Three professors at Fudan University have been punished and two
postgraduate students expelled following investigations into three
cases of plagiarism, Fudan officials announced yesterday.
Fudan's academic ethics committee has suggested the university
not renew a work contract with Lu Xiaoyong, a retiring professor at
Fudan's foreign language school.
Chi Fanglu, professor at the university's affiliated medical
school, and Gu Ning, associate dean of Fudan's school of
information technology, have been deprived of the right to enroll
postgraduate students for the next two years.
It is the first time the 102-year-old university has published
details of punishment for academic plagiarism since it introduced
an ethics code in 2005.
"Fudan deserves applause for voluntarily publishing its scandal.
But it is the country's evaluation and management systems that help
motivate students to plagiarize for better degrees and better pay,"
said Xiong Bingqi, a Jiao Tong university professor.
In May, the academic ethics committee received information from
a university faculty in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, accusing Lu and
four young teachers of plagiarism in a textbook they had
written.
Investigations suggested that the group's textbook was largely
copied from similar foreign textbooks. Lu accepted responsibility
for this and confessed in September.
Fudan is now recalling all the textbooks so that they can be
destroyed. Funding for Lu's research programs is also expected to
be withdrawn, the committee announced.
As well, a message appeared on an Internet bulletin board in
July challenging a thesis produced by a Fudan post-doctoral.
The message claimed that Liu Hongjian, the researcher who
carried out his post-doctoral program at Fudan, used photographs of
experiments that were not his own and without permission.
Chi was Liu's thesis instructor at that time and although he had
no direct responsibility, he was held culpable for sloppy
supervision.
Fudan officials said they withdrew Liu's post-doctoral
certificate after the accusation was investigated and found to be
true. Chi was disqualified from enrolling postgraduate students for
two years.
Another case involved Ye Wei, a doctoral candidate at the school
of information technology, who was charged with offering the same
article for publication in English and Chinese journals.
Moreover the article was remarkably similar to a paper published
by an overseas researcher.
Ye was expelled by Fudan earlier this month. Gu, Ye's
instructor, was also disqualified from enrolling postgraduate
students for two years.
(Shanghai Daily December 26, 2007)