Monica Crowley, picked to be a top national security communications aide in the incoming administration, plagiarized large portions of her PhD thesis at Columbia. http://money.cnn.com/interactive/news/kfile-monica-crowley-dissertation-plagiarism/
She makes a practice of dishonesty; she also plagiarized extensively in her books and columns.
I don’t want to get into the political aspect of this sordid tale of academic dishonesty. I have a different question. How did her academic advisor not catch this? This wasn’t one or two sections.; it was wholesale stenography. Someone who repeatedly read her “work,” as her advisor should have done, should have noticed the lack of a unified voice, and should also have been familiar with the works she stole from. How did she get away with this academic dishonesty on such a major scale?
Columbia, very properly in my view, says, “The University’s process for addressing concerns raised about University research preserves the confidentiality of any review, and even the fact of a review’s existence is confidential while it is underway.” I’m betting Crowley will be stripped of her degree soon.
One of the consequences of today’s instant news environment is that there is now the expectation of instant action, even if a proper investigation of the matter needs more time. Also, existing privacy and confidentiality policies make others suspicious and assume the worst, even if there is a good reason for them.
They don’t have to say they will strip the degree of her just that if true, they will look into it. That they can say instantly. Thay are not doing that. Looks dodgy to me.
I’m surprised the PI didn’t catch it. DH was reviewing a grant recently. He was so annoyed by the generic tone of how they were doing the statistical analysis he googled a chunk of it. Turned out it had been lifted wholesale from the web. Needless to say he gave it a bad review and also flagged it.
I’d imagine they’ll strip her degree once they go through the official process - whatever it is.
If Columbia is looking into this, as I hope they are, they are perfectly right in not talking about it. Unlike certain other malefactors I can think of, Columbia very properly doesn’t publicize investigations, realizing that the person being investigated may be innocent and should not be smeared with suspicions that may turn out to be baseless.
Crowley is guilty, guilty, guilty and should lose her unearned degree. But other people Columbia may investigate are innocent. We don’t need to know about investigations that uncover nothing.
mathmom, Crowley has a PhD in International Relations. I don’t think there are Principal Investigators in International Relations theses.
Speaking for myself, I would indeed be delighted if more people who stole their PhD theses were exposed and stripped of their degree. Crowley didn’t plagiarize two or three sentences. Rather, she plagiarized huge chunks of her thesis. This is not original work with a small mistake. It is theft.
I heard that Harvard did to a few undergrads even a decade or more out of undergrad when they later found substantial evidence of plagiarism/cheating in work done towards their undergrad degree.
Universities do reserve the right to rescind degrees in cases of cheating/plagiarism or fraud related to academic work in pursuing the degree or even finding evidence of fraud during the application process*.
Read somewhere that some universities revoked degrees after the possessors were found to have been pursuing them under false names because they were revealed as foreign spies after being arrested.
This reminds me of the case of Chris Spence, former director of the Toronto Board of Education. He was found to have plagiarized in a newspaper piece he wrote 4 years ago. Subsequently, it was found that he had plagiarized many speeches and articles. He is alleged to have plagiarized portions of his PhD thesis as well. The University of Toronto is still investigating that plagiarism and will have the hearing next month, almost 4 years after the allegations surfaced. https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2016/12/19/chris-spence-former-tdsb-education-director-stripped-of-teaching-licence.html
As noted by CF originally, this should be a three step process. First the university should into whether plagiarism occurred. If there was an unacceptable level of plagiarism, the degree should be revoked. But the third step is that the thesis adviser should be reviewed also. If plagiarism is truly egregious the adviser should be disciplined also.
This is just bizarre to me. Granted, I am in a small department where people are pretty close to their advisors. My advisor would know within a few sentences if something wasn’t genuinely mine.
I hope she’s stripped of her degree. It has nothing to do with politics and everything to do with the fact that I believe passing someone else’s hard work off as your own is as slimey as it gets.
Maybe we’ll start having to turn in our dissertation chapters through plagiarism checkers like we make our undergrads do. I’m for that.
The part of Columbia that employs Dr. Oz (New York-Presbyterian Hospital / Columbia University Medical Center and Columbia University College of Physicians & Surgeons) is only marginally related to the part of Columbia University that grants PhDs in International relations. Theoretically, Lee Bollinger, president of the university, is the top administrator of all facets of the university, including the medical center and medical school. But NYP has a CEO and the CUMC campus has its own chief executive, who is also the head of the medical school. In reality, Lee Bollinger would have little to no influence over Dr. Oz.
I wonder how technology contributes to plagiarism. On the one hand, you can find (and lift) anything on the Internet these days; on the other hand, it’s a lot easier now to find plagiarized content, and a lot more media consumers will hear about the transgressions.
Was there more or less plagiarism before the Internet age? I doubt that human nature has changed that much…