A University of Cyprus assistant professor is facing charges of plagiarism, in a case that has shocked many within the university’s faculty.
The allegations concern an academic from the Department of Classics and Philosophy, who is suspected of stealing from the work of Alasdair MacIntyre, a well-known philosopher for his contribution to moral and political philosophy.
The affair emerged after it was spotted that a paper submitted by the professor in 1999, bore an uncanny resemblance to MacIntyre’s After Virtue, a book on moral philosophy first published in 1981.
The contentious paper, which subsequently formed part of a book published in Athens, actually references and discusses MacIntyre’s work, with frequent quotes from After Virtue.
But whereas in some parts the paper correctly credits MacIntyre, employing citations in inverted commas, elsewhere even a cursory examination of the text suggests strongly that the author has translated, almost word for word, into Greek, entire sentences from After Virtue without attributing the content to MacIntyre.
Moreover, the suspect passages are interspersed with the “clean” ones to produce a flowing text giving the appearance of an original work. And in a further twist, the author has tagged her own original writing to sentences that appear to have been copied (translated) straight from MacIntyre.
Stavros Zenios, rector of the University of Cyprus, confirmed to the Mail that the assistant professor in question is now being probed by the university’s disciplinary committee.
He said the committee’s verdict would then be passed on to the Senate for ratification. The accused has the right of appeal.
Possible sanctions range from a reprimand, withholding of salary, to dismissal. A reprimand does not necessarily entail loss of promotion, Zenios said.
“But we have to keep in mind that everyone is innocent until proven guilty,” he cautioned.
He also warned against jumping the gun, since “there is a fine line where plagiarism is suspected, since academics often build upon each other’s work.”
The assistant professor in question is up for promotion next month, and Zenios said he has notified the university’s promotions committee of the investigation.
“If there is truth to the allegation, then it’s a sad event, for any university. But these are isolated incidents,” offered Zenios, adding that he could not recall a similar case, at least not under his watch.
But a source knowledgeable about the affair told the Mail that it would be in the university’s “best interests” to crack down on such phenomena.
“Professors are supposed to lead by example,” the source said. “It’s drummed into students that plagiarism is an extremely serious offense, one that can get them suspended or expelled. Now imagine what it means for an educator to be caught doing this.”
The source said that cases of dishonest or inappropriate conduct were often “heard” in academia in Cyprus and Greece, but that usually they tended to be covered up.
In one famous example a decade ago, a professor at the same university was accused of sexual harassment of his students. The man in question was later cleared of the charges and suffered no consequences.
“Let’s hope that the disciplinary committee has since matured enough to treat matters such as these with greater seriousness,” the source commented.
In the United States, where a strict code of conduct prevails, proven plagiarism can be career-ending. As a first step, the academic is sacked immediately, and is subsequently “blacklisted” by the university, which promptly informs other colleges of the offense.
Although it is next to impossible to pin down the extent of plagiarism in academia, sociologist Nicos Peristianis of the University of Nicosia conjectured that the phenomenon has grown more widespread in recent years, with the Internet being the main culprit.
“It’s so easy for someone to search the Web and copy-paste a passage and then pass it off as your own. Before the Internet, where material was available in print only, it was not especially difficult to identify the source or author, as there were a finite number in any given discipline. Not anymore.”
But universities are not sitting idle. Places such as UC Berkeley have developed software to detect plagiarism. Complex algorithms analyze sentence structure and can discover whether a text has been “stolen” even if the offender has tried to disguise their cheating by shifting words around.
In the table below, left column, is an excerpt from the Cypriot professor’s paper; on the right, the passage from MacIntyre’s After Virtue.
The use of quotation marks (see text in bold) indicates that the author is indeed aware of their proper usage, which may suggest that she has knowingly avoided quotation marks elsewhere. Whereas half a page earlier, the author had correctly included the footnote “After Virtue, p.50”, she does not do so here.
In the left column, enclosed within parentheses, is the professor’s undisputed original writing. The rest of the text is believed to be “suspicious.”
What is plagiarism?
According to the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, to “plagiarize” means: to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one’s own; to use (another’s production) without crediting the source; to commit literary theft; and to present as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source.
In other words, plagiarism is an act of fraud. It involves both stealing someone else’s work and lying about it afterward.
All of the following are considered plagiarism: turning in someone else’s work as your own; copying words or ideas from someone else without giving credit; failing to put a quotation in quotation marks; giving incorrect information about the source of a quotation; changing words but copying the sentence structure of a source without giving credit; copying so many words or ideas from a source that it makes up the majority of your work, whether you give credit or not.
