A professor at Texas A&M International University in Laredo was fired Nov. 5 for displaying on his course blog the names of six students accused of plagiarism.
Loye Young, formerly an adjunct professor of management information systems, said his course syllabus warned students he would "publicly fail and humiliate" any student caught plagiarizing. This would serve as an additional punishment to the standard university repercussions.
Young was fired for violating laws set by the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, said Ray Keck, president of Texas A&M International. The act is a federal law that protects the privacy of students' educational records by prohibiting their release without proper consent.
"The university is never going to publish a student's grades on public Web sites," he said. "It's a violation of federal law."
Texas A&M International has a strict policy concerning students who plagiarize on assignments, Keck said. Faculty members can address the situation in several ways, but the university does not condone publicly announcing students' grades.
The university's faculty is subject to the laws and rules instituted by the state of Texas and the Texas A&M University system, he said. Any violation of these laws could result in a loss of federal funding for the university.
Young, who formerly was a practicing lawyer, said he did not violate any laws by publishing the names of the accused plagiarizers. He said he analyzed the regulations instituted by FERPA before he issued the syllabus and sent a copy of it to the college's dean and university provost. Neither of the officials objected to the contents of the syllabus until the students' names were published.
"It is not surprising that the provost and other faculty there - who are unwilling or unable to read the law - are defending students who are unwilling or unable to read the syllabus," he said.
The entire situation is political, Young said. The student pass rate is directly related to the amount of state funding the university receives.
He said this has caused the university to become a "diploma mill" that is graduating students who cannot read or write.
Educators typically believe that high self-esteem promotes higher learning, which is a backwards thought, he said. Instead, higher learning will promote high self-esteem.
"Consequently, passing students at any cost is a doomed strategy," Young said. "Only in the Wizard of Oz can the diploma educate the Scarecrow."
Sam Dragga, the English department chairman at Texas Tech, said he believes Young handled the situation "poorly." Publicly publishing grades is a direct violation of students' rights.
"It's a type of situation that needs to be handled internally," he said.
At Tech, discretion is left up to individual instructors on how to handle plagiarism cases, Dragga said. Plagiarism often results in a failing grade for the assignment, and depending on the extremity of the case it could warrant a referral to the academic dean. Students with repeated cases of plagiarism could be expelled from the university.
"There's a lot of discretion that's necessary because it might differ on the notion of the assignment or the nature of the plagiarism," Dragga said.
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