Professor gives up chair amid plagiarism scandal

His lawyer said the theses' authors were sloppy but not cheaters.
ATHENS, Ohio (AP) -- The chairman of Ohio University's mechanical engineering department is stepping down, a month after a university committee recommended he be fired for allowing plagiarism within the department's graduate program.
Jay Gunasekera's five-year term as head of the department is expiring, his lawyer John Marshall said.
The contract of a second faculty member, Bhavin Mehta, will not be renewed next year, partly because he supervised some theses that contained plagiarism, university legal affairs director John Burns said.
The school began investigating the department two years ago after a graduate student told officials he found plagiarized passages while reviewing theses archived in a university library. A committee identified 21 theses dating back 20 years that contained passages copied from published materials or previous students' work.
The professor's retort
Marshall maintains his client was not at fault.
"There has been no real plagiarism. Other than being sloppy, these students were not trying to get away with anything," Marshall said. "None of the so-called plagiarism had anything to do with the originality of the research. It was students' copying introductory information leading up to their research."
Gunasekera has led the department for 15 years, supervising a number of the theses identified in the plagiarism probe.
In May, a committee recommended that Gunasekera and Mehta be fired and a third professor be placed on two years of probation, saying they were complicit in the plagiarism.
No decision has been announced regarding Gunasekera's future with the school. Board of Trustees Chairman Greg Browning said he expects the university will follow through on the committee's recommendation to fire him. Burns said the university will decide in the fall after consulting with the rest of the mechanical engineering faculty.
Burns said the school was sending letters this week to the 55 students whose theses are in question, outlining their options to respond to the accusations.