Controversy with dean of medicine at UofA

[metallicat]

I am curious to hear some of your thoughts on this. I admittedly do not have a ton of post secondary schooling, but what I do have, it was drilled into us that plagiarism is very serious. Obviously. Now you have the dean of medicine who has been caught taking material without citing its source during a commencement speech. He should know better, and I think he does, but should there be some sort of punishment over this? Or is this not as serious as some are making it out to be?

http://edmonton.ctv.ca/servlet/an/lo...b=EdmontonHome

The dean of medicine at the University of Alberta is under investigation after he allegedly plagiarized a convocation speech last week.

Dr. Philip Baker delivered an address to graduating medical students on Friday, but some of the graduates recognized the speech as the same one delivered last year by Dr. Atul Gawande to Stanford medical students.

In a letter to students who said the speech showed a lack of respect, Dr. Baker says the original text of the speech was so inspiring he decided to use it as his own.

"I have heard from you following the graduation banquet when the theme (and much of the content) of my speech was similar to that of one given by Dr. Atul Gawande," Dr. Baker writes.

[chemgear]

Given his position it seemed like a pretty dumb thing to do.

Hell, even if he wasn't a Dean of a faculty in the same University, it would be pretty dumb.

[DrJ]

As a representative of the faculty and profession he is rightfully facing huge pressure to resign from his position.

Met him once and he seemed super arrogant.

When I heard this I couldn't believe it. Plagiarism is one of the most serious forms of academic misconduct and if students can get expelled for it, he should resign to maintain the academic integrity of the program.

[jkstuart12]

Imagine how many students have been expelled for plagiarism under his watch. He should be held accountable as they were!

[rj*]

As a U of A alum, this sickens me- all the times professors claimed that plagiarism was the worst sin you could commit, and now a dean pulls a stunt like this- that just isnt right.

[GGG]

When I was a student I sat on tribunals that decided the penalties for Academic Dishonesty. It consisted of a professor in the college, a professor outside the college and a student from the same college as the accused.

We heard the evidence and then metted out punishment which as a minimum meant they would have to repeat the course. If they were lucky the mark they ended of recieving in the class wouldn't put them in jeoprody of being kicked out. Generally for a first offense we would give them 0 on the assignment plus subtract 10 to 20 percent off their final grade.

This means a minimum financial cost of $500 for repeating the class and possibly 10-15K if the student ends up taking an extra year to finish school.

So I think this guy should go through a similar process. Go to a hearing with student and faculty representitives and let them give a punishment. Allow them to have the power to fine him as well.

If I was on the panel I think a 25K fine or donation to a scholorship fund or to student servces for education on plagerism would be reasonable. As well as being required for the next 5 years to to presentations in the college ethics classes on what he did and why he did it and how to prevent ethical lapses in judgement in the future.

If the Dean doesn't agree to the terms I would force him to resign. I assume there is some kind of morality clause in the contract.

I realise that this may sound severe but we were ruthless to students who cheated and should be no less forgiving for a faculty member.

[chemgear]

Oh, almost forgot that they had this on the radio as well this morning. They mentioned that a wrinkle in any formal discipline against the dean comes from the fact that apparently the University did not record the speech/violoation.

Which surprises me actually now that I think about it . . .

[metallicat]

GGG, how often do you think things get resolved between professors and students before they made it to the tribunal?

[GGG]

Originally Posted by oilers_fan

GGG, how often do you think things get resolved between professors and students before they made it to the tribunal?

I would say quite a bit although doing was against U of S policy. Professors were not officially permitted to hand out penalties without going through formal channels. I got to work as a student advocate while I was in school where I walked students through the appeals process and any other academic issues they had. Kind of the other side from sitting on the tribuanls.

In that job I saw quite a few students come in complaining that they were assigned a zero on the assignment by the professor because they were accused of plagerism. Now students then had to decide wether they wanted to fight and risk much more severe punishment then just a zero or just take the zero and sweep it under the rug.

From the numbers of people who visted there I would suspect over half were settled beforehand with students required to either redo work (inadvertant plagerism) or take zeros.

One of the most common types of Academic dishonesty I saw was people handing in the same essay or report for two different classes. One of the rules at the U of S was that course work in each course had to be original and not used in a previous class.

The numbers of students accused was pretty low maybe 5 to 10 a year in a college of 1400 and probably about the same percentages University wide.

[Da_Chief]

Fine him and get him to attend first lecture of Ethics class every semester till he's the dean there and tell his story to the students and what he learned from it.

other option, capital punishment!!!!!!!!!!!!!11

[Phanuthier]

Funny, I actually posted about that speech last year.

http://forum.calgarypuck.com/showthr...light=stanford

It got a lot of attention, it seems like a slip up and not done on purpose. But thats a big no-no in academia, even the slightest big of plagerism gets you in deep crap. A lot of time, academic violation. I'd say the Dean has to resign over this, he's done in academia.

[billybob123]

Plagiarism was horse hooey when I was a grad student TAing. I had cases where it was blatantly obvious the student had copied. Two come to mind:

1) Two students made identical spelling errors throughout a report. I noticed it, reported it to the course coordinator, and she called them in, told them either tell her the truth or they both fail the assignment (worth some pitiful 5% of their grade). Turns out one copied from the other without their knowledge, so only one got "punished".

2) Was TAing a molecular biology lab where we rewrote the lab manual and changed the questions. For years, students had been getting previous years' lab reports, which was at the very least academically dishonest, at worst, was cheating; one student turned in a lab report which had in their discussion section, answers to the previous year's questions. I saw this, immediately gave the student zero, and reported him to the lab coordinator. Lab coordinator told me to mark the lab and give them appropriate marks for the questions (i.e. zero on the discussion only) because it was too difficult and painful to try to prove plagiarism. Sigh. I wanted the student kicked out of the course as a warning to everyone else.

I am sure my graduate alma mater (U of Ottawa) has serious repercussions for plagiarism; but the reality for me was that it wasn't really enforced.

As for the dean, I think this is a big deal over nothing. He should have attributed the source of his material, and what he did was wrong; but this wasn't a graded assignment, this wasn't part of the learning process - this was a commencement speech. The guy has (if I recall) 200+ peer-reviewed publications - all of which show a fairly high level of academic honesty and rigour. I liked the suggestion above that he should give a seminar on academic honesty. Med students sometimes need to be reminded of that.

[burn_this_city]

A university professor acting like a total hypocrite?!? This can't be true.

[valo403]

Originally Posted by GGG

When I was a student I sat on tribunals that decided the penalties for Academic Dishonesty. It consisted of a professor in the college, a professor outside the college and a student from the same college as the accused.

We heard the evidence and then metted out punishment which as a minimum meant they would have to repeat the course. If they were lucky the mark they ended of recieving in the class wouldn't put them in jeoprody of being kicked out. Generally for a first offense we would give them 0 on the assignment plus subtract 10 to 20 percent off their final grade.

This means a minimum financial cost of $500 for repeating the class and possibly 10-15K if the student ends up taking an extra year to finish school.

So I think this guy should go through a similar process. Go to a hearing with student and faculty representitives and let them give a punishment. Allow them to have the power to fine him as well.

If I was on the panel I think a 25K fine or donation to a scholorship fund or to student servces for education on plagerism would be reasonable. As well as being required for the next 5 years to to presentations in the college ethics classes on what he did and why he did it and how to prevent ethical lapses in judgement in the future.

If the Dean doesn't agree to the terms I would force him to resign. I assume there is some kind of morality clause in the contract.

I realise that this may sound severe but we were ruthless to students who cheated and should be no less forgiving for a faculty member.

Seems unlikely that the University would have the power to impose fines of that sort without there being a clause in his contract that allows for it, which I doubt there is.

I think this is being overblown. As the poster above said, this wasn't an academic situation, it was a commencement speech. While it's still a problem that he used someone else's words and passed them off as his own, it's not an 'end of his academic career' type situation IMO. It's the equivalent of stealing jokes to use in a wedding toast. If Carlos Mencia still has a comedy career there's no way this guy shoudl have his career ended over this.

[Sample00]

playing devil's advocate here...

is it possible that the Dean had a speech writer and that the writer plagerized the speech and gave it to the Dean to read.

I suspect a Dean's schedule can be fairly hectic to a point that he may not be able to take the time and write the speech himself.

just saying...

[Slava]

Originally Posted by Phanuthier

Funny, I actually posted about that speech last year.

http://forum.calgarypuck.com/showthr...light=stanford

It got a lot of attention, it seems like a slip up and not done on purpose. But thats a big no-no in academia, even the slightest big of plagerism gets you in deep crap. A lot of time, academic violation. I'd say the Dean has to resign over this, he's done in academia.

Slip-up? I don't know....it's a word for word slip-up using medical terms in the exact same order. Maybe it's a slip in he sense he meant to give credit but forgot, but even that would be hard to believe. If that were true wouldn't he come out immediately and say that though?

[troutman]

He should be placed on double secret probation.

[troutman]

A friend of mine had someone else write a mid-term for her at U of C. She was caught, and expelled for one year. Went to U of A, did one year there, then came back to complete her program at U of C.

I suppose going to EDM for one year was sufficient punishment?

[bizaro86]

Originally Posted by valo403

Seems unlikely that the University would have the power to impose fines of that sort without there being a clause in his contract that allows for it, which I doubt there is.

They could have a discussion where they told him he could try and think of a way to make amends (like this, for example) or he'd be fired with cause. I bet that would work.

[Cecil Terwilliger]

This is kind of absurd. Not because of the big deal being made, the guy deserves it, but because all he had to do is say "I'd like to share with you some words from commencement speech at whereever spoken by guy x originally". And none of this would matter.