/ 18 September 2007

Fight to stop ‘academic thuggery’

The higher education system and individual institutions need to act on the practice whereby some senior academics allegedly plagiarise the work of students. So say Dr Fulufhelo Netswera, a research director at Unisa, and Ndinannyi Malada, a higher education researcher at the Centre for Education Policy Development.

The higher education system and individual institutions need to act on the practice whereby some senior academics allegedly plagiarise the work of students.

So say Dr Fulufhelo Netswera, a research director at Unisa, and Ndinannyi Malada, a higher education researcher at the Centre for Education Policy Development.

They have been conducting research — in their personal capacities — into what they call ‘academic thuggery”.

Netswera and Malada say a growing number of postgraduate students discover that parts of their dissertations have been published as articles in journals, under their supervisors’ names without their prior knowledge or consent. Furthermore, some supervisors present their students’ work at conferences, without the acknowledgement or consent of the students.

They want institutions to go beyond their usual structures, such as ethics committees, by appointing an ombudsman to protect students and to publicise the rights of students. They also are appealing to the Council on Higher Education’s Higher Education Quality Committee to look into this malpractice.

Another recommendation is that the higher education system formally requires that PhD students publish parts of their work before they obtain their doctorates; that they be allowed to be the lead authors of publications as well as present papers at conferences with their supervisors.

Dr Albert van Jaarsveld, vice-president of the National Research Foundation (NRF), points out that all academic institutions already encourage students to publish their own work, with or without their supervisors.

‘It sometimes does happen that students fail to publish their work and simply walk away from their research leaving the institution with a large investment in work that might never see the light of day. Under these circumstances supervisors are encouraged to publish this work, but with students as co-authors,” he says.

However, Netswera and Malada say they are referring to clear-cut cases of top-down plagiarism.

In one case, a researcher produced 15 peer-reviewed articles from basic research in one year, but her name appears as a supervisor to students whose dissertation titles tally with the topics of all her articles.

In another instance a PhD graduate who is a researcher at a university of technology in Gauteng told Higher Learning that his supervisor informed him that he was presenting a paper at an international conference in Taiwan. The graduate, who was about to receive his PhD, asked to see the paper, but was ignored. On googling his name a few months later, the graduate discovered he was the third author of the paper presented in Taiwan. He found that a section of his dissertation had been re-formatted as a paper with his supervisor as the lead author and a second author who had nothing to do with the research. ‘I was shocked as I was the inventor of that wheel,” he says.

Before the conference the graduate had submitted the same section of his dissertation as a paper to a department of education accredited scientific journal for publication. Now he has to withdraw it because it had been published already by his then supervisor and he might be accused of plagiarising work that he in fact produced.

‘I would have received 70% of a nearly R83 000 subsidy allocation to my university and was hoping to build my research funds. I’m still crawling in the academic field and taking legal action will be a costly exercise,” the distraught graduate says.

Netswera and Malada say students are cautious about objecting to this malpractice as ‘they are afraid their supervisor could fail them. Many students do not know that their work might have been plagiarised as they qualify and go into industry and do not read academic journals.”

Malada says many institutions try to ‘silence” staff who are aware of the malpractice as they fear for their reputation.

One reason for academic thuggery is the ‘mounting pressure on academics to increase research outputs in the form of publications and postgraduate students.”

Universities receive subsidies for work published under their names that complies with the department of education’s criteria. This could be close to R100 000 per unit. In most institutions there are internal formulae for devolving some of this income to the researchers who generated the work and a supervisor would normally be awarded some research money for some outputs generated by themselves or even their previous students.

But the NRF’s Van Jaarsveld says the current subsidy scheme is not necessarily the driver of unethical practice. Instead he speaks about competitiveness in the academic world. ‘This is a global phenomenon. The reality is that academics who do not regularly produce research outputs find their careers under pressure and might miss out on promotion opportunities. This, I consider, plays a bigger role in unethical practices than the existing subsidy scheme.”

Speaking on behalf of the sector, Duma Malaza, chief executive of Higher Education South Africa (Hesa) says the question of ‘top-down” plagiarism has not been raised within the organisation’s ranks.

He says most institutions have codes of practice for students and supervisors, and channels for airing grievances. Unisa is one institution that already has an ombudsman to deal with student and staff grievances.

Universities say they would act against academics found guilty of inappropriate use of their students’ work.

Professor Robin Crewe, vice- principal of the University of Pretoria (UP), says the ‘question of ‘plagiarism’ is often complicated by the student-mentor relationship and competing claims to the intellectual effort”.

Crewe says UP encourages ‘students and staff to reach an agreement in advance of undertaking research about authorship of material that might result from the research”.

The University of Cape Town’s executive director for communications and marketing, Gerda Kruger, says in the case of a co-authored publication by a student and her/his research supervisor that is substantially based on the student’s dissertation or thesis, the student will normally be the first author. This condition might be waived if the student plays little or no role in the preparation of the work for publication. In such an instance, the student will be the second author.

She says authors should be able to provide a description of what each has contributed. All others who contribute to the work, who are not authors, should be named in the acknowledgements, with a description of the work they did.

Highlighting the ‘complex” relationship when people work together on research, Professor Frederick Fourie, vice-chancellor of the University of the Free State (UFS), says this could give rise to conflict around the order of names when work is published.

Fourie, who has been supervising PhD students in economics, while leading the institution for the past five years, says he believes students should publish work while they’re still obtaining their PhDs.

He says given the ‘weak” positions in which students sometimes find themselves, compared with their supervisors, it makes sense to establish a channel that students could use if they felt aggrieved.

A university research office, which is being established at UFS, might be the right place where such a channel should be located, he says.