The Forms of Our Deviance ...

I suppose yesterday's example of Jacques Pluss represents one form – though a particularly startling one – of our deviance: ideological deviance. For the most part, I'm in favor of protecting ideological deviants. That gets difficult when the deviation manifests itself in wholesale smears of ethnic communities. Then, it seems to me, you may have a dysfunctional faculty member to remove.

At University Diaries, Margaret Soltan cites allegations of our more common forms of deviance: bogus citations and plagiarism. Claire Strom is an assistant professor of history at North Dakota State University and editor of Agricultural History. The charges against her are that Strom's book, Profiting from the Plains: The Great Northern Railway and Development of the American West (University of Washington Press, 2003), includes multiple bogus citations and instances of plagiarism. According to Fargo's In-Forum, North Dakota State University hired John Wunder of the University of Nebraska to look into the allegations and his report confirms the accuracy of the charges in 14 of 22 instances cited. Wunder's report has been referred to a three member NDSU committee on Academic Integrity. It's sort of doubly humiliating that the author of NDSU history department's"Citation Guide" that intends to steer students away from bogus citations and plagiarism is, ah, Claire Strom.

The inquiry became public knowledge as a result of a ruling by North Dakota's Attorney General, which has its own message to all of us. After Strom became editor of Agricultural History and it moved its offices to NDSU, she hired a graduate student, Suzzanne Kelley, who blogs at Buffalo Commons, to serve as its managing editor in September 2003. A year later, Kelley took charges of professional misconduct against Strom to NDSU's history department chairperson, Larry Peterson. Subsequently, Strom fired Kelley as Agricultural History's managing editor. In appealing her dismissal, Kelley sought recovery of Strom's e-mails from January 2004 forward. The University complied with the request, but it narrowed its scope and charged Kelley $400 for the service. When she sought a broader scope, it charged an additional $164. Kelley took the charges to the state's Attorney General, who has ordered the University to comply with the original request for the e-mail and refund its charges.

Meanwhile, Strom faces a tenure decision in the fall. If these reports are accurate, there's a dark cloud hanging over Fargo.