The former acting vice-chancellor of Vista University, Professor Sipho Seepe, has accepted responsibility for ”sloppiness” in an essay he wrote after it was pointed out that certain passages are identical to those on a number of websites.
The essay was published in the book Towards an African Identity in Higher Education.
He is now the academic director of the Henley Management School in Gauteng.
An anonymous researcher pointed out in an e-mail sent to the media that passages in Seepe’s essay about the economist John Keynes and African scholarship are identical to those on a variety of websites. Seepe did not acknowledge the sources in his essay.
Seepe’s co-author, the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s vice-chancellor Malegapuru Makgoba, has offered to allow his computer to be examined to prove he never visited websites from which sections of the essay were apparently lifted.
”It would have been a nice story if I was found guilty, but people have tried to shoot me, and they always miss,” he told Sapa on Thursday.
”I have never written an article in which I have taken information from websites, and the websites that are being referred to in the current article, I have never seen.”
Makgoba told Sapa on Thursday that he and Seepe each wrote parts of the essay. His contribution had been a section on ”what an African university is”.
Academic colleagues to whom a draft was circulated had suggested the inclusion of material about Cairo’s historic Al-Azhar University and Timbuktu as a centre of learning, and Seepe had dealt with that.
Makgoba said that Seepe, who is currently overseas, had on Wednesday night sent him a copy of an e-mail he had prepared in response to media queries.
It said: ”It should be evident [to] any reader that the article in question is extensively referenced, and that failure to have included the said references reflects sloppiness on my part.
”In the final analysis I edited and collated the materials in the book and therefore take responsibility for the sloppiness that led to the final version of the article and any other material in the book.” – Sapa