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Accountability pays off
ACTA has long recommended that, as a basic measure of accountability, colleges and universities actually look into the scholarly background of those they are considering hiring. It's amazing how often that doesn't happen--and the results, as evidenced in the case of Ward Churchill, can be devastating to institutional reputations.
Ohio University, recently the scene of a plagiarism scandal in its engineering school, has tightened its standards. And it's paying off. While checking into the publication record of Thelma Wills Foote, a Harvard-educated scholar who had accepted an offer to chair OU's African-American Studies department, a dean discovered that Professor Foote's vitae was not all it appeared to be:
Thelma Wills Foote had accepted the job March 1, pending approval from a rank-and-tenure committee, as well as several top administrators.A day later, the university announced her hire, citing she had written two books, including one on Sally Hemings, a slave who was reputed to have been the mistress of Thomas Jefferson.
The history chairman noticed the reference to the Hemings book on Foote's curriculum vitae and searched online sources because he didn't recognize the publisher.
The chairman had been asked to nominate history professors to serve on a committee to review Foote's potential tenure as a full professor. Tenured professors at OU are required to have written at least two scholarly books.
In a cover letter to the university, Foote said she coauthored the Hemings book with television actress Tina Andrews.
But university officials found only a five-paragraph introduction by Foote, with Andrews, a former Days of Our Lives star, credited as the sole author.
Ogles wrote to Foote, asking for a clarification of her role. She responded that her contributions had been substantial but unacknowledged, which she described as common practice in the film and television industry.
The book, Sally Hemings: An American Scandal: The Struggle to Tell the Controversial True Story, was later made into a CBS mini-series. Ogles tried to reach Andrews through her agent to verify Foote's role but was unsuccessful.
"She may very well have been a behind-the-scenes consultant and editor, but she should have told us so instead of leading us to believe she was a co-author," Ogles said.
Foote, who most recently worked at the University of Southern Denmark and now lives in Rome, couldn't be reached for comment last night.
In an e-mail to Ogles, she wrote, "My reasoning in listing myself as co-author within my CV and letter of introduction is that my scholarly work done for the book publication merits that distinction."
She later told the student newspaper The Post: "It may turn out that things don't work out. You know how people are; they tend to seize on people's mistakes and make the worst of them."
Hours later, she sent Ogles a one-sentence e-mail message withdrawing her acceptance of the job offer.
OU ought to have discovered Foote's fabrication before it offered her the position--but, as they say, better late than never. What's remarkable about this story is not the behavior of Foote, which was calculated to game the slack academic hiring system, but the behavior of OU, which was conscientious and aboveboard, if slightly belatedly so.
For more on the need for better administrative review, see ACTA president Anne Neal's recent comments at Phi Beta Cons.
And for more on the Foote scandal, see Margaret Soltan and Cliopatria.
Posted by acta online at March 17, 2007 09:12 AM
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