SIU-Edwardsville’s Faculty Senate released an official statement Monday calling for SIU President Glenn Poshard to resign in light of the recent plagiarism controversy involving the president.

Monday’s statement includes the rationale for the call for his resignation, which the senate voted on Oct. 18, Senate President Kay Covington said. Covington said the statement was sent to the university community, including the SIU Board of Trustees, but she had no plans to speak on behalf of the senate at Thursday’s BOT meeting.

“I just hope that the Board of Trustees pays attention to the statement and would really consider the image of SIU and the academic integrity of our institution,” Covington said.

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The statement cited the instances of plagiarism in the 1984 dissertation as well as Poshard’s “continued tendency to make unacceptable excuses for his plagiarism,” as reasons for the president to resign.

Poshard did not immediately return a message left on his cell phone and University Communications Director Mike Ruiz said the university had no official statement on the senate’s most recent action.

In the four-point rationale included in the statement, the senate also challenged statements by Poshard that he was not clear on the meaning of plagiarism when he composed the document.

“Abundant documentary evidence exists to indicate that President Poshard, while a doctoral student at an American university in the 1980s, prepared his dissertation in a nationwide scholarly community where awareness of the concept of plagiarism was, as it is today, considered to be ‘common knowledge,'” the senate said in the statement.

SIU-Edwardsville’s undergraduate and graduate catalogs included definitions of plagiarism as early as June 1980, the statement said. The faculty committee at SIUC that reviewed the plagiarism allegations said no such definition existed in SIUC’s graduate catalog in 1984.

Duff Wrobbel, the senate’s president elect, said faculty debate and conversation about the controversy has died down recently. The senate’s decision to call for Poshard’s resignation seemed to calm much of the discussion, he said.

“People needed us to make some kind of a clear statement, and I think once that happened the truth of the matter is there isn’t a whole lot more we can really do,” he said.

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Joe Crawford can be reached at 536-3311 ext. 254 or [email protected].