U.S. Naval Academy Demotes Professor for Plagiarism
Nov 3rd, 2003 • Posted in: NewsANNAPOLIS, Maryland
The U.S. Naval Academy last week stripped a history professor of his tenure and $10,000 in annual salary after concluding that he plagiarized dozens of passages in a book about the atomic bomb.
Brian VanDeMark, author of Pandora’s Keepers: Nine Men and the Atomic Bomb, was found to have lifted — verbatim or nearly so — from at least four other authors, reported the Washington Post.
An investigative board at the Naval Academy concluded that VanDeMark had engaged in “sloppy scholarship” that included “improper borrowing and inadequate paraphrasing.”
“These improprieties constituted plagiarism,” the academy said in a statement, wrapping up an investigation launched in June.
While at least two of the plagiarized authors said VanDeMark should be fired, the Naval Academy, citing mitigating factors, said demotion and a pay cut would suffice, reported the local Capital newspaper.
While VanDeMark’s violations were the result of “gross carelessness,” they were not “a deliberate effort to pass off the works of other authors as his own,” the board concluded.
The Naval Academy stripped VanDeMark of his position as tenured associate professor, reclassifying him as an entry-level assistant professor earning $10,000 a year less.
“I reiterate my personal responsibility and accept accountability for my unintentional mistakes,” VanDeMark said last week in a statement. “Pandora’s Keeper was a big undertaking … and I became overconfident about paraphrasing a lot of secondary sources.”
To regain tenure, VanDeMark must satisfy research and publishing requirements, as well as three years of probation. He also must correct Pandora’s Keeper, which has been recalled by publisher Little, Brown and Co., before it is republished, according to the Post.
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