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Several sections of Provost Howard Johnson's academic plan match sections from other universities' plans verbatim, according to an NT Daily analysis. Johnson and ethics experts contacted Thursday said borrowing content from other universities' academic plans is commonplace, but at least one ethics expert is crying foul. "I think [Johnson's] colleagues deserve to know that these ideas come from other sources," said Dr. Bruce Cain, co-director of the Travers Ethics Program at the University of California at Berkeley.

Cain added that publishing the draft of NT's academic plan on the Internet without attribution appears to constitute plagiarism. "What would it have taken to put quotation marks around that?" Cain asked. Berkeley's academic plan is not one of the sources that matches Johnson's plan. Johnson said he is just trying to do his work and it is not unusual for him to take ideas from other universities and apply them to NT.

"These are not new ideas," Johnson said. "I wanted to put something up for people to react to."

Johnson, who also serves as vice president for academic affairs, emphasized that the academic plan displayed on his office's Web site is a draft. Johnson expects to complete the final academic plan document by spring 2005 and said that "we won't take anything verbatim" from the current draft.

The Daily compared Johnson's plan, titled the UNT Academic Plan for Distinctiveness and Excellence, with other universities' plans after editors received anonymous e-mails from two sources. The sources wrote that they ran Johnson's plan through anti-plagiarism software and found surprising results.

According to the Daily's side-by-side analysis of the documents, four out of five strategic initiatives from Johnson's academic plan match content from the University of Southern California's plan and Syracuse University's plan. Johnson previously served as executive vice provost for academic affairs at Syracuse.

The current draft of the NT plan states undergraduate education will "provide a distinctive undergraduate experience built on excellent liberal arts (i.e. humanities, the natural sciences and the social sciences) and professional programs."

USC's plan, written in 1994, states undergraduate education will "provide a distinctive undergraduate experience built on excellent liberal arts (the term includes the humanities, the natural sciences and the social sciences) and professional programs . . ." The NT plan states it will "create programs of research and education that utilize and contribute to characteristics of the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex region as a center of urban issues, multiculturalism, arts, communications, and business."

The USC plan states it will "create programs of research and education that utilize and contribute to the special characteristics of Southern California and Los Angeles as a center of urban issues, multiculturalism, arts, entertainment, communications, and business."

Several other sections of Johnson's plan follow USC's and Syracuse's plans nearly word-for-word, including the entire second appendix of NT's draft. Johnson's draft was last revised Nov. 1.

An official at Syracuse said Thursday that he didn't think borrowing content from another university's academic plan was a problem. "Part of this process is to research what other schools have done," said Patrick Farrell, communications manager for Dr. Deborah Freund, vice chancellor for academic affairs and provost of Syracuse. "This is an academic plan. It is not a novel or some other kind of proprietary piece of work. I don't think there is an issue here."

Farrell added that the matching documents could become an issue if NT tried to obtain a copyright of the current draft. He said "imitation is a form of flattery." Officials at USC declined to comment. Dr. Tim Dodd, president of the Board of Directors at the Center for Academic Integrity at Duke University, said he thought Johnson's plan should include attribution, but he would not call the plan plagiarized.

"One has to look beyond the letter of the law and situate this in academia," Dodd said. "There is a unique culture in higher education where we know our stuff is being shared. It falls within the spirit of how universities learn from each other." Cain, of Berkeley, said administrators should be held to the same standard as students.

"I imagine it's quite likely that administrators think they're operating on different rules, but if it's intended for public distribution, there should be attribution," Cain said. Dr. Theresa Flowers, undergraduate academic adviser for NT's English department, said if a student borrowed ideas or material from other sources without giving them credit he or she would receive a "zero for the paper and a zero for the class."

NT's student handbook classifies plagiarism as a form of academic dishonesty and defines it as "the deliberate adoption or reproduction of ideas, words or statements of another person as one's own without acknowledgement."

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