New Bits and Pieces

So as my distinguished colleague continues to serialize the plagiarism of Crony State’s very own Interim Provost, I sense I have neglected you loyal readers about the other goings on at Crony State. What follows are bits and pieces of the university’s ever exciting activities.
First, the Internal Auditor is rumored to have moved on to pursue other career opportunities. The timing of his exit is interesting as it comes after the revelations that Cheri Sidney and Tyra Austin falsified their job applications and mysteriously continue to remain employed at Crony State. And all of this occurs in the midst of continuing declines in enrollment. I guess the tagline (Where We Hire Our Friends) of the university is as true as ever.
Second, your humble narrator has been told, but has not yet confirmed by scientific evidence, that the university dormitory is in need of mold re-mediation. Could the presence of mold been responsible for departure of  the last two directors of housing? Is the owner of that building not in a position to ensure that students aren’t exposed to mold, if it is in fact present? Recently a middle school in the suburbs closed while environmental safety contractors made repairs to the building. I would hope the building’s owners would inspect the facility and take appropriate action, even if that action is to assure the community that there is no mold in the dormitory.
Third, one of the university’s hired law firms goes to court on Monday to defend the university in a wrongful termination suit filed by a former employee. Once that trial is complete, I will report more on the circumstances and outcomes. As a layman, I would have thought the university would have settled to avoid a costly trial but that’s only because I don’t really understand the law.
Fourth, how is the work in Douglas Hall progressing? I understand asbestos abatement can be a time consuming process and dangerous if not done exactly as required by law and federal and state regulations. I would hope that after the interior work is complete that maybe the doors to the building that have not had glass in them for the last several years might actually be repaired and not appear as an advertisement for a board up company.
And finally, I received notification that reports to the Board of Trustees for their March meeting are due on February 7th. I have no idea what to report as the city’s newspaper of record seems to have reported on issues important to the faculty, namely infringement on First Amendment rights and academic dishonesty. If, loyal readers, you have any other ideas on what the Faculty Senate could report on, please don’t hesitate posting it here.

The Morning Inspiration for Friends of Wayne

“I'm not a crook. I've earned everything I've got." Richard M. Nixon, quoted in the Washington Post, November 18, 1973.

For all the liars, cheaters and incompetent cronies of Wayne Watson who populate the upper administrative ranks at Chicago State, I have a few questions. First, do you sometimes find your enthusiasm for corruption and incompetence waning? Second, do you notice that you are having difficulty obtaining those unearned raises and promotions? Third, do you require inspiration elsewhere than from the exploits of the most accomplished liars and cheaters at the top of the administrative ranks? Fourth, do you occasionally question the infallibility of that “giant” of a president, that eminent "educator" Wayne Watson?

All you need is a little morning inspiration to get you back on track. Here at the Faculty Voice Blog, we attempt to appeal to a broad cross-section of the university community, or our “family” as the administrative “team” is so fond of calling Chicago State. In that spirit, and in keeping with the kind of intellectual integrity modeled by our upper administrators, I humbly present your daily plagiarized inspirational quotation. Of course, what better source exists for plagiarized material than the dissertation of our most distinguished plagiarist, the Vice President and Chief Plagiarizing Officer of Chicago State University?

Today’s quote comes from page 25 of Angela Henderson’s dissertation. It’s stolen from:
Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, “Conceptions of the Transition to Adulthood: Perspectives from Adolescence Through Midlife,” Journal of Adult Development 8-2 (2001): 133-43. Quotation from p. 142. Here it is:




Here's what appears on Henderson's dissertation. It inspires with its rhetoric and its purloined character gives it extra spice. Enjoy!

If this sterling example of intellectual theft does not convince you that with fraud and deception all things are possible, you can always convince yourself that you've earned everything you've got, just like Richard Nixon.

More on Our Plagiarizing Provost's Dissertation

In an attempt to give a fuller picture of what a fraud Angela Henderson perpetrated on the academic community, I now present another exploration of her plagiarized dissertation. Although much has been made of the TurnItIn program as the source of the information I used to construct my original plagiarism report and to check Henderson’s references, that particular venue provided little assistance. Instead, the vast majority of the plagiarized passages I discovered came from a simple google inquiry into relevant sentences along with occasional downloading of specific articles and searching them for keywords and verbatim passages. Although I am confident I could unearth more plagiarized passages, here is what I have discovered to this point.

Henderson’s dissertation includes 37 pages of text that is primarily based on external literature. Of those 37 pages, 28 pages, or 75.7 percent include plagiarized material at least a sentence long. On pages 2-3 and 11-22, Henderson’s dissertation features 21 plagiarized passages on 9 of the 14 pages. Henderson, however, was just getting warmed up on these pages. The 21 pages from 25-45 include a breathtaking 61 separate plagiarized passages on 19 pages. Thus, the total plagiarism I have discovered in the dissertation amounts to 82 separate passages on the aforementioned 28 pages. As an example, here is a segment from the material I reported to UIC. This comes from page 26 of Henderson's dissertation and the plagiarism continues onto page 27. The plagiarized portions are highlighted in yellow:

Henderson lifts this material from the following article: Eva S. Lefkowitz, "Things Have Gotten Better": Developmental Changes Among Emerging Adults After the Transition to University," Journal of Adolescent Research 20:40 (2005): 40-63. Available online here: http://jar.sagepub.com/content/20/1/40.full.pdf+html. The first passage comes from page 54, the second from page 60:

It took only a simple search to reveal the existence of the article in question and the inclusion of the plagiarized passages in the Lefkowitz piece. As I have said before, truly the kind of plagiarism one might expect from a second-year undergraduate.

Can't Shut Down the Blog, but maybe the Faculty Senate...

M E M O R A N D U M

TO:            Chicago State University Faculty

FROM:      Wayne D. Watson

DATE:       January 28, 2014

RE:             Faculty Senate – Constitution and Actions         

The University greatly appreciates a functioning Faculty Senate and the value it provides to the overall campus.  Accordingly, as a follow-up to the correspondence dated October 31, 2013, regarding the Faculty Senate not operating in accordance with its 2011 Constitution as a duly constituted University organization, it is important to communicate the status of this issue to the general faculty body of CSU.  The Faculty Senate has failed to respond and comply with the previous requests made during meetings with the executive team and through University correspondence throughout the Fall 2013 semester.

These concerns arise out of the September 20, 2011 Faculty Senate meeting where the Senate suspended the rules without following the requirements of the Faculty Senate’s 2011 Constitution and changed the calculus for representation on the Faculty Senate.  This action changed the Faculty Senate’s membership representation structure prescribed by its Constitution.  Since the October 2013 correspondence, a new document purported to be the Faculty Senate’s Constitution was placed on the Faculty Senate’s website.  Article IX of the Faculty Senate’s 2011 Constitution states:

“Proposed amendments shall be presented in writing to the members of the Senate at least one week in advance of a regularly scheduled meeting or at least two weeks in advance of a special meeting during the academic year.  Approval by a two-thirds majority of the Senate members present at a duly-convened meeting at which a quorum is present shall be required for submission to the University Faculty for consideration.  Voting by the University Faculty as described in Article III shall be by ballot.  Approval by a two-thirds majority of the ballots returned shall be required for passage and submission the University President for review and approval.  Following review and approval by the President, each amendment shall be submitted to the Board of Trustees for review.” 

The proposed amendments to the Faculty Senate’s Constitution have no effect until the process outlined in the 2011 Constitution is followed.  The Faculty Senate has untilFebruary 26, 2014, which is 21 days from the date of this memorandum, to follow the process above to make amendments as prescribed in the Faculty Senate’s 2011 Constitution. The Faculty Senate will not be recognized as a University committee if it does not comply with its 2011 Constitution by February 26, 2014.  Should the Faculty Senate decline to take the appropriate action by the requested date, the University encourages the faculty-at-large to make a determination as to how it wishes to participate in the governance of the University.

Again, the work of the Faculty Senate is of great value to the University since it is a mechanism that should promote inclusiveness and shared governance. In this vein, the Faculty Senate must comply with the mandates dictated by its Constitution, which permits all eligible faculty to vote on significant amendments to the Faculty Senate Constitution.  We look forward to the timely resolution of this issue, so that we can continue to move forward with the great work of this institution.  The administration is confident that by working together, we can overcome these hurdles.

cc:     CSU Deans

Wayne Watson, Ph.D.

President

Chicago State University

9501 S. King Drive

Cook Administration / #313

Chicago, IL  60628

P: 773.995.2400

F: 773.995.3849

www.csu.edu

Community Work Continues at Chicago State

 In spite of the negative press that the Watson regime has received, much good work continues on this campus and in the surrounding communities.  Unfortunately, the media has conflated the misdeeds of Wayne, Patrick, Angela, Cheri and other FOWs (Friends of Wayne) with the university as a whole.  All of us, students, staff, faculty and mid-level administrative non-FOWs have been tainted by their dishonesty and incompetence.  The students who overcome great odds to be here, the staff who are often overworked and underpaid (see rally by service workers for higher wages and dignity on January 16) and the faculty who excel in spite of the numerous unnecessary barriers erected by administrative incompetence deserve to be seen for what we are and not part of this political plaything, this dishonest patronage pit.  And we deserve better than what we are currently getting.

In a previous post titled, "The Real Story at CSU," I mentioned a small number of the amazing things our faculty and students have been doing.  Last week WBEZ did a pretty good story about one example of community development, community service and community education being conducted by CSU faculty and students.  The Aquaponics Center has been praised in the media before but the amount of important work being done there has yet to be discussed.  The WBEZ story on "The Morning Shift" show presents a picture of what the Aquaponics Center does and what our university could be.  Professor Emmanuel Pratt explains well some of the goals and ethics of the Aquaponics Center at http://www.wbez.org/sections/food/urban-agriculture-center-creates-more-green-space-109569

Installment 4 of the Plagiarism Chronicles: Let's Steal an Entire Paragraph

First of all, I promise this will be my final post on this topic today. Here is another excerpt from Henderson's dissertation. This time she plagiarizes an entire paragraph. The article from which she steals the material is: Williams, M., A. Bowen, U. Pallonen, M. Ross, S. McCurdy, S. Timpson, and C. Amos (2008). "An investigation of a personal norm of condom use responsibility." AIDS Care, 20 (2008: 225-234. Article is available online here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18293133.

I will have additional posts on Henderson's "alleged" plagiarism that will actually be far worse than the items I have documented today in terms of the volume of plagiarized material. This is a contemptible academic fraud, cheating to receive a PhD from a reputable university. Henderson has heedlessly exposed both UIC and Chicago State to pointless embarrassment and disgraced herself in the process. Aided by her enabler, Wayne Watson, she is apparently determined to fight this to the bitter end, doing incalculable additional damage to this university. This behavior is despicable and will do nothing but fan the flames of this scandal. Thank you Illinois officials for doing nothing to address this. After all, to the people who could do something about this, it seems that they view Chicago State as just a university filled with African American students, this is all they deserve.

Here is page 15 of Henderson's dissertation. As you compare the material from the Williams article, note the occasional change of a word or two, another trait of the ham-handed undergraduate plagiarizer.

This material comes from the first page of the article:

This is from page 3:

These next two passages are from page 5:

The final two items appear on page 6:

I have been at Chicago State for nearly 12 years and have seen a number of embarrassing scandals. This one will be hard to top. By all means, let us ignore this and focus on happy things because after all, just "because it is alleged does not make it true." Idiotic and irresponsible.

Dissertation Plagiarism Part 3: Don't Forget Wikipedia

For my next installment, I offer the kind of plagiarism that we generally see from our undergraduates. On page 11 of her dissertation, Henderson offers the following:

While the material beginning with "this addition was made . . ." appears on several internet sites, I'm sure that all of us have experienced the undergraduate plagiarists sophisticated reliance on the first site that pops up. In the case of this material, it happens to be Wikipedia, that proven source of scholarly material. The material from Henderson's dissertation appears in this article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_reasoned_action. You will note that in the Wikipedia article, the anonymous author actually accurately references the material from this source: Katherine Miller, Communications Theories: Prospectives, Processes and Contexts, New York: McGraw-Hill, 2004). The quotation cited in Wikipedia and plagiarized by Henderson appears on p. 127 of Miller's book:

I think further comment on this version of plagiarism is unnecessary.

The Plagiarized Dissertation, Part 2.

In the second part of our serial on the Chief Plagiarizing Officer's dissertation, I present another variety of cheating. This time, Henderson steals from the literature review of two authors: P. Bennett and G. Bozionelos. Passing their words off as her own, Henderson exhibits one of the most common traits of the garden-variety plagiarist: laziness. As with most of the passages she plagiarizes, the material from the Bennett and Bozionelos article appears on the first two pages. No sense in going too deep into the article when the material you want to take comes early in the piece. The material below comes from Henderson's dissertation, page 13:

Compare the dissertation material with the following passage from P. Bennett and G. Bozionelos, "The theory of planned behaviour as predictor of condom use: a narrative review," Psychology, Health and Medicine 5-3 (2000): 307-26. Plagiarized material from p. 307.

On page 14 of Henderson's dissertation, she presents a bigger segment of the work of Bennett and Bozionelos as her own:

Compare Henderson's text with the following passage from p. 308 of the Bennett and Bozionelos article:

I included none of this material in the plagiarism report I sent to UIC. By my tally, we are now up to six passages plagiarized from five sources on less than one page of actual text. Combined with the plagiarized material from pages 25-44, the count of plagiarized passages form Henderson's dissertation has reached 41 in only 44 pages of text (1-44).

The Dissertation of Chicago State's Vice President and Chief Plagiarizing Officer

Remember when newspapers and magazines serialized things like books? Probably not since that took place mostly in the first half of the twentieth century. In any event, in order to give the university community at Chicago State a more complete picture of the extent of Angela Henderson's dissertation plagiarism, I plan to present, in serial form, a number of pages of that document along with the sources from which she plagiarized her material. This post is intended for anyone who believes in the importance of academic integrity to an institution of higher learning. Supporters of Angela Henderson and devotees of Wayne Watson's vision of a university where lying and cheating by upper level administrators is not only excused but rewarded should probably not read the following material.

First, a little background. Yesterday, Wayne Watson and Angela Henderson attended a faculty meeting of the Geography, Sociology, History and African American Studies (GSHAA) department. The presence of Henderson at the meeting seems to me to be an example of Wayne Watson's extended middle finger to the entire faculty of Chicago State, particularly those faculty who actually earned their various university degrees. Message received. The meeting provided a typical Watson performance, a great deal of self-congratulatory nonsense and a rosy picture of how well the administration has performed and is performing, including Watson's assertion that the current enrollment catastrophe is actually a very positive thing, something directly related to his commitment to "academic rigor."

Needless to say, Watson's commitment to "academic rigor" does not extend to his administrators as Henderson continues to perform her duties during the University of Illinois at Chicago's assessment of her plagiarized dissertation. For his part, Watson refused to comment on the matter except to assure everyone that he was concerned about "due process," and that Henderson received the same. Henderson indicated that legal action was forthcoming or in progress. Neither person addressed the rather substantive nature of Henderson's plagiarism.

In the wake of the meeting, Watson apparently felt the need to at least address the issue in a letter to the CSU "family" that reiterated his position that he will take no action other than to "protect the rights of our employees," and reminded his readers that "because something is alleged does not make it true." In Watson's mind, the most useful thing CSU employees can do is "remain focused on the important work we do and on the many positive things that are happening on campus." So, putting on our happy faces, we will ignore the horrific scandal created by the recent revelations of academic dishonesty from UIC.

I must remind Watson and his stooges that the administrators at UIC are not the only persons in academia who are fit to judge plagiarism. Indeed, those of us who teach and evaluate student work are quite adept at ferreting out cheating when done by our students. In that spirit, I present the following information. Also, Henderson's dissertation was available to anyone on a website called UIC Indigo from late October until the University withdrew it in mid-December. Thus, Henderson's completed dissertation was a public document.

This is the plagiarism policy of the UIC College of Nursing Doctoral Manual. You will note it is quite specific. You will also note that it does not require that the plagiarism be intentional. These are the requirements with which Henderson should have been thoroughly conversant:

Now to give Henderson credit, one has to get pretty deeply into the dissertation before discovering any suspect material. I found the first obviously plagiarized material on page 2. Here are the bottom of page 2 and the top of page 3 from Henderson's dissertation:

Here is the article from which Henderson lifted her material. Compare the passage beginning with "AA college students" with the material in the second column of this article:

The article from which Henderson lifts the passage is: Mohsen Bazargan, Ella M. Kelly, Judith A. Stein, Baqar A. Husaini and Shahrzad H. Bazargan, "Correlates of HIV-Risk Taking Behaviors Among African-American College Students: The Effect of HIV Knowledge, Motivation, and Behavioral Skills," Journal of the National Medical Association, 92-8 (August 2000): 391-404. The plagiarized passage appears on p. 392.

Next, compare the passage beginning with "Consistent Condom Use . . ." with this brief passage:

Henderson takes this passage from: Robert L. Johnson, Walter Douglas, Andrew Nelson, "Sexual Behaviors of African-American Male College Students and the Risk of HIV Infection," Journal of the National Medical Association 84-10 (1992): 864-868. Plagiarized passage from p. 864.

The next plagiarized passage comes from a book, with the authors of the book receiving no credit for language taken verbatim from their material: The book's title follows:

The plagiarized material appears on 174 of the Azjen work and is available online here: http://books.google.com/books?id=zgNWEnPAD-AC&pg=PA174&lpg=PA174&dq=When+used+consistently,+latex+condoms+are+highly+effective+and+have+been+shown+to+reduce+the+risk+of+HIV+transmission+by+80%25+to+94%25&source=bl&ots=6yEVxZK9Y7&sig=n8VAaLk7V6Oi4Js_6Fgp_lbZjHk&hl=en&sa=X&ei=mx7jUu_uI8TLsQTkiIG4Ag&ved=0CCwQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=When%20used%20consistently%2C%20latex%20condoms%20are%20highly%20effective%20and%20have%20been%20shown%20to%20reduce%20the%20risk%20of%20HIV%20transmission%20by%2080%25%20to%2094%25&f=false

Of particular interest is that the material in Henderson's dissertation comes verbatim directly from the internet. Neither the original article nor the edited book appear in Henderson's bibliography.

Finally, at the bottom of page 2 running over to the top of page 3, Henderson plagiarizes from another article. Note the similarities between Henderson's material and these passages from: Ekere J. Essien, Angela F. Meshack, Ronald J. Peters, Gbadebo O. Ogungbade and Nora I. Osemene, "Strategies to prevent HIV transmission among heterosexual African-American men," an open access article available here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC544892/.

The two paragraphs on pages 2 and 3 of Henderson's dissertation include four plagiarized passages from four different sources. Since my focus in the original examination of her dissertation included only pages 25-44, I included none of this material in my report to UIC. In the next day or two, I will examine other pages of Henderson's dissertation to see what might be discovered.

Congratulations to William H. Adams!

Here's a story we can feel good about. William H. Adams, archivist in the Chicago State Library and graduate of Chicago State University (B.A. in History 2005, M.A. in History 2009), has been accepted into the American Studies Ph.D. program at the University of Kansas. Congratulations, William on your achievement, we know you will do Chicago State proud!