The Similarities of 2 Presidents’ Papers

Chief of Wesley College took credit for words that are almost identical to those of a peer

A paper that the president of Wesley College, Scott D. Miller, listed among his publications contains word-for-word sections from a speech written eight years earlier by Claire L. Gaudiani, president of Connecticut College.

In addition, a biography of Mr. Miller on the Delaware

college’s World Wide Web site contained misleading information about his inclusion in national publications that identify leading college presidents.

The similarities between the papers by the two presidents, which discuss “multiculturalism” in college curricula, were noticed recently by a freshman at Duke University, Seth R. Weitberg, who was doing research on education. He sent e-mail messages to Ms. Gaudiani and Mr. Miller notifying them of his discovery. Ms. Gaudiani then passed the message along to Michael A. Burlingame, a history professor at her college, indicating that he might find it interesting because of the attention he has drawn for leveling plagiarism charges against several scholars, he said.

Mr. Miller, the president of Wesley, a small Methodist college in Dover, Del., posted his paper, “In Pursuit of Global Civic Virtues” on the college’s Web site under a heading that said, “Occasional Papers of the President.” The title also appeared in a list of speeches and papers attributed to him. The list said the paper was “Published 8-1999.”

Mr. Miller this month removed the paper, the list, and his biography from the college’s Web site after a Chronicle reporter asked him about the similarities between the two speeches and about the biography. (The Chronicle had downloaded a copy of the paper; it may be read at http://chronicle.com/weekly/documents/v46/i36/4636miller.htm.)

Most of the paper repeats, word for word, sections of an essay with the same title that Ms. Gaudiani presented in 1991 to Connecticut College’s alumni association and at the annual meeting of the Association of American Colleges. (The essay is on the college’s Web site at http://www.conncoll.edu/ccadmin/gaudiani/writings/multiculturalism.html.) A longer version was published in the college association’s magazine in 1991.

The 1999 paper attributed to Mr. Miller substitutes “Wesley College” for “Connecticut College” in a couple of places. But it keeps Ms. Gaudiani’s 1991 references to a then-recent commencement speech by President Bush and to then- recent “cover stories in Time magazine.”

Mr. Miller acknowledged the similarities between the two papers. He said that he has “a number of people who do some drafting for me,” and that the paper was written in the early 1990’s, when he was president of Lincoln Memorial University, in Tennessee.

“I don’t remember the specifics of who wrote it,” Mr. Miller said. He said he reused the paper last summer for a speech to a small group at Wesley.

Despite the fact that Wesley’s Web site listed the paper as having been published last summer, Mr. Miller said, “This has not been published in any publication.”

“I really for the life of me can’t explain it,” he added. He said last week that he has spoken to the Connecticut president about the matter, in addition to removing the speech from Wesley’s Internet site.

Ms. Gaudiani said that while she was dismayed that Mr. Miller’s paper had borrowed heavily from hers, she had no plans to take legal action.

“I’m surprised that a person with the level of responsibility that a college president has would make a mistake like this, and I’m disappointed,” Ms. Gaudiani said. “It’s very difficult for those of us in academic institutions to hold students to higher standards if we don’t meet them ourselves.”

Meanwhile, the Duke student, Mr. Weitberg, was surprised to learn that his find had attracted notice beyond the two college presidents. The freshman, who is majoring in English, said he had discovered the two papers while searching a Duke-library database for an education class. “It just struck me at first,” he said. “Whole paragraphs were coming up the same, even in places where the names of the two colleges were being switched.”

Most faculty members at Wesley did not immediately hear the news about Mr. Miller’s paper, in part because the college took down its Web site for most of the day after The Chronicle’s first story about the questions appeared online. Susanne Fox, a history professor, said the president had instructed faculty members to turn off their computers that day because an e-mail virus had begun circulating worldwide.

She said she had read the article after a colleague at another institution faxed a copy to her. “It really shocked me,” she said. “I am just so disgusted.”

The chairman of Wesley’s Board of Trustees, Charles R. Dashiell Jr., said the board was scheduled to discuss the matter at a meeting late last week. He praised Mr. Miller’s leadership of the college. “His dedication to the position of president has been extraordinary,” Mr. Dashiell said.

Charles Hubbard, a vice president at Lincoln Memorial, who directs its Abraham Lincoln Library and Museum, said that Mr. Miller, when he was president there, had asked people on the campus to write documents that were officially attributed to Mr. Miller.

Mr. Hubbard did not know if the paper similar to the one by Ms. Gaudiani was one of those.

“He never quite had the respect for originality or scholarly work that I thought the president of a university should have,” Mr. Hubbard said. “That absence of real respect for scholarship would lead someone to plagiarize without even realizing it’s wrong.”

Mr. Burlingame, at Connecticut College, disagreed with that assessment. “You don’t need to have gone to graduate school to have learned this,” he said. “In the fourth grade, I was taught by Mrs. Grabowski that you can’t go to the World Book encyclopedia and copy the article for your report.”

A paragraph that until last week appeared in Mr. Miller’s biography on Wesley College’s Web site also raises questions.

“In recent years, Dr. Miller has gained wide-spread recognition as a leader among college and university presidents,” it states. “He was identified in the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania survey as one of the most effective college presidents in the nation, a Change magazine survey about effective young leaders in America, and a CASE survey of effective fund-raising chief executives.”

A Wharton spokeswoman said the school sponsors no such survey. And Mr. Miller was not listed among 40 “Young Leaders of the Academy” identified by Change in its 1997 leadership poll, which was published in early 1998.

Mr. Miller said he had received a letter in 1997 from Change requesting information for the survey, although he acknowledged that he was not among the finalists named in the magazine. He said a former college president had sent him a letter in 1998, saying that Mr. Miller had been identified in a Wharton professor’s survey on effective leaders in higher education.

As for the survey by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education cited in his biography, Mr. Miller said it actually was a book, The Advancement President and the Academy, published by the council. The book contains an appendix that “identifies effective fund-raising presidents,” he said.

A spokeswoman for the council said the appendix lists people who have moved from college-advancement positions to become presidents.

Mr. Miller later noted that he had received two awards from the council, in 1999 and 1994, for excellence in the development programs at Wesley and at Lincoln Memorial.

2 Presidents’ Talks

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