ACADEMIC INTEGRITY
Texas A&M Fires Professor on Charges That She Plagiarized Colleagues' Work
This article from The Chronicle of Higher Education
From the issue dated August 10, 2001
By JENNIFER JACOBSON and ROBIN WILSON
A professor of agricultural economics at Texas A&M University who had accused two junior colleagues of plagiarizing her work has herself been fired on charges of plagiarism and trying to cover it up.
Ronald G. Douglas, the provost, said in a statement July 13 that he had fired Mary A. Zey for committing "flagrant and serious scientific misconduct," although her termination will not take effect until July 2002. Mr. Douglas declined to comment further on the situation, because it involves a personnel matter.
Ms. Zey also declined to comment, but released a statement of her own, proclaiming her innocence. She suggested that the university has a "vendetta" against her because a study she worked on found that many business leaders believe that the university's lack of student diversity limits the perspective of its graduates.
In his statement, Mr. Douglas agreed with a finding of an investigatory committee that Ms. Zey, who has been at the university since 1982, falsified and plagiarized data belonging to John L. Boies, a former assistant professor of sociology, and Harland N. Prechel, an associate professor of sociology who is still at the university.
The investigation into Ms. Zey's conduct resulted from her own accusations in 1999 that Mr. Boies and Mr. Prechel had used her data in a scientific paper published in 1998 in the journal Sociological Forum. That year, she published the same data in a book, Research in Organizational Change and Development. In March, the investigative panel found that Ms. Zey's article contained falsified data and that, because it did not cite Mr. Boies as a co-author, she had plagiarized his work. The committee also decided that Mr. Boies and Mr. Prechel had sufficiently proved that the work was, in fact, theirs.
Andrew S. Golub, Ms. Zey's lawyer, disagreed with those findings, arguing that his client had initiated the investigation.
Mr. Boies said that after Ms. Zey had accused him of plagiarism, she was nonetheless allowed to vote on his tenure case and influence the decision against him. He left the university in October 1999 and now works as a mathematical statistician for the U.S. Bureau of the Census.
Mr. Prechel declined to comment.
Mr. Golub said that Ms. Zey had been given only 10 minutes to defend herself during the investigation, and that she plans to appeal Mr. Douglas's decision.