Disgraced Serial Plagiarist and Former TDSB Chief Chris Spence Wants to Keep His PhD

Not only wants to, demands to. And his lawyer thinks he's found a loophole that'll to the trick:

Chris Spence is asking the University of Toronto to drop charges of plagiarism and academic dishonesty as he fights to keep his PhD. 

Spence, the former director of the Toronto District School Board, who resigned in disgrace after plagiarized passages were discovered in newspaper articles he submitted, has been applying for executive-type jobs across Canada and the U.S. and with such charges hanging over him he’s having difficulty moving on, said his lawyer Selwyn Pieters. 

“Dr. Spence’s entire future” rests on the outcome of these charges, he added. 

Pieters said the case has dragged on for a year and a half and “we take issue with the delay.” 

At Spence’s upcoming hearing July 15, Pieters will introduce a motion to throw out the charges. He said there has been an abuse of process because Spence’s thesis was run through commonly used plagiarism-detecting software turnitin.com without Spence’s consent, which violates university policy...

So you mean U of T policy is to get the potential plagiarist's approval before deploying plagiarism-detecting software on the potentially plagiarized material?

Great policy--for the plagiarists.

Update: Chris Spence's theme song?:

 

Update: Spence had better pray that that "abuse of process" stuff works because otherwise it looks like he's toast:

In the charges outlined by the University of Toronto, the institution stated that Dr. Spence “knowingly represented the ideas of another, or the expressions of the ideas of another as your own work” in his thesis titled “The Effects of Sport Participation on the Academic and Career Aspirations of Black Male Student Athletes in Toronto High Schools.” The university stated in the document that Dr. Spence submitted his thesis without properly attributing the work to the original source. 

“By submitting the Thesis, you knowingly engaged in a form of cheating, academic dishonesty or misconduct, fraud or misrepresentation ... to obtain academic credit or other academic advantage,” the document stated. 

Dr. Spence did not respond to an e-mail on Tuesday. 

The Globe and Mail found that passages from Dr. Spence’s 1996 dissertation appear copied from unattributed sources, and one section relies heavily on a 1991 book edited by Grant Jarvie, Sport, Racism and Ethnicity. 

In his bibliography, Dr. Spence listed the chapter of the book that his work resembles, but did not credit the author in the passage, and used the citations as his own, The Globe found.