Questioning Campus Discipline

By Ellie McGrath

Accused of plagiarism, a senior takes Princeton to court

Gabrielle Napolitano, 21, is having a most unexpected ending to her distinguished undergraduate years at Princeton University. A top scholar-athlete at her Stamford, Conn., high school, she was assiduously recruited by several colleges, but picked the ivy of Princeton. Sidelined from the women's basketball team by a knee injury during her freshman year, she put in long hours helping to manage both the men's baseball and women's basketball teams, while attaining a superb 3.7 out of 4.0 average as an English major. By her senior spring, she was awaiting acceptance by several law schools. But three months ago, a student-faculty committee at Princeton, after a hearing, found the honors student guilty of one of academe's most serious offenses: plagiarism on a term paper. The committee voted unanimously to withhold Napolitano's degree for one year and to pass word of its disciplinary action to the law schools where she had applied. This week Napolitano gets her day in state court in a suit that has temporarily blocked the committee's action and raised an important new issue about the disciplinary prerogatives of a private university.

Napolitano's paper was an analysis of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, written for a course in the Spanish-American novel. In it she cited five quotations, appropriately footnoted, from a scholarly reference work by Josefina Ludmer. But after examining the paper carefully, Napolitano's professor, Sylvia Molloy, discovered that Ludmer was quoted far more often than the footnotes indicated. Molloy charged that Napolitano deliberately changed the page numbers of quotations cited by Ludmer to correspond to those in her own edition of the Garcia Marquez novel. "The paper Gabrielle Napolitano has turned in," Molloy informed Assistant Dean Peter Onek, "has been lifted, I am afraid, word for word in its near entirety from that book. .. I have no doubt that the student wished to pass this piece as hers."

Appearing before a ten-member faculty-student committee on discipline. Napolitano did not deny the basic allegation; she challenged the conclusion that she had deliberately plagiarized. She insisted that all she had done was to commit a "technical error" while she was also rushing to complete her senior thesis. Several character witnesses spoke in her behalf, including the associate director of athletics and English Professor Hans Aarsleff, her senior thesis adviser. He told the committee: "The quality of her work and thought lias been of the highest caliber, her reliability and integrity have been un impeachable, and her willingness to assume and meet responsibility has been noteworthy." After huddling in closed session for about half an hour, the committee notified University President William G. Bowen of its verdict.

Napolitano then petitioned Bowen for clemency but was denied. Said Bowen: "Given all the circumstances, including the seriousness with which we view plagiarism, it [the decision] seems to me the only proper outcome." Bowen added the hope that the disciplinary action would make the student "a better and stronger" person. Napolitano responded by securing the services of a New Jersey law firm, which filed suit in New Jersey Superior Court. "My whole purpose is to avoid having the label of plagiarist attached to me for the rest of my life," Napolitano insisted in an interview with TIME. "I really didn't feel that I was given a fair hearing." She claims that due process, as well as the fact that academic violations tend to be prosecuted unevenly, is at issue in her case. A judgment by Superior Court Judge William A. Dreier may come this week, subject to appeals.

Academic issues have been taken to the courts before. Allan Bakke, for instance, challenged the affirmative-action policies of the medical school of the University of California at Davis, which led to the famous 1978 Supreme Court ruling limiting the university's discretion to set its own admissions ground rules. But this appears to be the first time that a case of academic plagiarism has been fought in a civil court. And while public universities like U.C. Davis are governed by general, public domain constitutional law, private universities like Princeton write and execute their own special laws, which have traditionally been harder to challenge. As Princeton University Counsel Thomas Wright put it, "The courts have the right of review, but it should be up to the university to determine whether the standards applied are academically reasonable and not arbitrary or capricious."

Lawsuits against universities, in fact, are becoming increasingly common. Twenty years ago, students were likely to accept suspension or expulsion with nothing more than an appeal to the president. By the '70s, students had become more aggressive in pressing civil rights claims: the handicapped sued for proper facilities, women charged sexual harassment, minorities claimed discrimination. Today about 100 colleges and universities face charges that their athletic policies discriminate against women, in violation of Title IX of the Civil Rights Act.

In recent years, the trend has been away from social issues and toward more personal causes. Some students, like dissatisfied consumers, sue their colleges for "fraud" when they are unable to get jobs for which they were trained. One California student sued her university for $125,000 for giving her a B+ in a course instead of an A --. Says Philip Moots, special counsel to Ohio State University, which, like many other institutions, is becoming increasingly familiar with what an Ohio State commencement speaker described as "litigation mania": "Today's students flunk and sue."

The Princeton case follows this trend. Notes Claire Guthrie, assistant general counsel of the American Council on Education: "This woman is not concerned with establishing some profound legal principle. She knows jobs are tough to get out there, and that when you have a mark against you, it is all that much tougher. She's trying to protect herself." But if Gabrielle Napolitano succeeds in reversing the university's action, the danger is that she may establish a legal precedent, one that could erode the right of Princeton and other private universities to act as the sole judge of misconduct within the province of academic behavior. That prospect is viewed with unease on the Princeton campus and beyond. Says Princeton Senior Marshall Merrifield, chairman of the Princeton student honor committee: "The general feeling here seems to be that we have groups set up to deal with these questions, and that they should handle them--not the courts."

--By Ellie McGrath.

Reported by Adam Zagorin/New York and Gary Lee/ Washington

With reporting by Adam Zagorin, Gary Lee

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