Some people may have been following the whole debacle where the Glenn Poshard, the president of Southern Illinois University, was accused of plagiarism on his doctoral dissertation. An SIU faculty committee agreed that there were some problems with Poshard's work, but decided that standards had been different back then, so Poshard should be allowed to just correct the errors. There was quite a bit of disagreement with this conclusion, and the N-G even ran at least one editorial condemning the decision.
An emeritus faculty member read the entire dissertation and concluded that the general level of scholarship was very poor. His column in the Daily Egyptian, "Victim of a Culture,"
Many, if not most doctorates in education are awarded for dissertations with a low level of scholarship. Whenever a school system hires a "Dr." as a superintendent or upper-lvevel adminisrtator, I always wonder if their doctoral disertation was at all substantial. Reading Dr. Culver's or retired Dr. Amberg's dissertation might be equally disappointing. On the other hand, a doctoral dissertation's quality has no predictive value of the individual's skill as a public school administrator.
Michael Fuerst
I would be interested in reading
Dr.Mr. Culver's dissertation, assuming he ever gets around to finishing it....Now that I think of it, Dr. Martin Luther King's doctoral thesis contained much plaigarism and thus was not intellectually or academically rigorous.
http://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/m/mlk.htm
However, this did not affect his subsequent leadership and achievements.
Michael Fuerst