The entire situation regarding Glenn Poshard’s dissertation and thesis is important.There are varying degrees of culpability and certainly Poshard has some there with the question being how serious the violations are. The examples I’ve seen suggest that he’s not presenting the ideas as his own work and so it does not fall within the worst case scenarios of a plagiarized work, but people who can analyze the material directly and take their time to see the full extent need to make that determination.
However, let me point out that one example is fricken’ silly:
“Drug abuse is not a new phenomenon in America. Various forms of drug abuse have existed for years in the United States and other countries.”
From the U.S. government report:
“Drug abuse is not a new phenomenon. Varying forms of drug abuse have been present for years in the United States and other countries.”
Having discovered several plagiarists from reading papers–some who did it on purpose, other who didn’t understand how to cite and quote material–I would never think to check on either sentence because they are so hackneyed, anyone could have written them and come up with very similar sentence structure. It’s bad prose in both cases, but not what anyone with a brain would call plagiarism.
Now, if you were planning on plagiarizing either sentence above would be a great way to disguise it since most readers would be falling asleep before the end of the sentence.