The Dean's Speech

Wait ... people actually listen to convocation addresses?

Philip Baker, the dean of the University of Alberta's medical school, is facing an investigation from the school after he admitted that he plagiarized parts of a convocation speech he gave last week. Political science professor Clifford Orwin fumes in The Globe and Mail, calling Baker's offence “not just a crime at the university, it’s the crime against the university, the primordial academic offence. It strikes at the soul of the institution.” Orwin likens it to an accountant embezzling funds from a client, compromising the tenets that underpin academia and sullying the school's reputation in the process. “Forgive the medical school dean if you must, but only after he resigns. That Philip Baker must go is as clear as a blue Alberta day.”

The Edmonton Journal's Paula Simons detects the irony in students uncovering their dean's plagiarism with the same technology their professors use to check their charges' work. “The very search engines that make it simple to rip off material make it child's play to identify plagiarism when it happens,” she writes. “The same web networks that made it so easy for people to find Baker's source material have sent this story whizzing round the world, making him, and the U of A, into international laughingstocks,” which is too bad, as Simons notes, because Baker's career had otherwise been highly regarded until this point, and has now been largely undone by a ctrl+c, ctrl+v.

Finding defenders of Baker's slip-up isn't easy, but Todd Babiak, also of the Journal, offers one mitigating factor. Babiak, drawing on his experience as an English instructor for non-liberal arts students, figures Baker's plagiarism is just an example of how little regard those in the science, business and math faculties extend toward literary endeavours. “I’m not sure a speech to a graduating class is something a lot of people in specialized disciplines see as a piece of intellectual property,” says Babiak. It's not as though Baker ripped off someone else's work to further his career; neither is the ability to give a good, original speech of particular importance to the medical doctors to whom he delivered it. Baker showed poor judgment, certainly, but all his misdeeds warrant is a full-fledged apology – written by him, of course.

*An earlier version of this article incorrectly cited Todd Babiak's piece as a defence of Baker's plagiarism, when it indeed makes no such case. Thanks to Dr. Andrew MacMillan for bringing this to our attention.