Intellectual Dishonesty (Editorial)

Dexter Suggs

Under Associated Press style rules, most of which we have adopted at Arkansas Business, the honorific Dr. is reserved for medical doctors, dentists, veterinarians and the like — not for Ph.Ds. Therefore, we would never have called the interim superintendent of the Little Rock School District “Dr.” Dexter Suggs in the first place.

But unless Indiana Wesleyan University, which granted Suggs his doctorate, decides to rescind it, the taxpayers of Arkansas are on the hook for another $250,000. A quarter million dollars. As much as the median household in Arkansas earns through more than six years of honest labor.

Honest is an operative word here. Blue Hog Report, the blog through which attorney Matt Campbell has already exposed the misdeeds of former Lt. Gov. Mark Darr and former Faulkner County Judge (and admitted felon) Mike Maggio, pointed out multiple instances of apparent plagiarism by Suggs in his dissertation.

Plagiarism is particularly horrifying to those of us in the news business, but, fortunately, it’s also easy to prove. The side-by-side comparisons of Suggs’ dissertation with works written earlier leaves no reasonable doubt, even if he says he didn’t mean to claim someone else’s work as his own. In a cut-and-paste world, it’s easy to see how a few words could accidentally find their way into someone else’s work, but not big chunks from multiple other sources that are then not even cited as sources.

So Suggs, kept in place by the Department of Education after it seized control of the LRSD, is gone, as he should be. But it wasn’t the DOE’s fault that a plagiarist was hired in the first place, and the state should never have agreed to reward such intellectual dishonesty.

Politicians talk a lot about incentives, both good ones and bad ones. The lesson our state government is teaching in the Dexter Suggs Affair is this: If you cheat, you might get a really good job. And if your bosses find out that you cheated, you might really hit the jackpot.