The University of Nevada at Las Vegas has fired Mustapha Marrouchi, a professor of postcolonial literature, based on its finding that he plagiarized the work of numerous other scholars, according to documents it released to The Chronicle on Monday in response to an open-records request.
Donald D. Snyder, the university’s president, told the professor in a letter dated November 7 that he was firing Mr. Marrouchi for cause, effective immediately, based on the conclusions of a special hearing officer and the recommendations of a special hearing committee.
The five-member hearing committee had unanimously found Mr. Marrouchi guilty of academic dishonesty and of misconduct deemed serious enough to render him unfit to remain in his job in the university’s English department.
The committee voted, 4 to 1, in favor of his dismissal, with the dissenter arguing that instead he should be suspended for a year and required to forfeit six years’ worth of pay increases, apologize to his victims, undergo ethics training, and submit to plagiarism-software analysis any scholarly work he intends to submit to publishers over the next three years.
Mr. Marrouchi chose neither to appear nor to have his lawyer, L. Kristopher Rath of Las Vegas, appear at the special hearing held in his case in October. Mr. Marrouchi could not be reached for comment on Monday, and Mr. Rath did not return several calls seeking comment.
Lori J. Olafson, executive director of the university’s Office of Research Integrity, testified at the hearing held in Mr. Marrouchi’s case that a computer analysis of 26 articles he wrote from 2008 to 2013 found evidence of plagiarism in 23 of them, according to the report of the special officer overseeing those proceedings. The report says Ms. Olafson cited more than a dozen scholars whose work Mr. Marrouchi had used without credit or attribution.
Robert A. Leonard, a professor of linguistics at Hofstra University, similarly testified that his own computer analysis of Mr. Marrouchi’s writings had found levels of similarity with other scholars’ work best explained as the result of direct copying.
In late August, The Chronicle published an article documenting how Mr. Marrouchi had repeatedly used other scholars’ work without attribution over the past 24 years, and twice before coming to work at UNLV had been publicly accused of acts of plagiarism for which he apologized.
