Mayor’s Row…………..by Ned Mitchell
 

There are so many hot topics to write about anymore it becomes difficult to sometimes just pick a subject and take off. The world we live in today finds all types of news outlets for us to research just about any subject that we want to. Any of us can sit at our home computer and read news publications from all over the world and listen to audio at the same time. Not so long ago if we wanted to watch news we had to rely solely on television. Today that is not the case as we are finding more and more newspapers posting audio and visual reporting. Some of these interviews locally last for 45 minutes or so and involve very detailed reporting and not the 60 second evening news dedicated to the subject at hand.

This column will address the bizarre “blue ribbon” committee at SIUC that explored President Glenn Poshard’s doctoral dissertation. As I had predicted from the moment this committee was announced, the final decision was just as I and many other writers and commentators had predicted. The committee found that Poshard had indeed made some mistakes but that they were minor and he could correct them now.

In talking about this obscene whitewash by the Board of Trustees and the “Blue Ribbon” committee with an acquaintance of mine I happened on this story. The acquaintance has a degree from SIUC during the same decade that Poshard made his “minor” mistakes. It so happens this person had enrolled at SIUC and attended classes for a short period of time before deciding the timing was not right for a college education. The student in this case quit going to class. Once it was discovered the person would receive a failing grade, an F, in all the classes, an attempt was made to officially withdraw. The student was told the deadline for withdrawing had passed and the failing grades would stand in all of the classes.

Of course this troubled the student a great deal because in their own mind a decision had already been made to someday come back to SIUC and finish the work for a degree. The student eventually enrolled back at SIUC and finished the work and was given their degree that was earned. The only problem here is the failing grades were now used to tally the grade point average (GPA) of this student and they were much lower than they would have been if the failing grades had been eliminated and an incomplete grade given.

What has that got to do with the debacle Glenn Poshard has caused at SIUC you ask? It is all about across the board fair treatment for everyone. Now the person I just wrote about is contemplating whether or not it would be possible for them to go back and “correct” this misunderstanding. It was after all “unintentional” what this person did. Just like Poshard’s “unintentional” plagiarism. This whole thing at SIUC has boiled down to a group of “experts” in the education field, all employees of the SIU system who have met and pontificated a decision that says Poshard did plagiarize but he did not mean to and the plagiarism was minor so he can now go back and correct the dissertation. If as the “blue ribbon” committee says the mistakes were minor, why bother correcting them in the first place?

Then the name Walter Wendler comes to mind who is probably laughing himself silly over the results of this inquiry. Remember Wendler was the administrator at SIUC who fell out of Poshard’s good graces and was fired or demoted because he had the audacity to plagiarize his own work. Now there is an original concept if I ever saw one. This same Board of Trustees did not allow Wendler to go back and correct his dirty deed. By the way could someone explain to me exactly how a person can plagiarize themselves? This same school SIUC would not allow the acquaintance of mine to go back and undo those failing grades because they did not understand that it was necessary to withdraw in the first place. It is kind of like Poshard saying he did not really understand or had not been trained in the subject of plagiarism.

In this column I have outlined three people connected to SIUC and their stories. One was given failing grades, one was fired, and one was retained and given another chance to correct a previous mistake. If that is not a self explanatory end result of three different people with three different treatments I don’t know what is. It is a classic example of the “good old boy” network that used to involve only the politicians of our area but now it has permeated the halls of higher education at SIUC.

In my opinion this “blue ribbon” committee surely must have been drinking Blue Ribbon to come up with this decision. The only fair way for this to ever go away, and that is exactly what the Board of Trustees want, is for an outside and independent group of educators trained in plagiarism to look at this dissertation and offer up a decision. This is not going to go away folks and the first thing SIUC needs to do is to quit digging the hole they are in. This will continue to “dawg” SIUC for years. It will hurt enrollment, it will hurt alumni who have a degree from SIUC and it will certainly hurt fundraising in the future.

This is not a witch hunt as some have said. Poshard and his cronies have circled the wagons on this issue and made it a political football by claiming that those who question his honesty are somehow political enemies. Hogwash, did it ever occur to anyone here that some of the folks calling for an outside independent review just might be interested in saving the reputation of SIUC? Great efforts have gone forth to influence pals of Poshard to write letters to the editor in his support and to sway public opinion. It is a classic example of where we need to be applying the concept of what is good for the goose is also good for the gander!

This Thursday night in Sesser a conference of two of Southern Illinois talk radio show hosts will take place at the historic Sesser Opera House. WXAN-FM of Ava host Scott Doody and sidekick Will Stevens and WQRL-FM of Benton host Jim Muir will have dinner with winners of free tickets from their respective shows. This will be a very historic event as it marks the first time the two very popular talk show hosts have had a sit down dinner together with special guests. You can come along and enjoy the scene and then join them as they watch a special opening night of the Opera House Company’s performance of “El Grande De Coca Cola”. Dinner is at 6:00 pm and the show starts at 7:30. Tickets are available by calling 625-5322 or they can be purchased at the door on a first come first served basis. You won’t want to miss this historic event and we hope to see you there!
 

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