Plagiarism

The University of Colorado has dropped two parts of its investigation into Ward L. Churchill, a professor who stirred controversy by comparing the victims of the Sept. 11 attacks to Nazis, but is still determining whether he committed plagiarism, Churchill's lawyer confirmed Tuesday.

As long as there have been students, there have been cheaters. In imperial China, academic dishonesty was so rampant that test administrators searched students for crib sheets, then separated them into isolated cubicles during civil service exams. The punishment for cheating: death. Repercussions today aren't so severe, but academic dishonesty persists--and new technology, from the Internet to personal digital assistants, makes cheating easier than ever.

The editor of a prominent medical journal has apologized to a South Korean fertility scientist for statements the editor made to the Los Angeles Times during an authorship dispute. Dr. Alan DeCherney, editor of Fertility and Sterility, wrote in a May 31 letter to Kwang-Yul Cha that he regretted telling The Times that Cha and his co-authors had potentially committed plagiarism by submitting an article for publication that had previously been published in South Korea.

A Santa Ana law school dean accused of pulling text from an encyclopedia to write an article for the school's journal is a victim of sloppy editing, his attorney said Monday. Tom Borchard, attorney for Winston L. Frost, said the editor reading the story for Trinity Law Review omitted footnotes that would have provided proper attribution in Frost's article on the history of human rights published last year. Law review editors could not be reached for comment.

The dean of a small Christian law school in Santa Ana has been suspended with pay for several weeks while authorities look into allegations that he lifted text from Encyclopaedia Britannica for an article in the school's law journal. The allegations concern an article that Trinity Law School dean Winston L. Frost wrote on the history of human rights for the Trinity Law Review last year. Frost, 43, also works as a part-time arbitrator and judge for the Orange County Superior Court.

Roger Davidson, the 18-year-old self-titled Teen Movie Critic who built a loyal following of fans and movie buffs on his 2-year-old Web site, came to the end of the line when he announced he would be taking an indefinite break from reviewing starting Monday.

A U.S. medical journal will retract an article that set off an international plagiarism dispute but will take no action against the lead author, a prominent South Korean scientist whose Los Angeles institute is in line to receive state funds for stem cell research. The article, published by Kwang-Yul Cha and others in the journal Fertility and Sterility in December 2005, had been published the year before in a Korean journal by a former doctoral student in Cha's lab in South Korea.

A week after dismissing Winston L. Frost as dean of Trinity Law School, officials said Thursday they also intend to fire him from the faculty because he "engaged in plagiarism" for an article in the school's law review. In a tersely worded two-paragraph statement, Trinity International University officials said they will try to remove Frost from the tenured teaching job he has held since 1998. Provost Barry J.

Reports of the death of scholarly ideals, according to the head scholar, were greatly exaggerated. No students wept. No researchers resigned. No faculty breasts were beaten in the eucalyptus-shaded corridors of Stanford. In fact, said Clayborne Carson, director of the project that recently announced evidence of "selectively appropriated passages" in the graduate-school writings of Martin Luther King Jr., the "emotional climate of the project was definitely overdone in the (newspaper) article."

Ward L. Churchill, a University of Colorado professor who gained notoriety for comparing some victims of the Sept. 11 attacks to "little Eichmanns," committed research misconduct and plagiarism in his writings on Native American history, a faculty panel concluded in a report released Tuesday. Churchill's lawyer, David Lane, dismissed the findings as part of an effort to fire the ethnic studies professor for political reasons.