ACADEMIC INTEGRITY
Trinity International University Fires Its Law Dean Amid Charges That He Plagiarized
This article from The Chronicle of Higher Education (http://chronicle.com)
Monday, August 20, 2001
By RICHARD MONASTERSKY
Trinity International University dismissed the dean of its law school on Friday after investigating allegations that he had plagiarized portions of an article published in its law-review journal.
Winston L. Frost confirmed in an interview on Sunday that he had been removed from his position as dean and as president of the private university's campus in Santa Ana, Calif. He remains a tenured law professor there but is under paid suspension as the university decides whether to start dismissal proceedings before the faculty senate.
Mr. Frost last week gave the university a written response to its charges against him, but "that did not seem to us to be an adequate explanation for the similarities in the material we saw," said Gregory L. Waybright, president of Trinity International, an evangelical Christian institution based in Deerfield, Ill.
The university accused Mr. Frost of misappropriating material from an article in the Encyclopaedia Britannica and from a chapter in a book on human rights. Mr. Frost's own article, "The Developing of Human Rights Discourse: A History of the Human Rights Movement," appeared in the fall 2000 issue of Trinity Law Review.
Mr. Frost has denied the plagiarism charges and instead says that he mistakenly attributed the sections in question to other sources. He says that poor editing and fact checking by the staff of the law review compounded the problems. For example, he said Sunday, his article has two footnotes labeled as No. 5, so that every following footnote is incorrect. "It was my error in terms of misattribution of the footnotes. It was compounded by what the law review did and didn't do, and then exploited by my enemies."
Nowhere in the law-review article, however, did Mr. Frost cite the true sources of the disputed material, which he used in virtually verbatim form from an article in a 1984 book by Jerome J. Shestack, a former president of the American Bar Association, and from the encyclopedia entry written by Burns H. Weston, a University of Iowa law professor.
Mr. Waybright praised Mr. Frost for his role in building up the law school, saying, "He had done a tremendous job of administration and leadership." But the president said that Mr. Frost's actions both violated the institution's plagiarism rule and failed to protect the intellectual-property rights of the true authors. The university is investigating whether Mr. Frost's mistakes were intentional or not. "If it is an honest mistake, we will really take that into consideration," Mr. Waybright said.