Tuesday, December 2, 2014

Actually, he's out

As of December 2, the faculty page of the University of Nevada-Las Vegas offers this dignified notice: "Dr. Mustapha Marrouchi is no longer a member of the faculty at UNLV’s Department of English."  Plagiarizing from over 160 sources, in works ranging from his dissertation to recent articles, is, it seems, a bit too much. Was it the 134th theft that was the tipping point?  By that 150th stolen paragraph, the university decided that enough was enough? (Although 1 person voted not to fire him, fearing, apparently, a rush to judgment.)  But the Cabinet should not snark. Slow as it was, UNLV, unlike ASU, did in the end act.  This long saga was primarily a failure of a scholarly community, not of a bureaucracy.  Or is there not a difference?