Students Speak Out on Plagiarism, Consider Potential Repercussions

A look at the 36 passages that served as the basis of Teachers College’s determination last week that Professor Madonna Constantine was guilty of academic plagiarism illustrates the similarities between her writing and that of her students. But Constantine and her lawyer continue to maintain that she had authored the passages in question.

Concern over the 36 passages in question from Constantine’s writing were raised by former TC students Tracy Juliao and Karen Cort and former TC faculty member Christine Yeh, all three of whom saw striking similarities between some of Constantine’s published work and their own work. These phrases were the basis for sanctions placed against Constantine last Wednesday following a year-and-a-half-long investigation into work she published without attribution.

Juliao—who, as a student at TC, worked with Constantine before switching to work more closely with Yeh, who sponsored her dissertation. She cited phrases from Constantine’s April 2006 article, “Multiple Role Balance, Job Satisfaction, and Life Satisfaction in Women School Counselors,” which appeared extremely similar to passages from Juliao’s own 2005 dissertation on women’s multiple roles and role balance in society.

Juliao said that though she had discussed her ideas with Constantine, the work that Constantine published contained exact pieces of “work from my dissertation, nothing that I had worked on directly with her.”

In one example, Julaio pointed to a phrase from page 29 of her dissertation that read, “Role balance challenges this notion and suggests that it is normal for individuals to maintain multiple roles throughout life, but that what influences physical and mental health is how one organizes and understands the system of roles within one’s life.” She compared it to a phrase in the fifth paragraph of Constantine’s article that read, “Role balance theory, however, suggests that it is typical for women to function within multiple roles throughout their lives, and what affects their mental and physical health is the degree to which they organize the system of roles within their lives,” as a clear indication of that Constantine lifted material directly from her former student’s work.

“I saw her article, and as I was reading it I was very shocked, surprised, whatever, to read words that were my own, and I actually took out my dissertation and started highlighting things in her article that correlated with things in my dissertation,” Juliao said.

In response to the allegations, Constantine’s lawyer, Paul Giacomo, said, “This is complicated. We’re talking about 36 passages. We’re talking about works by two different authors over a period of at least seven or eight years.”

He continued, “We can prove prior authorship of all of the passages that they are claimed in their report to have been plagiarized.”

“Evidence showing my accusers to have lied also has been ignored,” Constantine said.
According to a TC statement issued last Tuesday night, the investigation “concluded that Professor Constantine’s explanation for the strikingly similar language was not credible.” However, Constantine and Giacomo both assert that the investigation was faulty and was conducted merely “to achieve a predetermined conclusion.”

“My research is extremely important..,[and] relevant to my own life. My interest in multiple roles in women’s lives grew out of my own experience of being female and being involved in lots of different activities, all of which competed for my time,” Julaio said. “As a result of the article published by Madonna Constantine, I have been forced to put my own writing regarding this topic on hold.”

Joy Resmovits contributed reporting to this article.

lydia.wileden@columbiaspectator.com