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Last year, Kean University had an intense debate over false statements on the résumé of President Dawood Farahi. The board investigated and determined that there were inaccurate statements, but that he should keep his job. (Farahi blamed staff members for the errors.)
This week, another senior administrator at Kean has faced scrutiny -- and she's no longer at the university. Shortly after faculty leaders filed a complaint about plagiarism they found in a report by Katerina Andriotis, associate vice president for academic affairs, she was gone. The university would not confirm why she had left. sted "was gone" to avoid repetition. dl
The complaint against Andriotis documented that some material in a report on enrollment management that she submitted to the university came straight from a report at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, and that other material came verbatim from a report by the Center for the Study of College Student Retention. James Castiglione, associate professor of physics and the president of the American Federation of Teachers' faculty union at the university, filed the complaint.
Castiglione and the union had pushed hard for the board to dismiss the president in last year's scandal, arguing that students and faculty whose official biographical materials contained falsehoods would be punished severely. In a statement he issued about the plagiarism incident, he said that professors remain frustrated. "We teach our students to be ethical and scrupulous, and we expect our university officials to be held to the same high standards. It is unconscionable that a culture of academic fraud persists among Kean’s highest administrators,” he said.
“A university’s reputation stands or falls on the integrity of its administrators and faculty. The persistent unethical conduct of high-level university officials must be addressed by Kean’s Board of Trustees without equivocation,” Castiglione said, “or else Kean University will lose what remains of its reputation as a fine university.”
Aside from confirming that Andriotis was no longer employed, the university declined to comment.
Andriotis did not respond to a request for comment, but she told The Star-Ledger that she had been "overworked," and included in her report material she had gathered in her research, without necessary attribution.
"Once the draft version of the document was completed, it was ultimately my job to compile the final version of the document, and due to being overworked, I made the serious oversight of forgetting to include the final contributions page," Andriotis said, adding that "it saddens me that this oversight will be my legacy at Kean University."
