Little Rock interim Superintendent Dexter Suggs, who is facing accusations of plagiarism, said Monday that "everything was aboveboard" in his 2009 doctoral dissertation at Indiana Wesleyan University.
"I do not feel like I intentionally committed any fraud or plagiarism or anything of that particular nature," Suggs said, adding that the questions about the authenticity of his dissertation -- which are pending before the Arkansas Department of Education and Indiana Wesleyan -- can be resolved.
Suggs said he had been advised by his attorneys to make no public comment on the accusations first raised last week by Matt Campbell, the author of the Blue Hog Report blog on Arkansas politics.
Campbell is also a lawyer who recently successfully defended a group of teachers against a Little Rock district complaint about their use of a school district building for a summer program for children for which fees were charged.
The online blog contains a link to what is identified as Suggs' dissertation, titled "The Impact of Middle School Principal Leadership on the Integration of Technology in Selected Middle Schools within the Indianapolis Public School District."
Campbell wrote that Suggs "lifted entire pages of his dissertation" from a 2005 piece written by Georganne Scott, "Educator Perceptions of Principal Technology Leadership Competencies," without giving credit to Scott for the material in his 12 pages of reference sources attached to the dissertation.
Scott was associated with the University of Oklahoma at the time of her article.
The blog post includes nine side-by-side comparisons of pages from what Campbell said is Suggs' dissertation and the Scott article showing identical sentences and paragraphs. Many of the sentences and paragraphs in the side-by-side documents include citations or references from other authors.
In a second, follow-up post on the blog, Campbell showed screen shots of additional pages from Suggs' dissertation that appear to duplicate language from two other publications that Campbell said are not given credit by Suggs in the reference section of the dissertation.
One is a Milken Family Foundation publication, "Technology in American Schools: Seven Dimensions for Gauging Progress: A Policymaker's Guide" by Cheryl Lemke and Edward C. Coughlin. The other is "High School Hispanic Program Availability in Marion County, Indiana: A Multi-School Case Study" by Arlene Coleman.
"I had heard the plagiarism rumor for a few months" Campbell said in an interview Monday, but only recently did someone send him a copy of Suggs' 120-page dissertation to make comparisons.
"I just started Googling distinctive phrases from the thing and it didn't take long," Campbell said, before he found passages from the 2005 Scott article that Suggs "lifted pretty heavily from."
Suggs has been serving as interim superintendent of the Little Rock district since Jan. 28, when the Arkansas Board of Education voted 5-4 to assume control of the state's largest school district and dismiss the seven-member elected School Board. Suggs, who had been the district's superintendent since July 2013, was retained on an interim basis. He now reports to state Education Commissioner Johnny Key.
Key and his staff have declined to comment much in recent days on the plagiarism accusations and any state investigation into them.
"Accusations of this nature must be and will be taken seriously, but a rush to judgment does not serve the public interest," Education Department spokesman Kimberly Friedman said last week.
Asked again Monday about whether a state investigation was being done or had been completed, Friedman said, "This is a personnel matter, and there is no additional comment at this time."
Don Sprowl, executive vice president for academic affairs at Indiana Wesleyan, said Monday that university leaders were aware of the allegations against Suggs but are not allowed to discuss the particulars of any individual student or graduate.
In general when there is a question about academic dishonesty, he said, there is a process of discovery to determine the facts. Any consequences that would result from that would be based on university policy.
"Sanctions can range from an F on an assignment to an F in a course that would require a student to repeat a course. And," he said, "there is a precedent for the revocation of academic degrees in the case of academic dishonesty."
The time period it would take to determine the facts and decide if a sanction is necessary varies by individual circumstances, Sprowl said.
Suggs earned his doctorate in education organizational leadership from Indiana Wesleyan in December 2009. One of his two master's degrees -- a 1997 degree in curriculum and administration -- is from the same campus. He earned a bachelor's degree in speech and communication in education from Southern Illinois at Edwardsville in 1994.
Metro on 04/21/2015