Charges of plagiarism levied by a professor in Penn's Sociology Department have raised questions about how the University community deals with issues of academic integrity.
Last week, Sociology professor emeritus Harold Bershady accused his colleague Kathryn Edin of lifting the "analytic scheme" of her new book from work done by fellow Sociology professor Elijah Anderson.
In doing so, Bershady revived a months-old controversy that many in Penn's Sociology Department thought had already been put to rest.
Bershady sent an e-mail memo last Thursday to all University Sociology faculty, condemning Edin for taking concepts in her new book Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage "practically wholesale from Anderson."
Although Anderson's work is named in the bibliography of Promises I Can Keep -- and some scholars in the field say the book properly gives credit to his ideas -- Bershady said that Edin and her co-author, St. Joseph's University sociology professor Maria Kefalas, owed Anderson more credit.
After mediation sessions between Edin and Anderson earlier this year, no formal complaint was filed against Edin.
But in his memo, Bershady said that "decisive action should be taken soon."
"Anything less than a full and frank public accounting will, I think, serve to heighten suspicion over and cast further doubt on the scholarly integrity of the department and the University," he added.
But School of Arts and Sciences Dean Rebecca Bushnell says that the controversy over the academic integrity of Promises I Can Keep had already been internally resolved months ago.
After the University of California Press published Edin's book in March, she and Anderson met with SAS and Sociology Department administrators to discuss the overlaps in their research.
"The [Sociology] Department and the school did act responsibly in convening people to discuss it and to reach a resolution," Bushnell said. "It's best if you can resolve it informally and with consultation and mediation."
Bushnell said she could not divulge the terms of Edin and Anderson's agreement, but said that they had reached a resolution to which both professors had agreed.
Penn's faculty handbook says that University employees are asked to resolve questions of academic integrity at the departmental level.
If those efforts fail, individuals can file a formal complaint with the Faculty Senate, after which an official committee will investigate charges of plagiarism.
"A lot of things get resolved at [the departmental] level without having to go through official channels, and that's a good thing," Bushnell said.
Timothy Dodd, executive director of the Center for Academic Integrity at Duke University, said that this type of informal mediation is the most common way universities deal with questions of academic integrity.
And a complaint like Bershady's -- which comes several months after Edin and Anderson mutually agreed upon a resolution -- is quite unusual.
"I've been around for almost 25 years dealing with this kind of stuff, and often it's hard to separate the political from the principled," Dodd said.
"I don't know if [Bershady's memo] is a political action taken against colleagues ... or whether this is truly a principled angst, [if] this is somebody who is deeply troubled by what he ... has seen and believes that the mediation was something of a whitewash," Dodd added.
