Academic wrongs must not be ignored

LIANG YING, a professor from the School of Social and Behavior Sciences, Nanjing University, is reported to have deleted 120 papers she wrote from online versions of academic journals. Thepaper.cn comments:

Liang claimed that she deleted the essays because they were written in her early academic years and were of low quality. Yet a probe by China Youth Daily found that some of them might contain plagiarism. Even though the essays have been deleted from the online databases of the academic journals, the printed journals still exist and anybody who doubts its claims can take a look for themselves.

Liang has previously admitted academic misbehavior in the past, saying that it happened before the first national crackdown on academic malfeasance was launched in 2005.

Given this, the suspicion is that Liang deleted the online papers in order to destroy evidence of wrongdoing, as over the past few years, one university after another has taken strict measures to root out academic transgressions such as plagiarism.

Liang became a professor at a relatively young age and is also the member of quite a few young scholar programs funded by the Ministry of Education. But if her past essays are found to have problems, it might ruin her future career.

However long ago, academic misdeeds should be corrected when found, and the person responsible should be given his or her deserved penalty. There is no sell-by date and no academic misbehavior should be considered immune.

The departments that have bestowed honorary titles on Liang should check to make sure there are no loopholes in their procedures. China Youth Daily said they found the problems of Liang's essays rather easily, so why did the departments fail to find them earlier?

In a response to the China Youth Daily claims, Nanjing University said it is already looking into the matter and the results of the investigation will be made soon. We hope other departments will take action so that such misbehavior does not ruin the reputations of academic institutions.