KEY POINTS:
A senior Unitec academic who copied pages from websites for a report - without referencing or attributing any of it - has been cleared.
Dr Andrew Codling, Unitec's deputy president (academic), was the subject of an inquiry when a colleague complained about a report he wrote after a
10-week paid trip to Scotland and England.
However, there appears to be deeper issues, with one source suggesting Codling was the victim of a personality dispute with another person.
Codling did not want to comment yesterday but it is understood he considers the non-attribution in his report a relatively minor mistake.
Other sources said there were differences between a factual report, like Codling's, and a student essay or paper for assessment and for which there are strict rules about attribution.
Codling visited universities in Scotland and England last year, after being awarded a Woolf Fisher Trust fellowship, which paid for the trip. He wrote a 48-page report to the trust in November, including a 35-page appendix of "details and observations of the key universities visited".
A Herald on Sunday Google search showed every page of that appendix contained sentences, phrases, or entire webpages which appeared to have been sourced directly from the internet. None included citations.
However, in describing the University of Gloucestershire, Codling appeared to have copied citations from the website along with the text.
Only 12 - or one-quarter - of the report's pages appeared to be completely Codling's own work.
Unitec and other tertiary institutions have strict rules for students about the use of other people's work. Unitec's Academic Statute, prohibits "the act of taking and using another person's thoughts, ideas, writings, inventions or work as one's own without proper acknowledgement".
It covered "directly copying any part of another's work, including information obtained from the internet; summarising another's work" and was considered "a serious academic offence".
Disciplinary actions for students include a reduced grade or being excluded from study.
Student president Adam Beach did not want to comment last week because he said he did not know enough about the case. However, he said, he thought the rules were different for writing reports, compared with essays or pieces for academic journals.
Unitec chief executive John Webster said in a statement that a council member had brought the allegation to his attention shortly after Codling handed in his report.
"I arranged for an internal investigation to be conducted by a professor who has extensive experience in dealing with ethical matters. She concluded that the report was clearly the independent work of the author. However, material had been copied, without attribution, from university websites... She recommended that the author issue an addendum, pointing out the omission, to all recipients of the report and appendices."
An independent professor who was an international expert in "the field" reviewed the decision and agreed that Codling should not be censured, Webster said.
Codling sent out the addendum but the complainant was not satisfied, and the matter was debated at a council meeting. Council decided its actions had been "appropriate and sufficient".
During his trip, Codling visited 15 tertiary institutions in Britain. Some had held the title of "university" for a long time, while others were in the transition process or applying for the title. As Unitec had been seeking university status for years, Codling was interested in how other institutions had managed the transition.
