Bitter Aftertaste

After a professor took credit for a graduate student’s research, Cornell found little amiss

Antonia Demas is still passionate about food. On a recent winter morning at her rambling home here,

she rolls out an elaborate breakfast of scrambled tofu, a colorful fruit torte with an oatmeal-and-date crust, and avocado with cilantro. Food “is so fundamental to everybody’s life that you may as well do it with pleasure rather than just do it to get it over with,” she says.

That belief brought Ms. Demas to Cornell University a decade ago in pursuit of a Ph.D. in education. It fueled her award-winning work on an elementary-school curriculum. And in the end, it proved a recipe for disaster as, she says, a professor took credit for the very work she’d spent a lifetime concocting.

Just weeks after getting her degree, in 1995, she began hearing about all the places where David A. Levitsky, a professor of nutrition at Cornell, had taken credit for her study: at a Rotary Club meeting, at a conference in Syracuse, N.Y., in a psychology seminar, in a grant proposal, in a Cornell newsletter.

Now, seven years, four university investigations, and one lawsuit later, Mr. Levitsky still claims as his own the two awards Ms. Demas won, and he insists he was only trying to help Ms. Demas, not hinder her. The former student, however, remains obsessed with justice.

“It’s intolerable,” she says, “to have my life destroyed by a thief.”

What’s worse, perhaps, is that Cornell has refused -- or been unable -- to do much about it. Indeed, Cornell and other institutions face a difficult balancing act in such cases: The line between a student’s idea and a professor’s may blur, particularly when the graduate student carves out some portion of the professor’s existing research.

But in this case, Ms. Demas came to Cornell with a clear plan for her dissertation -- a study of ways to teach children to like low-fat, vegetarian foods. Mr. Levitsky’s research focused on obesity and lab rats. She wasn’t even Mr. Levitsky’s student. She earned her Ph.D. in education, not nutrition. He wasn’t on her dissertation committee when she designed her study, and he was never its chairman.

So is it a cut-and-dried case? One Cornell dean believes what Mr. Levitsky did was “permissible academic entrepreneurial behavior,” and the professor and most university officials now refuse to speak on the record, citing the lawsuit. “The charges are without merit against Cornell,” says Henrik N. Dullea, the vice president for university relations.

But in the end, interviews with Ms. Demas, her professors, and Cornell officials, as well as a review of hundreds of pages of court records, correspondence, and other documents, paint a stark case of academic misappropriation. Most damning of all is the opinion of all three professors originally on her dissertation committee, including a former associate provost, who maintain that everything Ms. Demas says is absolutely, positively true.

The Ambitious Student

As her long fight against a major university and a popular professor attests, Antonia Demas is stubborn. One friend describes her as having the courage of Joan of Arc crossed with the home-economics wizardry of Mary Poppins. The fresh-faced 51-year-old health nut wears loose, flowing clothes and the easy smile of an earth mother. But when talking about her legal ordeal, she becomes animated, her words tumbling over themselves to describe the enmity she feels toward Mr. Levitsky.

Before this bitter taste of the academic life, back when her two children were in school, Ms. Demas was a perpetual room-mother, the kind that built gingerbread houses to teach the class about architecture and the spice trade. If they learned about food and cooked it themselves, she found, the students would eat all sorts of things their parents never dreamed they would: curried vegetables, whole-wheat couscous, rutabagas, collard greens.

Ms. Demas wanted to promote a food-centered curriculum that would teach children about cooking and nutrition as well as history, music, mathematics, and science. But she needed credentials. “I knew as a woman who was cooking with kids, most educators wouldn’t take my work seriously,” she says. So in 1991, at the age of 41, with her son finishing college and her daughter about to start high school, she entered the Ph.D. program in education at Cornell.

About a year into planning her doctoral research, one of her committee members suggested she speak with Mr. Levitsky.

A Talented Teacher

David A. Levitsky grew up in New Jersey, the son of a butcher. As a teenager, he was fascinated by the strict logic of electronic circuits and dreamed of becoming a television repairman. His parents had other ideas and shipped him off to Rutgers. By 1970, he had a Ph.D. in experimental psychology and a faculty job at Cornell. He married a fellow nutrition professor and lives near the campus with their two children.

A favorite with undergraduates, the 59-year-old Mr. Levitsky has won many teaching awards. He speaks with pride of making sure students remain engaged, even if that requires nontraditional methods. In one lecture, for instance, Mr. Levitsky begins the class fully clothed, then takes off his shoes, pants, and shirt. He sprints around the auditorium in tiny running shorts to explain, huffing and puffing, how his body is using energy.

In the spring of 1993, Ms. Demas told the professor about her planned research. While the details changed, the basic outline of the study stayed the same: She would go to several classrooms at Trumansburg Elementary School, about 10 miles northwest of Cornell, and teach 14 different lessons during the school year. Children would learn about and prepare foods that many of them had never seen. All the dishes would be low-fat and meatless. As she discovered, when the same foods later showed up in the cafeteria, students who had learned about the foods ate, on average, 3 to 20 times as much as classmates who had never taken Ms. Demas’s lessons.

At Trumansburg, the children loved “Antonia Day,” when she would push her cart from class to class. “When is Ms. Demas coming back?” one second grader asked his teacher. “She wakes up my tummy with new foods, and she lets me use a knife.”

Her professors eventually suggested that the curriculum also be taught by other teachers, just to make sure that the children’s willingness to eat new foods was not simply the result of a fondness for their dynamic teacher -- the “Antonia effect,” one professor called it.

Mr. Levitsky was excited by the study, and, before the research began, he talked about adding an obesity component to it. That never happened. But that summer, he did talk to the Trumansburg teachers about nutrition. And in the fall, he kept asking to be added to Ms. Demas’s dissertation committee. At least that’s what she and the other professors on the committee say. (Mr. Levitsky says he never asked.) That fall, as the Trumansburg project got started, Ms. Demas passed her first oral examinations and then acquiesced, adding Mr. Levitsky to the committee.

During the study, Ms. Demas spent more than 100 days at the elementary school, which is around the corner from her house. She taught the lessons in 12 classes, sent the recipes home with the children, worked with the cafeteria staff, and supervised three dozen volunteers she had enlisted to help with the study.

Mr. Levitsky returned to the school in the spring of 1994 for just the second time, according to a teacher there. The occasion? A New York Times reporter was in town to write about the project. Mr. Levitsky monopolized the reporter’s time, Ms. Demas says, and the resulting article leaves the impression that she was “the lady in the kitchen with the apron strings who’s helping this brilliant professor cook.”

The article was just the first of the plaudits the project received. It won two national awards in 1994, one from the Society for Nutrition Education and the other from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. On one award application, Ms. Demas listed 60 people involved in the project -- the teachers, the volunteers, the school staff, her committee members, and Mr. Levitsky. They each got certificates of participation. Today, on Mr. Levitsky’s résumé, he lists both awards as his own.

“I doubt that the cafeteria workers or janitors have put it on their CV’s,” says Ms. Demas. “But they have as much right to claim it as he does.”

Mr. Levitsky alternated between taking most of the credit for the Trumansburg study and asserting it was a collaboration. In one lecture, he told undergraduates about parents who were calling to get “my recipes.” More often, he referred to it as “our project” and maintained he had taken Ms. Demas onto his research team. Almost no one else sees it that way.

“One person, a late addition to the special committee, Professor Levitsky, somehow thinks the ideas in the dissertation are his,” wrote Robert Ascher, an anthropology professor and an original member of the dissertation committee. “He is dead wrong.”

“It was clear from my conversation that he had no idea what the data was that she was collecting,” says Yasamin DiCiccio, the university statistician who helped Ms. Demas with the analysis. “I can 100-percent guarantee you that Levitsky had nothing to do with it.”

In January 1995, Cornell awarded Ms. Demas a Ph.D. in education. That same month, Mr. Levitsky submitted a grant proposal seeking $200,000 from the Agriculture Department to expand on the Trumansburg study.

Ms. Demas says he promised to make her the co-principal investigator. He says he was told by university officials that wasn’t possible. Either way, he wrote an application that managed to propose building on the Trumansburg project without ever mentioning Ms. Demas or her dissertation.

Mr. Levitsky later called the omission an “oversight.” The first of four Cornell investigations chastised him for it and required him to write a letter to an Agriculture Department official to explain Ms. Demas’s role in the original research. He wrote the letter. But two days later, he sent an e-mail message to the same federal official. “I should also warn you that you will be receiving a strange letter from me in a couple of days,” he wrote. “The women [sic] I worked with on our preliminary project was upset that I didn’t mention that the work that I described was part of her Ph.D. dissertation, and so the letter merely states that. She was so difficult to work with for me and my staff that I had to dismiss her.”

Eventually, federal officials terminated the grant, criticizing Mr. Levitsky’s progress reports.

The Investigators Weigh In

By the fall of 1995, when Mr. Levitsky was correcting his “oversight,” the other committee members were worried about Ms. Demas, who was fighting depression. At one point, she spent a long weekend at an alcohol-rehabilitation center in rural Pennsylvania. Since getting her degree, not much had gone right for Ms. Demas. Her 25-year marriage, which has since ended, was crumbling. She had been given a job that year as a research associate at Cornell, but she had been thrown off the Agriculture Department project by Mr. Levitsky, leaving her in a strange limbo. So, in the evenings, she drank wine.

Mr. Levitsky’s failure to credit her in the grant application, coupled with other reports of his misappropriation of her ideas, prompted Ms. Demas to seek help from Richard G. Warner, the university ombudsman. Although he didn’t know it, Mr. Warner, a nutrition professor, had witnessed just the type of behavior Ms. Demas was complaining about. The year before, after seeing the New York Times article, Mr. Warner had invited Mr. Levitsky to speak about the research at a Rotary Club meeting. During the speech, the professor never mentioned Ms. Demas.

Mr. Warner found that there was “substantial merit” to the claim that Mr. Levitsky was not properly citing Ms. Demas. Failing to mention her in the grant proposal, he wrote in a report, was “quite inappropriate.”

Mr. Warner helped craft a contract between the two. It required Mr. Levitsky to give her due credit in all public presentations, to write a letter of apology, and to correct the record at the Agriculture Department. The deal also called for them to work together to publish articles about the study, and the pair later exchanged multiple drafts of a possible paper.

But Ms. Demas and Joän Egner, another committee member, became aggravated by what they say was Mr. Levitsky’s sloppy and unprofessional work; his papers were littered with mistakes that he failed to correct even after they were pointed out to him.

Ms. Egner and Mr. Warner eventually suggested that Ms. Demas publish the paper without Mr. Levitsky. When she submitted it to the Journal of Nutrition Education, Mr. Levitsky wrote a letter to its editor saying that he should be listed as a co-author and that publication without his name is a “serious breech [sic] of my intellectual rights.”

The journal editors returned the manuscript to Cutberto Garza, the nutrition-division director at Cornell, asking him to explain the authorship dispute. Two months later, Mr. Garza wrote back to the journal that Mr. Levitsky had withdrawn any claims to the paper and that Ms. Demas’s sole authorship was the result of her principal role in the study. But the paper was never published.

‘Entrepreneurial Behavior’

Ms. Demas says Mr. Levitsky ended up breaking every term of the ombudsman’s contract. So she and the three original members of her dissertation committee asked Peter Stein, dean of the faculty, to investigate her claims of academic misconduct.

Mr. Stein, a physics professor, says the academic-misconduct policy at Cornell is narrow and poorly named. It’s meant, he says, to cover only fraud in research: “There are many evil things a faculty member could do that don’t fall under this policy.”

The dean found that while one of Ms. Demas’s charges -- misreporting data -- needed further investigation, most of the others were not covered by the policy. And then he wrote a sentence that has since become a rallying cry for Ms. Demas and her supporters: Mr. Levitsky’s “preemption of Demas’s ideas (i.e., the concept and the recipes) lies within the boundary of permissible academic entrepreneurial behavior and does not warrant further investigation.”

In a recent interview, Mr. Stein explains his remarkable statement. “It meant that if a person publishes an idea in a public source, anyone is free on reading that idea to follow it through and that includes asking for a grant. That’s the way science advances,” he says.

And Mr. Levitsky’s lack of credit to Ms. Demas in a Rotary meeting, undergraduate classes, or newspaper articles, he contends, isn’t really academic misconduct. “You have to distinguish,” he says, “between what you claim at a cocktail party when you’re trying to pick somebody up and when you claim something in a journal article.”

Cornell’s Final Word

Mr. Stein’s preliminary investigation led to the creation of two more committees, each with three members, to examine different aspects of the case. The first was headed by Christine K. Ranney, associate dean of the graduate school. When Ms. Demas arrived for her scheduled interview, in June 1996, she was told by Ms. Ranney that the interview had been canceled and that the committee was being disbanded. Ms. Demas never received an explanation for the cancellation, and Ms. Ranney refers all questions about the matter to the university’s lawyer.

Another faculty committee, headed by W. Ronnie Coffman, associate dean of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, was to investigate the misreported data in the Agriculture Department grant application. In a letter, the panel found that mistake “inconsequential,” but Mr. Coffman and the two other professors were alarmed by the other allegations raised by Ms. Demas. They wrote a separate letter in which they told Daryl B. Lund, dean of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, that they were “of the unanimous opinion that Professor Levitsky’s actions ... represent inappropriate behavior for faculty.”

But Mr. Lund did not release that second letter. He would later say that members of the Coffman committee “were not asked to give their opinion, and I was not seeking their advice.” Instead, Mr. Lund issued his own report, which would be Cornell’s last official word on the case.

He found that Mr. Levitsky “could have been more forthright” and that he “appears to have been insensitive and careless in attributing the idea for the basis of the work to Dr. Demas.” But, Mr. Lund concluded, Mr. Levitsky’s actions did not constitute plagiarism or misconduct.

The three original members of Ms. Demas’s dissertation committee fired off an acerbic response. They called the Lund report “woefully remiss” and said it marked the culmination of the administration’s attempt to “whitewash” the affair. They were especially incensed by the one sanction Mr. Lund did impose. He required Mr. Levitsky to have either the nutrition-division director or the associate dean review all papers, reports, and grants the professor wrote related to the Trumansburg study, to “ensure attribution for the novel and pioneering ideas brought forth by Dr. Antonia Demas.”

“If he didn’t do anything wrong,” Ms. Demas asks, “why do they need a babysitter?”

Maybe this is when Ms. Demas should have walked away. Cornell, after four investigations, had issued what it felt was the final word. Perhaps she should have just gotten on with her life. She didn’t.

Ms. Demas and her committee kept pushing the university to stop Mr. Levitsky and to acknowledge that she had been wronged. Support came from several powerful alumnae who served on the President’s Council of Cornell Women. Elsie Dinsmore Popkin, a North Carolina artist and 1958 graduate, took up the cause. She and other alumnae see this as a fight to save the university’s dignity. “They have so destroyed what the university stands for,” she says.

After Ms. Popkin and others asked Cornell administrators to explain their side of the Demas debacle, in 1998, the provost, Don M. Randel, spoke to about 70 members of the alumnae group, many of whom knew little about the case. He destroyed any hope the Demas believers had of garnering more support from the group. According to Ms. Popkin, Mr. Randel, now president of the University of Chicago, made a number of false statements, including that Mr. Levitsky had done the quantitative analysis, that the government grant had been terminated merely for minor budgetary irregularities, and that the ombudsman’s report had cleared Mr. Levitsky. Most outrageous to her, Mr. Randel suggested that Ms. Demas’s Ph.D. was suspect because she had failed to cite two important sources -- a West Virginia pamphlet that was actually published after her dissertation, and a 1961 home-economics textbook called Teaching Nutrition. (The former provost declined to comment on Ms. Demas’s case.)

Mr. Randel’s remarks were the final straw for Ms. Demas, who had been considering a lawsuit against the university. In March 1999, she sued Cornell and Mr. Levitsky in state court in Ithaca, making 14 claims, including fraud, negligence, breach of contract, and misappropriation of her ideas. She sought $20-million in punitive damages.

In defending Cornell, administrators do not hold Mr. Levitsky blameless. Even Mr. Stein, who condoned Mr. Levitsky’s conduct, acknowledges now that it might have been “bad pool.” Instead, Cornell’s defense has been to distance the institution from the professor. It’s working.

While an early court ruling favored Ms. Demas, in February a New York appeals court struck a serious blow to her case. It agreed with Cornell’s argument that the university should not be held liable for Mr. Levitsky’s conduct because Ms. Demas has not claimed that his actions furthered the university’s interests -- a crucial element to any claim against the institution. “The acts as alleged,” Cornell’s lawyers argued, “directly depart from the duties of a tenured professor at Cornell.”

Ms. Demas’s lawyer hopes to appeal part of that ruling, arguing that Mr. Levitsky was acting as a Cornell professor and that the idea that he wasn’t furthering university interests is irrelevant.

What is Ethical?

Although the appeals court left standing several claims against the professor, Ms. Demas knows that it’s Cornell that has the deep pockets. A court judgment against Mr. Levitsky “may be a hollow victory,” her lawyer admits.

So Cornell may win in court, but that doesn’t mean the university is without blame, say Ms. Demas and her supporters. As Mr. Ascher, the anthropologist on her committee, puts it, “we’re a university,” and Cornell lost track of “what is ethical, proper, moral, and what is legal.”

Ms. Demas now runs a one-woman nonprofit institute that draws on her research. Winning grants is hard because of the Agriculture Department fiasco, but she says she has introduced her curriculum in 70 elementary schools around the country.

In between refining the curriculum and putting in hours preparing her legal case, she dreams about the future. She longs to move away from Ithaca, maybe to someplace warm. She makes imaginary plans for a big celebratory dinner (vegetarian, of course) at the campus hotel, once she wins.

But for now, this educator, cook, and mother can’t get her mind off Mr. Levitsky and the “bad guys” at Cornell. Back home in Trumansburg, after picking at the breakfast of avocado, torte, and tofu, she steps outside to get her latest order from Amazon.com. She rips open the cardboard to reveal Thomas Mallon’s book Stolen Words: The Classic Book on Plagiarism.

FIGHTING FOR THE TRUTH

The research

Fall 1991 Antonia Demas begins her Ph.D. in education at Cornell University, selecting the three members of her dissertation committee.

September 1993 Ms. Demas starts a yearlong school-lunch research project at Trumansburg Elementary School, in New York.

October Ms. Demas says that David A. Levitsky, a nutrition professor, asks to be on her committee and she adds him.

June 1994 Ms. Demas wins two national awards for the school-lunch project.

Fall Ms. Demas works on her dissertation and talks to Mr. Levitsky about pursuing a U.S. Department of Agriculture grant to expand the research. The two feud over when Ms. Demas will be put on the university’s payroll.

October Mr. Levitsky tells two committee members and Ms. Demas that federal funds have been approved, although Agriculture Department records show he did not submit the grant application until January 1995. He submits an application that does not mention Ms. Demas and fails to list her as the co-principal investigator, as she claims he promised.

January 1995 Ms. Demas is awarded a Ph.D. in education by Cornell and given a one-year appointment as a research associate in nutrition.

May Mr. Levitsky removes Ms. Demas from the federal-grant project.

May 1996 Mr. Levitsky writes to the Journal of Nutrition Education, telling the editor that he should be listed as co-author on any paper Ms. Demas submits.

December The Agriculture Department terminates the grant, saying that Mr. Levitsky’s progress reports have been inadequate and that he is doing work outside the original proposal.

Allegations and investigations

April 1995 Richard G. Warner, Cornell’s ombudsman, gives “substantial merit” to Ms. Demas’s claim that Mr. Levitsky was failing to give her credit in public presentations.

May 1996 Peter Stein, the dean of the faculty, finds that many of the misconduct claims filed against Mr. Levitsky aren’t covered by university policy, and that the professor’s “preemption of Demas’s ideas . . . lies within the boundary of permissible academic entrepreneurial behavior.” But allegations of Mr. Levitsky’s misrepresentation of data, says Mr. Stein, warrant more investigation.

June A committee led by Christine K. Ranney, associate dean of the graduate school, is formed to investigate many of the allegations, then disbands after conducting one interview. Ms. Demas says she is told that documents she gave to the committee were shredded.

September A faculty committee led by W. Ronnie Coffman, associate dean of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, finds Mr. Levitsky not guilty of the one charge of academic misconduct -- misrepresentation of data -- it was asked to look into. But its members find Mr. Levitsky’s failure to cite Ms. Demas to be “inappropriate behavior for faculty.”

October Daryl B. Lund, dean of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, takes over the investigation. He has concerns about Mr. Levitsky’s actions, but thinks they fail to “constitute plagiarism or, ultimately, misconduct.” The three original graduate-committee members protest Mr. Lund’s decision.

March 1998 Don M. Randel, Cornell’s provost, publicly supports Mr. Levitsky, saying that the professor did the study’s quantitative analysis and that the ombudsman cleared Mr. Levitsky of wrongdoing.

The litigation

March 1999 Ms. Demas sues Mr. Levitsky and Cornell, alleging misappropriation of her idea, fraud, breach of contract, negligence, and defamation.

December 2000 A New York judge allows all 14 of Ms. Demas’s claims to remain despite motions to dismiss them by Cornell and Mr. Levitsky, who then appeal.

February 2002 A state appeals court tosses out several of the complaints against Cornell, saying the university cannot be held vicariously liable for actions by Mr. Levitsky that were “unrelated to the furtherance of Cornell’s business.” Complaints against Mr. Levitsky, as well as one defamation claim against the university, remain.

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