Hmm, this is interesting

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that the president of Wesley College in Delaware has narrowly escaped a faculty vote of no confidence:

The president of Wesley College, in Delaware, who six years ago was accused of plagiarizing a speech by another college president, narrowly survived a faculty vote of no confidence this week, after new allegations of plagiarism were raised by a faculty member. Faculty members split, 25 to 25 with one abstention, on Wednesday on a vote on a motion of no confidence in Wesley's president, Scott D. Miller, and a call for his resignation. The vote took place after a professor presented evidence suggesting plagiarism in two documents attributed to Mr. Miller.

Mr. Miller, who has been president of Wesley since 1997, was the focus of a plagiarism scandal in 2000, when The Chronicle reported a Duke University student's discovery of close similarities between a speech by Mr. Miller and one written eight years earlier by the president of Connecticut College. At that time, Mr. Miller acknowledged the similarities but said the speech had been written for him by someone else. He then removed the speech, on multiculturalism in college curricula, from the Internet (The Chronicle, May 19, 2000).
Now, Jeffrey Mask, a professor of religion and philosophy at Wesley, has found evidence suggesting that Mr. Miller plagiarized the college's "statement of management philosophy" and an essay on the "practicality gap" in the liberal arts.

Those discoveries were prompted more by curiosity than suspicion, said Mr. Mask, who had been discussing the college's statement of management philosophy with a colleague. "I've always thought it was odd that you would feel it necessary in a statement of management philosophy to make a statement that you were going to pay your bills," he said. He was referring to the statement on the college's Web site, attributed to Mr. Miller, that says: "We will pay bills, honor commitments, keep our word, protect our honor."

Mr. Mask said he was in the habit of Googling phrases from student papers to check for plagiarism, and on a whim decided to search for the phrase "pay bills, honor commitments." The search yielded both Wesley College's statement and a similar document, a management-philosophy statement for Samford University, in Alabama, which was attributed to its retiring president, Thomas E. Corts.

"It was word-for-word identical with what's been on the Wesley Web page for nine years," he said. "Except that they say 'university' where we say 'college,' and they say 'Samford' where we say 'Wesley.'" After contacting Samford and confirming that the document had been written by Mr. Corts 25 years ago, Mr. Mask then used an Internet archive service to search a number of speeches by Mr. Miller that had been on Wesley's Web site before 2000. The search turned up a May 1999 essay by Mr. Miller called "The Liberal Arts: Solving the 'Practicality Gap'," which appeared to have been lifted verbatim from a 1997 essay by Richard H. Hersh, then the president of Hobart and William Smith Colleges.

Mr. Mask said he confronted Mr Miller with the materials and offered not to share the information if Mr. Miller would agree to resign. "He didn't want to follow that course," said Mr. Mask. On Wednesday, Mr. Mask presented his findings to colleagues, which prompted a faculty motion of no confidence and a call for Mr. Miller's resignation. According to Mr. Mask, at a Wednesday faculty meeting Mr. Miller presented documents suggesting that the college's statement of management philosophy predated his presidency and that he had inherited it from his predecessor, Reed M. Stewart.

Mr. Miller did not return phone calls on Thursday, but issued a written statement denying the plagiarism allegations: "The allegations that have been made against me are entirely without merit, and I encourage the Wesley Board of Trustees to commission an immediate investigation into such allegations. I am confident that an investigation will demonstrate unequivocally that I did not engage in and never have engaged in any such acts and will permit the college's administration and faculty to return to serving the institution and its students without delay or distraction."

According to copies examined by The Chronicle, Mr. Miller's five-page essay "The Liberal Arts: Solving the "Practicality Gap'" is an almost word-for-word match with an "analysis" portion of Mr. Hersh's essay, "Intentions and Perceptions: a National Survey of Public Attitudes Toward Liberal-Arts Education."

According to Bette S. Coplan, the college's executive vice president, the matter will be discussed today at a regularly scheduled meeting of the trustees. The board has already issued a statement that it will commission an independent review of the allegations.

Hmm, what happens if I Google "Do Great Work"? What-ho, here's a speech by Richard Hamming of Bell Labs in 1986: "...If you want to do great work, you clearly must work on important problems, and you should have an idea." He ends with "Go forth, then, and do great work!"