Glenn Poshard

Glenn Poshard
Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Illinois's 22nd and 19th district
In office January 3, 1989 – January 3, 1999
Preceded by	Kenneth J. Gray
Succeeded by	David D. Phelps
Personal details
Political party	Democratic

Glenn Poshard (born October 30, 1945 in Herald, Illinois) is a former Illinois State Senator, U.S. Congressman, Gubernatorial Candidate, and is currently President of the Southern Illinois University system.

Early career

Glenn Poshard is a three-degree graduate of Southern Illinois University. He received a bachelor's degree in secondary education in 1970, a master's degree in educational administration in 1974 and a Ph.D. in administration of higher education in 1984. After graduating from college, he taught high school, coached high school sports, and served as director of the Southern Illinois Educational Service Center in Benton, Illinois from 1975 to 1982.

He served in the Illinois State Senate from 1984 to 1988.

Congressional service

Poshard ran for U.S. Representative from Illinois' 22nd Congressional District and was elected in 1988, where he served until 1992 when he was forced to run in the 19th district because of redistricting. After fending off a challenge from fellow incumbent Democrat Terry L. Bruce, he represented the 19th district in the United States House of Representatives from 1993 to 1998. As Congressman, he was considered to be a social conservative and fiscal populist; he was opposed to abortion, gay marriage, and the death penalty largely on religious grounds, and opposed free trade agreements and encouraged fiscal responsibility.

Gubernatorial campaign

In 1998 Glenn Poshard ran for governor against Republican Secretary of State George Ryan. He was considered by many to be to the right of his centrist opponent — specifically on issues like abortion, which gained him the support of many social conservatives who would normally vote Republican but also cost him some support from Chicago liberals.

Poshard strongly supported campaign finance reform. In his campaign, Poshard severely curtailed contributions to his campaign, refusing to accept any corporate or special interest group donations and limiting private donations to a small amount per individual. Because of his stance on campaign finances, Poshard faced a significant financial disadvantage in the campaign against Ryan and was outspent by a roughly 4 to 1 margin.

Glenn Poshard was first to alert the public about George Ryan's connection to the "licenses for bribes" scandal and other corruption. Some individuals, even prominent Democrats like former Senator Paul Simon, criticized Poshard for his attacks on Ryan's corruption. Simon and others were proven wrong several years later when Ryan was indicted in late 2003 on 22 counts of racketeering conspiracy, mail and tax fraud, and false statements charges alleging public corruption during his terms as Illinois Secretary of State and as Governor. Ryan was subsequently convicted and was sentenced to serve six and a half years in prison.

Poshard lost the Governor's race to Ryan by a 47%-51% margin. In his concession speech, Poshard declared that "no purpose is served by anger or resentment. No good is served by dropping out of the system in the future. The time for disappointment is only for this evening. Tomorrow we go back to work."

Continued public service

After he left Congress, Poshard and his wife Jo founded the Poshard Foundation for Abused Children, which raises more than $100,000 annually to fund care for abused children and other victims of domestic abuse throughout southern Illinois. Among its many activities, the Poshard Foundation led efforts to construct a new $600,000 women's shelter in Cairo, Illinois that opened in December 2003.

Poshard also served for four years as the Vice Chancellor for Administration at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, before Governor Rod Blagojevich appointed him to the Southern Illinois University Board of Trustees in January 2004. He was later elected Chairman of the Board of Trustees. He resigned his position on the Board of Trustees in 2005 when he announced his candidacy for the presidency of the Southern Illinois University system.

President of Southern Illinois University

The Southern Illinois University Board of Trustees announced that they had selected Glenn Poshard to serve as President of the system on Friday, November 18, 2005. He took office on January 1, 2006.

Plagiarism Controversy

.[7] In 2004, SIU’s Edwardsville campus dismissed an untenured professor for plagiarizing his statement of teaching philosophy. The dismissed professor, claiming that his firing was pretextual and had violated SIUE procedures, sued SIU. A group of supporters, terming themselves "Alumni and Faculty Against Corruption at SIU” (AFAC) , gathered evidence of other instances of what they claimed was plagiarism by SIU faculty and staff. Later, AFAC discovered that passages from SIUC’s new strategic plan, “Southern at 150," were apparently borrowed from Texas A&M’s “Vision 2020.”

At some point, members of AFAC approached Poshard and threatened to reveal what they believed to be instances of uncredited quotes from Poshard's dissertation unless he agreed to re-hire the professor. Poshard has referred to members of AFAC “academic terrorists” for their conduct. After Poshard refused to re-hire the fired professor, an unknown source linked to AFAC subsequently supplied The Daily Egyptian with evidence of problems with Poshard’s own scholarly work.[8]

In August 2007, Southern Illinois University-Carbondale’s student newspaper, the Daily Egyptian, published evidence that Poshard had plagiarized passages in his doctoral dissertation, completed in the University’s Department of Higher Education in 1984.[9] The Daily Egyptian then published passages from Poshard's dissertation that apparently had been taken from other sources without either quotation marks or citations or both.[10]. On September 10, The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that "There are so many examples of such practices that the dissertation seems as if it has been cut-and-pasted from other sources" [11]. The Chronicle soon noted similar, but less extensive, problems with Poshard’s master’s thesis.[12]

Poshard asked Gerald Nelms, an associate professor in the SIUC English Department and past Director of SIUC's Communication Across the Curriculum program, to investigate whether he had, in fact, plagiarized. Nelms taught courses in plagiarism and consulted with faculty and students on issues of plagiarism. Nelms report was written for Poshard personally and was not part of the official investigation into the plagiarism accusations. Nelms claimed that graduate student Glenn Poshard had committed an error students often make in the process of writing from research. The novice writer will produce a lengthy summary of one important source in support of a point and then later, introduce information from other sources into that same discussion such that the original summary is broken up and the citation that once clearly referred to the entire summary now referred only to a part of that original summary. If the student, then, does not go back and carefully recite the now separate parts, then she or he will appear to have plagiarized. In fact, Nelms found that virtually all of the questioned sections of both the Poshard's dissertation and thesis appeared in his literature reviews and emerged from the above common error students make in the process of writing.[13]

Nelms did not label this error as plagiarism, since the sources for these now separate and inadequately cited sections of discourse were cited in the literature reviews. Many definitions of plagiarism require intent, and Nelms did not find any evidence of an intent to plagiarize. He concluded that Poshard's dissertation and thesis did include erroneous citations but that there was no evidence of any academic dishonesty.

Poshard publicly responded to the evidence by admitting there might have been citation errors, and pointing out that citation practices in his department and in academia at the time were casual and noting that his dissertation committee had approved his work. In a taped interview with The Southern Illinoisan, he suggested that, had he intended to hide his scholarly debts, he would not have cited the sources of most plagiarized sections in close proximity. He also suggested that though he “would never offer it up as an excuse...at that point in my life, I had a family. I worked two jobs. I was running for the Illinois State Senate. I was trying to get my dissertation finished."[14]

Poshard asked that the department in which he completed his dissertation review the evidence of plagiarism and render an opinion, but it refused.[15] SIUC’s new chancellor then appointed a committee made up of faculty from SIUC to pass judgment on their president[16], provoking calls for an outside investigation[17]. The review committee found that "There are many instances in the dissertation where the words of others are present in a continuous flow with student Poshard's own words, so that readers cannot distinguish between those sources"[18], but it also confirmed that scholarly standards in Poshard’s department had been deficient generally.

The committee concluded that his plagiarism was "inadvertent" and recommended that he be allowed to revise the dissertation. It also called for the original document to be removed from the SIUC library and University Microfilms and the corrected version be substituted for it. The SIU Board of Trustees, which had supported Poshard throughout the controversy[19] and included a member from the department in question, accepted the committee's recommendations.[20]

Several public figures joined the SIU Board of Trustees and the local newspaper, The Southern Illinoisan, in coming to Poshard’s defense. Senator Dick Durbin issued a statement calling Poshard "an extraordinary person whose talents and integrity have made him one of the most effective university presidents I have ever worked with."[21]. Williamson County District Attorney Charles Garnati published letters in the Southern Illinoisan and the Daily Egyptian suggesting that members of AFAC be investigated.[22]

In late 2008, Southern Illinois University officials drafted a controversial Plagiarism policy intended to take effect by February, 2009.[23] The proposed policy would give university officials the right to punish those making "frivolous or malicious" complaints of plagiarism against the "chancellor or members of the university president's office."[24] SIU Law Professor Leonard Gross, who is also the chairman of the Southern Illinois Chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, objected to those provisions.[25] "Apparently you can file a truthful charge, but if they find it's malicious then they can charge you. This is just ridiculous in the extreme," Gross said.[26]

Gerald Nelms stated in a news interview in the December 5, 2008 Daily Egyptian that the "intent of the accuser" as determined through an investigation made by a committee appointed by the university, would determine if the accuser would be punished.[27] It is worth noting that Nelms provided The Daily Egyptian with extensive scholarly material on plagiarism, which the DE appeared to ignore. In its reporting of the recommended plagiarism policy, then, the DE failed to adequately describe the plagiarism committee's recommendations. In a Comment written in below the DE's December 5, 2008, news article, Nelms stated that he believed the recommended policy does not give the university the right to arbitrarily punish those that make plagiarism accusations. He went on to explain that the complainant could be punished if the investigative committee determines the complaint is frivolous or malicious. He also noted that some accusations could be true but could also be malicious. [28]

The same day, December 5, 2008, the Daily Egyptian editorial staff published a group editorial strongly opposing the proposed policy[29] and inviting readers to see the whole policy online.[30]

Three days later, December 8, 2008, John Haller, Vice President of Academic Affairs, wrote a guest column in the Daily Egyptian in which he stated that it is against law and university policy to retaliate against an individual who makes allegations or complaints about plagiarism. Haller then stated that the next provision in the proposed policy gives the right to the university to punish a member of the university community or to file a civil lawsuit against a member of the public for making "frivolous or malicious charges" against the university chancellor, president, and those working directly for them—with the determination of the allegation being "frivolous or malicious" made by university employees appointed by the chancellor or president.[31]

The same day, December 8, 2008, a guest column by Danny Wenger, an SIU student, objected to the proposed policy on the bases that it is a violation of Constitutional Free Speech because the university officials are government officials and thus must be held accountable, that the legal standard is higher in determining if a public official has been defamed than it is for a private citizen, that a seemingly-frivolous charge can also be true, and that the university officials will be the ones to appoint the group that is to investigate whether an allegation is frivolous or malicious.[32]

The following day, December 9, 2008, the Daily Egyptian staff published an editorial stating that any plagiarism policy should be clearly worded, should have no double standards and should apply equally to all in the university community, and that the university should rethink the acceptability of "inadvertent plagiarism," which is what Dr. Gerald Nelms had decided was committed by Glenn Poshard in writing his dissertation.[33] The editorial then responds to the attacks made against the Daily Egyptian staff by university officials by stating that the paper will continue to cover the issue and express opinion.[34] Sean McGahan, the Northeastern University student and Boston Globe reporter who had been covering the story, had been virulently attacked in a Guest Column written by John Haller,[35] as well as in a lengthy Comment written under the name of Gerald Nelms, which names Sean McGahan and gives Nelms' views of his conversations with McGahan and what he thinks McGahan should have reported.[36]

Electoral history

• 1998 election for Governor
  • George Ryan (R), 51%
  • Glenn Poshard (D), 47%

External links

• United States Congress. "Glenn Poshard (id: P000452)". Biographical Directory of the United States Congress.
• Biography from Southern Illinois University