It's not just historians accused of plagiarism: The University president on the hot seat

Facing allegations that he plagiarized sections of his doctoral dissertation in the 1980s, the president of the Southern Illinois University system announced Friday that the department that awarded his degree would evaluate the charges – a plan complicated by the fact that the department of educational administration and higher education is based at Southern Illinois’s Carbondale campus.

Southern Illinois’s student newspaper, The Daily Egyptian, reported that at the Friday press conference in which President Glenn Poshard announced his intentions, he indicated that he “never considered submitting his dissertation to a committee outside the university for review.” Poshard, a former U.S. congressman and Democratic nominee for Illinois governor, holds three degrees from SIU – a university system that’s been beset by plagiarism scandals in recent years and is still recoiling after the former Carbondale chancellor was forced out less than a year ago for a plagiarism scandal of his own.