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It was a stressful week at Stockton University. Students were arriving on campus to move into dorms for the first time since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. Professors were preparing to start fall courses with a mix of in-person and online classes.
And Interim Provost Michelle Craig McDonald was facing tough questions from her faculty and staff. Why was the 9,900-student public university in Galloway reopening at all? And why was the largely white faculty given the choice to teach from home while many of Stockton’s support staff, with a larger portion of minorities, were told they must report to work in person?
On Sept. 4, McDonald sent an eight-paragraph mass email about the reopening addressed to the “Campus Community” that she said she hoped would be inspiring.
One faculty member, thinking the words and ideas sounded familiar, ran McDonald’s email through Turnitin, the same detection software professors use to spot plagiarism in assignments and papers submitted by students.
McDonald’s email came back as about 30% plagiarized, according to a summary of the Turnitin report that quickly circulated around campus.
Several of McDonald’s paragraphs appeared to be partially rewritten versions of lines from an op-ed advocating for reopening colleges written by Joanne Berger-Sweeney, the president of Trinity College in Connecticut. The op-ed recently ran in several newspapers, including in the Press of Atlantic City on the same day McDonald sent her email.
“We must take responsibility to be positive leaders in challenging times and share our knowledge of how we can live as safely as possible in a pandemic,” the Trinity College president had written in one line.
“We must take responsibility to be positive leaders in challenging times and share our knowledge of how we can live with and support each other safely,” McDonald wrote in the conclusion of her email.
McDonald quickly sent a follow-up email to the faculty and staff the same day briefly mentioning she had been “inspired” by the Trinity College op-ed piece in her previous message. A week later, after meeting with the executive committee of the Faculty Senate, she sent a longer email apologizing for lifting several paragraphs of someone else’s words and ideas.
“Last Friday, I made a mistake. I knowingly used someone else’s words as my own. I am identifying this as starkly as I can so there can be no confusion. I realize I let you down, particularly given my current position at Stockton,” McDonald wrote.
Neither McDonald nor Stockton’s officials responded Friday to requests to comment further. However, a university spokeswoman provided NJ Advance Media copies of her emails, noting they were sent to faculty and staff only and were never intended to be public statements.
Stockton’s Faculty Senate, the governing body for the university’s professors, voted last week to call for an investigation into McDonald’s email and her plagiarism admission.
“This is troubling considering the interim provost’s responsibility as the university’s chief academic officer and the person who oversees the university’s academic honesty activities. The Senate urges the (university president’s) cabinet to acknowledge and investigate this act committed by interim provost McDonald and to take appropriate action,” a draft of the Faculty Senate resolution said.
McDonald, who was appointed Stockton’s interim provost and vice president earlier this year, is the university’s top academic administrator. Her duties include overseeing the discipline process students go through if they are accused of cheating or plagiarism.
Under Stockton’s academic dishonesty policy, students who plagiarize in their academic work can fail a class. If they are accused of academic dishonesty three times during their time at Stockton, students can be expelled or suspended for an amount of time determined by McDonald.
The Faculty Senate did not call on McDonald to step down. But the group voted to call for Stockton to do a national search for a new provost and not automatically switch McDonald from interim to permanent provost without interviewing other candidates.
Some professors said they appreciated McDonald’s apology and urged the campus to move on.
“During these uncertain times caused by global public health crisis, and various other social justice issues that need utmost attention from a public institution (and faculty) like ours, we look forward to moving Stockton collectively by finding forgiveness, embrace collegiality and camaraderie,” Manish Madan, president of the Stockton Faculty Senate and an associate professor of criminal justice wrote in a letter to colleagues.
McDonald has a doctorate in history from the University of Michigan, master’s degrees from George Washington University and St. John’s College and a bachelor’s degree from the University of California-Los Angeles. She was hired at Stockton as a history professor in 2006, taking on various leadership and administrative roles until she was appointed interim provost earlier this year.
She has been the target of some of the faculty and staff’s frustration as Stockton put together its reopening plan for the fall semester.
In her Sept. 11 email admitting to lifting the Trinity College president’s words, McDonald said she had first drafted a message to the campus community on a Thursday night in early September after a faculty member wrote to a group of senior administrators raising health and safety concerns about bringing some staff members back to campus..
The following day, McDonald saw a petition being circulated by the faculty protesting that some staff members were allegedly being forced to put their health at risk by returning to the campus. She said she felt the need to send a response quickly.
“When that message arrived, I was not in my office, but at a doctor’s appointment in Philadelphia, and had another appointment scheduled ninety minutes later. In between, I tried to rewrite my draft from the night before. Such work is not easy and should never be done quickly. But the clock was ticking as people contributed to an exchange that was becoming increasingly fraught,” McDonald wrote in her apology.
Facing a tight deadline, she said she ran out of words when she needed to convey to those working at Stockton that they were valued and university officials were doing their best in a difficult time.
“So, I did what no academic should ever do. I used inspirational words from the President of Trinity College whose message to her campus had so impressed me earlier that morning. I regret that decision and hold myself accountable for my lapse in judgement,” McDonald wrote.
In her email, McDonald also denied the university was unfairly forcing non-teaching staff members with health problems to return to campus to work. Stockton had received 63 requests from academic affairs staff members and managers, representing about a quarter of the staff, asking to work from home either for health or childcare reasons during the pandemic.
All of the childcare-related requests were granted, McDonald wrote. Of the remaining 29 requests involving health reasons, five were granted and nine were denied. Another two of the cases were granted full medical leave and 13 were resolved with informal modifications to the employees' jobs.
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Kelly Heyboer may be reached at kheyboer@njadvancemedia.com.
The Link LonkSeptember 27, 2020 at 10:31PM
https://www.nj.com/education/2020/09/nj-university-provost-wanted-to-send-an-inspirational-email-to-staff-she-ended-up-plagiarizing.html
N.J. university provost wanted to send an ‘inspirational’ email to staff. She ended up plagiarizing. - NJ.com
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