Gregory J. Vincent became president of Hobart and William Smith last year.U. of Texas at Austin
Hobart and William Smith Colleges is looking into allegations that its president, Gregory J. Vincent, plagiarized portions of the dissertation that earned him a doctorate in education.
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Gregory J. Vincent became president of Hobart and William Smith last year.U. of Texas at Austin
Hobart and William Smith Colleges is looking into allegations that its president, Gregory J. Vincent, plagiarized portions of the dissertation that earned him a doctorate in education.
The allegations surfaced recently in an anonymous email to The Chronicle and other news media, as well as to officials at Hobart and William Smith, in Geneva, N.Y., where Vincent was named president last year, and at the University of Pennsylvania, which awarded Vincent an Ed.D. in 2004.
The Chronicle asked the president’s office for comment and received this statement from Thomas S. Bozzuto, chair of the Board of Trustees: “Hobart and William Smith Colleges are aware of the allegations in the anonymous email and are committed to thoroughly and seriously investigating them. This process to examine the issue fully and fairly has already begun.”
The email alleges that the dissertation repeatedly uses long passages from other works without identifying them as such.
The Chronicle sent a message to the sender’s email address but did not receive a response.
The Chronicle also obtained a partial copy of Vincent’s dissertation and confirmed that it used language verbatim to that of another author in at least one of the examples.
Two sentences on Page 13 of Vincent’s dissertation are identical to passages that appeared in the bookUniversities and Their Leadership (Princeton University Press, 1998), edited by William G. Bowen and Harold T. Shapiro. Those passages are: “Bush proposed to institutionalize his program in a different National Science Foundation (NSF) that would be the flagship agency of basic research and training in all the major areas of science, including those related to medicine and the military” and “National Institutes of Health, which was established in 1948 as an umbrella to cover the National Cancer Institute and the new National Heart Institute and which now comprised five more research institutes, making a total of seven.”
Both passages can be found on Page 232 of Universities and Their Leadership.
Vincent’s career in higher education spans more than two decades. Before being named president of Hobart and William Smith, he spent 12 years at the University of Texas at Austin, most recently as vice president for diversity and community engagement.
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Gregory L. Fenves, president of the Austin campus, had praised Vincent’s track record as a university administrator, noting the key role that he played in Austin’s successful defense of its affirmative-action policies before the U.S. Supreme Court.
“When the court later ruled in our favor, it was a victory for UT and a victory for students across the nation,” Fenves said then. “Dr. Gregory Vincent helped make it possible.”
Correction (3/28/2018, 4:31 p.m.): This article originally misidentified the degree Vincent received at the University of Pennsylvania. It was an Ed.D., not a Ph.D. The article has been updated to reflect this correction.
Michael Vasquez is a senior investigative reporter for The Chronicle. Before joining The Chronicle, he led a team of reporters as education editor for Politico, where he spearheaded the team’s 2016 Campaign coverage of education issues. Mr. Vasquez began his reporting career at the Miami Herald, where he worked for 14 years, covering both politics and education.
