A PhD supervisor at Charles Darwin University has been found to have ripped off his own students’ work and submitted it as his own. There are so many layers to this story it feels like one big academic lasagne.
According to an email obtained by the ABC, the uni’s vice-chancellor Scott Bowman was aware of a complaint made by two students in 2021 that alleged their professor had copy/pasted their ideas.
The two students were in the middle of completing their PhDs in the social sciences when the professor published their work as his own in “some journal articles, and maybe in some book chapters as well”.
The audacity!
I’m not sure about you but my entire university degree was filled with professors telling me how important it was not to plagiarise other people’s writing.
Or, at the very least, if you’re going to copy it, be clever about it…
To complicate matters even further, the academic in question has since passed away, so he definitely won’t be facing any repercussions for his actions, nor will either of the students be given any sort of apology.
When the students first raised the issue, an internal investigation was set up by Charles Darwin University which didn’t properly deal with the matter in a sufficient or timely enough manner.
“There was quite a bit of confusion … really, I made some mistakes,” Bowman admitted.
The investigation ended up finding in favour of the professor, a decision which the students appealed.
An independent panel later found plagiarism has indeed occurred and noted that “errors had been made in the administration of the [initial] investigation,” according to Bowman.
Apparently, this sort of thing isn’t even that unusual.
Another Charles Darwin University professor interviewed by the national broadcaster on the topic, Rolf Gerritsen, said that “there’s a growing practice of academics taking credit for their students’ work, and there are fine lines that are often crossed”.
Thank GOD all my uni essays were too shit for any of my professors to want to copy them.
Accidental slay by me.
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