Ala. college president accused of plagiarism

The president of Jacksonville State University, whose use of a ghostwriter for newspaper columns caused a stir two years ago, now has been accused of plagiarizing his doctoral dissertation at the University of Alabama.

Officials at the two Alabama universities said they did not plan to investigate the allegation.

The claim surfaced in a lawsuit filed against William Meehan which alleges that he submitted a dissertation that was copied in part from another professor's work around the time Meehan became JSU president in 1999.

An Associated Press review found similarities between the two papers, and an expert hired by the JSU professor suing Meehan over another issue concluded his dissertation was plagiarism.

Meehan did not respond to an interview request but said through a university spokesman there was "no substance" to the charges.

The University of Alabama reviewed the matter and was "not inclined to go behind the decision the dissertation committee made 10 years ago" in granting Meehan a doctorate in education, said spokeswoman Cathy Andreen in a statement Tuesday. She would not elaborate.

Alabama's position closes the matter for Jacksonville State, said JSU board chairman Jim Bennett.

"We're satisfied that President Meehan has a legitimate degree," said Bennett, who also is Alabama's labor commissioner.

Plagiarism claims previously dogged Meehan in 2007, when news reports revealed that "Town and Gown" columns appearing under his name in The Jacksonville News actually were lifted from Internet sites. The school said the columns were ghostwritten by a former university publicist who accepted blame for the mistake. Meehan also said he accepted "full responsibility."

The allegations about his dissertation are meant to bolster claims in a civil lawsuit accusing Meehan, a former biology teacher, of wrongly seizing a collection containing some 55,000 plant samples from professor R. David Whetstone.

Donald Stewart, an attorney for Whetstone, filed arguments Friday about Meehan's 118-page dissertation in an attempt to show Meehan has a habit of taking academic work done by others. Stewart argued that Meehan's dissertation was copied from one completed three years earlier by Carl Boening at the University of Alabama.

Boening wrote about applications for sabbatical leaves by University of Alabama faculty from 1986 through 1996. Meehan wrote about the same topic, but looked at what happened at Jacksonville State from 1988 through 1998.

Meehan credited Boening in his paper, saying his study "replicated the investigation conducted by Boening." Rather than just citing some of the same articles and studies as Boening, Meehan in places used wording that was almost identical to Boening's.

In one section, Boening wrote about the work of researcher J.S. Fairweather: "Fairweather concluded that faculty and administration must deal with the enormous emphasis placed on research and the rewards tied to it before achieving a re-emphasis on teaching."

Meehan wrote: "Fairweather concluded that faculty and administrators must deal with the enormous emphasis placed on research and rewards tied to it before achieving a reemphasis on teaching."

Boening said in an interview Wednesday that there are "striking similarities" between his 127-page paper and Meehan's, but he declined to say whether he considered it plagiarism.

"Obviously, since it is my work that has been allegedly plagiarized, I can't be neutral in any assessment," said Boening, chairman of the division of behavioral studies at Shelton State Community College in Tuscaloosa.

Jonathan Bailey, runs the Web site plagiarismtoday.com, was hired by Whetstone to review the papers and concluded that "extensive portions" of Meehan's dissertation were plagiarism of Boening's work.

Bailey, who is not an academic, analyzed the two papers using a computer program that looks for similarities in writing. He submitted a report claiming 38.7 percent of the second chapter in Meehan's paper was copied from Boening's.