Mark Carney responds to plagiarism allegations in his PhD thesis

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Ottawa – Liberal leader Mark Carney dismissed the charges, saying he might have stolen paragraphs in his 1995 PhD dissertation in economics at Oxford University, as the National Post revealed for the first time last Friday.

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According to three university scholars who reviewed the materials, his paper, titled “The Dynamic Advantage of Competition,” shows 10 obvious theft cases – from full quotes to slightly modified quotes – according to reports from three university scholars who reviewed the materials.

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These include Geoffrey Sigalet, an assistant professor at UBC Okanagan, a member of the President’s Student Discipline Advisory Committee and two other Canadian professors who have asked to remain anonymous for fear of Carney’s lawsuit.

“He just repeats it directly without quotes. That’s what we call stealing,” Sigalet said. Another professor said it was the “most complicated stealing” he saw, and a third said it encountered “a definition of stealing by nearly any well-known institution.”

“I’m glad my dissertation is so interested in my dissertation,” Carney said in a campaign announcement in Winnipeg on Tuesday, answering a question from the National Post.

He added that his doctoral supervisor, Margaret Meyer, economics officer at Oxford Nuffield College, made a “very clear refutation” of the allegations.

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Meyer said in the original article that she saw “no stolen evidence…and no unusual academic practice” in Carney’s work.

Jonathan Bailey, the U.S. plagiarism consultant and author of the website Plagiarismtoday, also reviewed the material at the request of the State Post. After a thorough analysis, he said he understood why “scholars have different opinions about this.”

“I see this fits the pattern I’ve seen in other academic circles, especially in the United States,” he said.

“Carney obviously didn’t have the perfect work to write this paper. It’s obvious that he mixes the words together from the original writing from the source.”

Carney widely mentions Michael E. Porter’s 1990 book “The Competitive Advantage of the Country” in his paper. But he repeated part of Porter’s work and came up with a few sentences – sometimes making some adjustments to the wording, just like his own.

He used Jeremy C.

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He also repeated HS Shin’s article in the 1994 Rand Journal of Economics, Vol. 25, No. 1, only one word has been changed.

Bailey said while some paragraphs in the paper are “definite examples of copying and pastry,” he noted that the source of the material was cited elsewhere in his work, and that troublesome paragraphs account for a “small percentage” of the total work.

“If we follow the strictest definition of burglary, it is burglary. But it is at the bottom of the severity. This is the kind of burglary, the burglary of material, and it all points to this a relatively small case.”

So far, Oxford has refused to weigh the issue.

State Post

calevesque@postmedia.com

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