Would-be college president criticized by US publishers

An academic publishing house in the US has harshly criticized the candidate in line to become president of National Chunghsing University (中興大學), saying the candidate has passed off the work of American scholars as his own.

For weeks, professors at National Chunghsing University have alleged that Peng Tso-kwei (彭作奎), a an agricultural economics professor who is expected become the school's next president, has plagiarized others' works on least two occasions.

Those accusations grew stronger yesterday, after John Ackerman, director of Cornell University Press, wrote in a strongly-worded letter that Peng borrowed liberally from the book of two Cornell professors, William Tomek and Kenneth Robinson.

"It is clear from a quick perusal of Professor Peng's book that it reproduced many of the graphics and tables that Professor Tomek and Robinson developed for their volume," Ackerman wrote in a letter dated Sept. 13.

"Peng has violated the most basic standards of international scholarly communication and probably transgressed international copyright agreements ... That it reproduces this intellectual property without permission and proper citations is unacceptable."

Tomek and Robinson are the authors of Agricultural Product Prices, released in 1985 by Cornell University Press. Peng's 1991 book The Analysis and Theory of Agricultural Product Prices allegedly plagiarized more than 80 percent of the tome by the two US academics.

In addition to Cornell University Press, a professor at the University of Maryland also wrote to convey his unhappiness with Peng's conduct.

"An article by Professor Peng Tso-kwei entitled The Impacts of Trade Liberalization on Agricultural Productions and Farmers' Share in Taiwan, which appeared in the Journal of Agricultural Economics, No 47, June 1990, contains substantial excerpts from an article of mine entitled The Farm-Retail Price Spread in a Competitive Food Industry, which appeared in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics in August 1975," wrote Bruce Gardner, a professor of agricultural and resource economics.

"He [Peng] duplicated four of the six main quotations of my model ? Much of the language he used to describe the model is word-for-word identical to mine."

Gardner said Peng's use of his model was not a cause of the problem in itself. What prompted the controversy was that "Peng did not cite my article at any point in his paper, nor is my article included in the list of references at the end of his article."

Both letters said that further investigation of the matter was underway and that all parties would be kept informed of any further developments.

The letters were addressed to Wu Ming-ming (吳明敏), a professor at National Chunghsing and president of its professors' association. Wu opposes Peng's appointment to the school's presidency.

When questioned by the Taipei Times, Peng repeatedly evaded the question. Finally, he gave an ambiguous answer, saying that he was not in violation of Taiwan's Intellectual Property Law, which was amended in 1992, one year after his book was published.