This was the right move and benefits all parties involved: the university, the faculty and, most importantly, the students.

On Oct. 27, the Board of Trustees approved returning $619,489 of a $770,119 grant to the NSF because of what investigators called plagiarism in the research.

Mathematics professor Douglas Lapp and former mathematics professor Azita Manouchehri, now at Ohio State University, were found to have been involved with the wrongdoing. Lapp spoke with CM Life on Thursday and said he was at fault for not double-checking his co-worker’s work. Manouchechri, according to documents, has a “pattern of being ‘careless.’”

Although Trustees did not reveal the real reason behind the move during its special session, CMU revealed the documents Wednesday to CM Life instead of waiting for the Freedom of Information Act to force its hand.

The university should use this as a model for when problems arise to make sure everyone is in the know — an asset to a transparent university. It’s only fair to those affected the most.

While this situation was completely transparent, there have been others in which students have wanted answers and wanted their voices heard in which the university kept information withheld, with the recent changes to tailgate and the lawsuits involving women’s basketball coach Sue Guevara and former soccer coach Tony DiTucci being a few of them.

This information was discovered, not informed of, by CM Life and, in turn, it makes it look like the university is trying to cover things up. We know that’s not always the case but, sometimes, image is everything. Again, it comes down to taking responsibility.

In the NSF grant case, CMU worked well to make sure the student body and public knew about the grant. Documents, reports and e-mails were all provided to CM Life when they were asked for. Administrators spoke to reporters, and even one of the names on the report, Lapp, spoke to CM Life to share his side of the story.
CMU was in wrong; There is no denying this fact. Every party involved admits it, including Lapp. Even though the reprimands for the faculty involved will not get released, the university should keep in mind it fails students found guilty of plagiarism.

Students are looking at this as a “lead by example” situation. CMU should not just send a letter of reprimand — the professors involved should have to pay a price similar to what a student would have to if they are found to be plagiarizing or being a party to it. Professors need to be held to the same standard as students.

The entire NSF grant plagiarism situation is what transparency is all about: accessibility to the truth. That’s all students want to know.

A committee organized by Interim Provost Gary Shapiro determined the two put together a National Science Foundation grant proposal for a multi-year project entitled “CONCEPT: Connecting Concept and Pedagogical Education of Pre-service Teachers.” The proposal was submitted in September 2004 with no involvement from other faculty.

The committee found uncited information from three different sources in the proposal, according to its report.

The total grant amount was $770,119, and the university spent $619,489 over the course of the project. The Board of Trustees decided to return the money at a Oct. 27 special meeting with other university funds after it determined the project could not be completed.

It was later revealed violations of the academic integrity policy were the primary reasons behind it.

“There’s two instances of plagiarism,” Shapiro said. “In essence, both the grant proposal, as well as the work output, were plagiarized.”

The committee found Manouchehri plagiarized the work output — a set of course materials designed to better teach math.

Lapp said he only had minimal involvement with the actual writing of the proposal and did not plagiarize. Instead, he said he was more involved with looking over the writing and providing Manouchehri with feedback.

“Oftentimes, there is one person who takes the lead of writing,” Lapp told CM Life. “I am at fault in the sense that I did not check my colleague’s work.”

Manouchehri, now a professor at Ohio State University, could not be reached for comment Thursday.

Input from other members

Other project members had different takes on each professor’s involvement in the grant proposal, according to the documents.

Two members claimed Manouchehri wrote the proposal based off Lapp’s ideas. Another member said the proposal was a genuine collaboration, in which both individuals played a significant role.

Manouchehri informed a fourth member that she wrote the proposal, according to the documents. A sixth person who did not participate in the grant research also said Manouchehri wrote most of it.

Shapiro said he could not speak on each professor’s level of contribution other than what is presented in the report.

Lapp, who served as principal investigator of the research team, said it is not common practice for faculty to check each other’s work for issues such as plagiarism.

In a report from the investigation committee dated July 28, 2008, the committee states, “In this particular case, both Dr. Manouchehri, as a co-PI, and Dr. Lapp, as the PI, signed off on the proposal and the evidence supports the fact that they were each actively engaged in the proposal development.”

The report stated “gross negligence” was shown by the individual who copied and pasted the information into the proposal, while a certain level of “carelessness” was displayed from the individual who did not directly plagiarize, but still participated in forming the proposal.

Lapp said he received a letter from former Provost Julia Wallace, in which she stated Lapp had not plagiarized. But because he was the principal investigator, he was still held as partially responsible.

“Any grant proposal I submit for the next five years … has to be thoroughly checked,” he said.

Lapp was also required to attend an academic integrity workshop.

Steve Smith, CMU director of public relations, said the university has never seen a similar case before.

“To the best of my knowledge, this is an isolated incident,” he said.

Move to Ohio State

Manouchehri, who formerly taught at CMU, accepted a position at Ohio State University on June 25, 2007.

Just one day after that, Lisa DeMeyer, another math professor involved in the grant, brought up her concerns about Manouchehri and possible foul play.

CMU was originally considering subcontracting the agreement so Manouchehri could continue her portion of the research at OSU, but the idea was tossed aside after allegations started to mount.

An investigation into the controversy soon followed.

“Wayne Osborne, who at that time was interim vice provost for Research and Sponsored Programs, did an initial inquiry and reported that there was enough evidence to conduct an investigation,” Shapiro said.

Osborne reported the situation to Shapiro, who arranged to form an investigation committee. The committee members were Barbara Taylor, director of Faculty Personnel Services, and Kirsten Fleming of Northern Kentucky University. Janine Janosky, former vice provost of Research and Sponsored Programs, also worked with the committee.

After Manouchehri was accused of the violations, Shapiro notified administrators at OSU about the situation in a letter dated Dec. 21, 2007.

“The academic integrity policy calls for contacting and notifying the supervisor of an individual who is accused of violating it,” he said.

OSU spokeswoman Shelly Hoffman said she is unaware of the case, but would look into the matter with university administrators. As of late Thursday night, Hoffman did not have any additional information.

After calling for the investigation, Shapiro froze the grant funds in late December 2007. The $619,489 in grant money had already been spent, but no more money could be withdrawn from the grant all the way up to the recent decision by CMU to reimburse the NSF.

The allegations against the faculty members were not brought up at the October Board of Trustees meeting in which the reimbursement was approved. Shapiro said revealing all the details of the investigation at that time would not have been appropriate.

“We felt it was premature at that time to announce anything other than returning the funds, because in fact we were still engaged in some discussions and communication with the NSF,” he said.

Apparently that’s not enough for some people.

I’m not talking about students violating these policies; I’m talking about the two mathematics professors who violated the university’s research integrity policy, costing the university $619,489.

Earlier in the week, two independent investigators concluded that plagiarism had taken place in both the grant proposal and research materials for CONCEPT: CONnecting Content and Pedagogical Education of Pre-service Teachers, a research project funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation.

In order to guarantee that CMU will continue to get grant funding from the NSF in the future, and because it was the ethical thing to do, the Board of Trustees voted to return $619,489 to the NSF.

Where the money will come from is still up for debate.

Personally, I think the professors guilty of the plagiarism should have to pay for a large portion of it. Due to privacy issues, the professors’ names have not been released. Interim University President Kathy Wilbur did say however, that one of the professors is no longer here at Central Michigan University.

If legally possible, the university should open up a civil case against these professors and try to get them to pay part of the grant money back.

So far, the university has not commented on the disciplinary actions taken against the other professor involved. The professors involved should be fired immediately. If the university decides not to fire any of the professors, they should at least have their salaries and benefits cut, with the difference going toward paying back the grant money.

I doubt the university will be able to recover the full amount from the two professors, but they should definitely not get off scot-free.

What kind of image does this send to our students? “If you plagiarize, we may give you a failing grade in the course but, if one of our professors plagiarizes, we’ll cover the $619,489 that they essentially stole from the NSF.”

These two professors ought to be ashamed of themselves. They knew better. I have never seen a syllabus that doesn’t include the academic integrity policy in it, so how could these two professors read off that policy and tell students not to plagiarize while they themselves were doing it?

I commend the Board of Trustees for doing the right thing. It was the smart thing to do in order to secure future grant money.

At a time when the university is struggling financially, we cannot afford to throw away this much money because of two professors’ stupidity. The professors need to be held accountable and need to pay for a substantial amount of the grant.

Duane Kleinhardt, manager of IT Communications, said since it is a part of Blackboard licensing, CMU is eliminating the contract with Turnitin.com, which cost $23,329 last year.

“SafeAssign performs the same function as Turnitin, and is included in the licensing of Blackboard,” Kleinhardt said.

The purpose of the service is to help educators prevent plagiarism by detecting unoriginal content in student papers.

“The university saves the extra cost of the Turnitin licensing,” Kleinhardt said. “The Online Learning Environment executive team made the decision to change from Turnitin to SafeAssign following a year of consideration, careful comparison of the two products, including a two-phase pilot implementation, and a survey of the user community.”

Though it is a new Blackboard service, it is based on technology Blackboard acquired from Sciworth Inc., formerly MyDropBox, and enhanced to offer better stability, performance and integration with other Blackboard products.

In SafeAssign, instructors can set up SafeAssignments in their Blackboard courses and let students submit papers to these assignments, in a way very similar to the one provided currently by Blackboard Learning System.

As students submit papers, they are checked against SafeAssign’s comprehensive databases of source material. The papers then will be delivered to instructors through the Blackboard Learning System with the originality reports and the results of the matching process attached.

All material submitted to SafeAssign is checked against the following databases: A comprehensive index of documents available for public access on the Internet; ProQuest ABI/Inform database with more than 1,100 publication titles and about 2.6 million articles from the ’90s to present time, updated weekly; institutional document archives containing all papers submitted to SafeAssign by users in their respective institutions; and the Global Reference Database, which contains papers volunteered by students from Blackboard client institutions to prevent cross-institutional plagiarism.

For more information on the Blackboard plagiarism service, go to SafeAssign.com.