Plagiarism appears to be an act that some in academe cannot resist duplicating.
Mustapha Marrouchi, a professor of postcolonial literature at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, is facing accusations of dozens of acts of plagiarism over the past 24 years, even after twice previously being publicly called out for lifting the words of other scholars.
The documented instances of Mr. Marrouchi’s quoting the works of others without attribution include passages in his books, essays, blog posts, and course descriptions. They begin with his 1990 dissertation as a doctoral student at the University of Toronto, extend through his four years on the faculty of Louisiana State University’s English department, and continue up through three journal articles published last year.
In some cases, he is accused of improperly claiming as his own entire essays by other writers in which he changed just a few words. In a 2008 essay on Al Qaeda published in the journal Callaloo, for example, he reprinted, without attribution, much of a review of the movie 300 written by the New Yorker staff writer David Denby the year before. In a 1992 incident which marks the first time he was publicly accused of plagiarism, Queen’s Quarterly published an essay by Mr. Marrouchi that repeated almost verbatim the content of another writer’s essay in the London Review of Books.
Mr. Marrouchi could not be reached by telephone on Tuesday and Wednesday and did not return several emails seeking comment.
Administrators at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, citing a policy against commenting on personnel matters, refused to discuss the allegations against Mr. Marrouchi or to say anything about him other than that he remains on the faculty there. Several faculty members in the university’s English department, where he has worked since 2008, similarly refused to comment on the accusations against him.
A source familiar with the investigation of Mr. Marrouchi said, however, that the university’s Office of Research Integrity had completed its investigation of him in April and has since subjected him to disciplinary proceedings that remain open. A second source, a member of the university’s faculty who is familiar with the allegations against Mr. Marrouchi, said that “almost everyone in the English department knows that this has happened and that he is under investigation,” and that many have reacted with “shock and disgust” and calls for his dismissal from the faculty.
“My sense is that it is being taken very seriously,” the source said. But administrators have not told faculty members there where the disciplinary proceedings against Mr. Marrouchi stand, the second source added. Both sources requested anonymity, citing the possibility of retaliation.
Hollow Apologies?
Jonathan Bailey, a copyright and plagiarism consultant who edits the blog Plagiarism Today, said serial plagiarists are rare in academe. That is partly, he said, because public exposure of the offense often is fatal to academic careers, and partly because most scholars accused of plagiarism “learn their lesson and don’t repeat the infraction.”
Mr. Marrouchi, however, appears to have weathered two accusations of plagiarism in the first half of his career.
In the 1992 incident involving an essay he wrote for Queen’s Quarterly, a journal published at Queen’s University in Ontario, Mr. Marrouchi was accused of lifting from the London Review of Books almost an entire essay by W.J.T. Mitchell, now editor of Critical Inquiry.
In an interview Tuesday, Mr. Mitchell recalled being surprised to see how little of his original essay had been changed by Mr. Marrouchi. “It was a strange thing,” he said.
Queens Quarterly acknowledged the plagiarism in a subsequent retraction. Mr. Mitchell said he later received a letter in which Mr. Marrouchi “apologized abjectly,” in a manner suggesting he was “very emotional and upset.”
Mr. Marrouchi left a position as an assistant professor at the University of Lethbridge, in Alberta, Canada, at about the time of the incident. Elizabeth Galway, chairwoman of the English department at Lethbridge, said in an email Wednesday that she did not know the reason for his departure, which predates her time there.
In 1999, Mr. Marrouchi faced a second public accusation of plagiarism. In a letter published in the London Review of Books, Steven Howe, a lecturer in politics at Ruskin College, in Oxford, England, alleged plagiarism in a letter Mr. Marrouchi had previously written to that publication about Gayatri Spivak, an Indian literary theorist.
“A particularly devastating polemic, I thought: vigorous, well informed, and spiced with some rather good jokes,” Mr. Howe wrote. “But then I would think that—for the letter is an almost verbatim, complete transcription of my review of Spivak’s previous book, published in the New Statesman in February 1994.” His letter went on to say “I have received an apology from Mr. Marrouchi.”
Hot Commodity
Mr. Marrouchi went on to work as a lecturer at the University of Toronto from 2000 until 2004. In 2004 he joined the faculty of the English department at Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge, where he rose from associate professor to professor before leaving for UNLV in 2008.
Anna Nardo, a professor of English at Louisiana State who was chairwoman of its English department during Mr. Marrouchi’s time there, said he left for UNLV because it offered a higher salary and a position for his wife. No accusations of plagiarism against him came up in Baton Rouge.
Kevin L. Cope, a professor of English at Louisiana State, recalls that “for his services there was a bidding war coming in and, likewise, a bidding war going out.”
“This is the kind of thing that happens in academic departments when there is too great an eagerness to follow fads,” said Mr. Cope, who attributed the high demand for Mr. Marrouchi to the scholar’s background in postcolonial and multiethnic literature and his expertise on Edward W. Said, the Palestinian American literary theorist who helped establish the field of postcolonial studies.
Mr. Marrouchi has been accused of plagiarizing from at least 160 different works over the course of his career. The journals that published articles in which he is accused of failing to properly credit other writers include Atlantic Studies, College English, Comparative Literature, the Journal of North African Studies, Le Monde Diplomatique, Philosophia Africana, and Southern Review.
