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When Philip Baker addressed the University of Alberta’s medical school graduates at a banquet last Friday, he had the audience hooked. The speech by the dean of the faculty was inspiring. To some, it was even familiar — smartphones in hand, they soon learned why.

Dr. Baker is facing criticism and calls to resign after he admitted to lifting much of a speech delivered at the banquet from an American doctor’s graduation address at Stanford University last year, a talk that was later published in The New Yorker magazine.

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Graduates in attendance on Friday said they recognized the words dean Philip Baker was speaking and quickly searched a few phrases on their iPhones and BlackBerrys. One student’s brother found the speech on The New Yorker

web site and followed along word for word.

On Sunday, the dean issued an apology to students who had accused him of plagiarizing the speech from one originally penned by Dr. Atul Gawande, a surgeon and writer for The New Yorker