discipline.

I followed up every few months resulting in an interesting set of back and forth letters in which the university attempted to explain why it was taking so long to handle an extensively documented plagiarism allegation. [The university handbook indicates a timeline of about 2 months at most.]

At the end of 18 months (late 2010), I received a letter indicating that an investigation had indeed verified that plagiarism had occurred and unspecified sanctions were being put into place.

Last year (2013), it occurred to me to check if any changes had been made to the dissertation in Dissertation Abstracts International database. To my great surprise (and I do mean my _great_ surprise), I found that the dissertation had been extensively altered and the "revised' dissertation had replaced the original dissertation in DAI. No notation was made to indicate that significant changes had been made (e.g. one entire chapter was deleted and replaced with a completely different chapter). DAI specifically indicates on the cover page of each dissertation in its database that any changes made to a dissertation will be noted. Not so in this case. The current dissertation in the DAI database explicitly states that the dissertation was completed in 2003. This is not true. The plagiarized 2003 dissertation has been replaced in DAI with an extensively altered dissertation. The switch was most likely performed in 2010. No notations have been made to alert readers to this switch and all identifying information (UMI number, year of completion as 2003) are unchanged.

Why did ProQuest/DAI not follow its own guidelines? Did the university ask ProQuest/DAI to do so?

One thing for sure, I am probably one of few people who has two very different versions of the same doctoral dissertation that have the same UMI number in the ProQuest/DAI database. Not surprisingly, requests to the university to provide a copy of the dissertation through interlibrary loan (a normal request in academic life) are met with a refusal. [Which copy does the university library have? The plagiarized 2003 version? The extensively altered 2010 version? Both?]

This could be an interesting project for an enterprising investigative journalist. A cursory review of the list of responses in the piece above reveals a well hidden pattern in higher education: Only when the press reports on these issues are universities likely to take any action.

Let's stop this circular, interminable argumentation so typical of academics. Plagiarism is outright theft and should be punished with humiliating public exposure, expulsion, and denial of professional re-entry.

Theft of what exactly? Where is the consensual law that defines it precisely and distinguishes it from fair use? How is society harmed by plagiarism? Under what circumstances? What democratic due processes is in place that allows a fair hearing for those who are accused of it? These are the kinds of inconvenient, but important clarifying questions that academics ask. Someone has to.

Open your eyes. The rules regarding plagiary are well established in federal regulations and university ethics codes, not to mention copyright law.

Nonsense. It is entirely possible for accidental plagiarisms to occur, as in the cryptamnesia phenomenon, a trick of the mind, which should be dealt with as a hazard of creative work and not as a moral failing.

http://ipbiz.blogspot.com/2...

How about Professors who teach the same courses over and over for years, and plagiarize their students to produce "research" and "publication"? It is very common. Students are well aware of it.

Sometimes integrity gets sacrificed by choice and sometimes by accident. The worst case of lost integrity is failure to admit and correct the failure(s). Partial admittance is nothing more than further loss of integrity. The ultimate sacrifice of integrity is the cover-up and history has shown the lessons of such.

I rate institutional loss of integrity at the top of my list as that is what harms the greatest number of people. I have never understood how a person continues to live with a cover up.

Wondering how these examples correlate with the Leahy-Smith AIA "first to file" rather than "first to invent" criteria, the former used just recently in the US after some 200+ years of honoring invention conception...

Within all this discussion of plagiarism I don't see a discussion of where in the publication it took place. While obviously all works by others should be acknowledged, I think it is a more minor offense if quotation marks or a citations are omitted, accidentally or otherwise from the literature review portion of a thesis, dissertation or article, than if they are omitted from the portion of the writing that is supposed to be original in terms of data, findings or conclusions.

The author forgot to include Ward Churchill, who had twelve different excuses for his plagiary: http://bit.ly/1pXGhuA

I caught one of my students in an obvious case of plagiarism: his source was on the reading list for the course. His excuse: "It isn't my fault, because my roommate wrote the paper for me."

To follow up on my prior post here and some of the sad rationalizations it elicited: I have lectured several times on the twin sins of plagiarism and fabrication in ostensibly nonfiction writing, and I refuse to budge from my position that both should never be tolerated for any reason, including psychological, pathological, or legal. In my lectures I name names, and my audiences often gasp at some of the prominent ones. My position became exigent when a university student in a course I taught said this to me after I warned him and another student, in the privacy of my office, about their nearly identical term papers: "If you're not cheating, you're not trying." I was speechless.