UNION TOWNSHIP — A top Kean University administrator has left the school after being accused of plagiarism, according to campus documents and school officials.

A complaint filed last week said Katerina Andriotis, the university’s associate vice president for academic affairs, copied nearly nine pages of a 15-page campus enrollment management report from two documents found on the internet.

James Castiglione, who serves as head of the Kean Federation of Teachers, the public university’s faculty union, said he filed an official complaint with Kean President Dawood Farahi on Wednesday after another faculty member discovered that much of Andriotis’ report appeared to be lifted without attribution from documents on the websites of the University of Tennessee and the Center for the Study of College Student Retention.

"This was not some midlevel administrator," said Castiglione, an associate professor of physics. "The violations of the Academic Integrity Policy were by the second in command in the Office of Academic Affairs, the very office tasked with enforcing academic standards."

Reached via e-mail, Andriotis said there was a simple explanation: She was "overworked." She said she made an error in distributing an unattributed report that was the result of extensive research from various campus subcommittees.

"Once the draft version of the document was completed, it was ultimately my job to compile the final version of the document, and due to being overworked, I made the serious oversight of forgetting to include the final contributions page," Andriotis said.

"It saddens me that this oversight will be my legacy at Kean University when I worked very hard to contribute to the reaccreditation of the institution and the successful substantive change application for additional location in Wenzhou, China," Andriotis added.

Kean University officials declined to discuss Andriotis or the plagiarism allegations.

"The university does not comment on personnel matters," said Terry Golway, a campus spokesman. "I can confirm that she no longer works for the university."

Golway would not say whether Andriotis was fired or resigned. Andriotis would only say she was "no longer affiliated with the institution."

Academic integrity has been a contentious topic at Kean in recent years. Last year, faculty members accused Farahi, Kean’s president, of fabricating parts of his résumé and called for his dismissal. Farahi attributed errors on his résumé to his staff and received the backing of Kean’s Board of Trustees, which eventually renewed his contract for another five years.

Kean’s academic integrity was among the areas flagged when the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, a collegiate accrediting agency, placed the campus on probation last year. Kean was taken off probation later in the year and had its accreditation renewed after making several changes, including the adoption of a new campus academic integrity policy.

Castiglione, the head of the faculty union, said he used the procedures in the new academic integrity policy to make his complaint against Andriotis.

GROUP PROJECT

Andriotis, a former dean at St. Joseph’s College in New York, had been working on Kean’s 16,000-student campus in Union Township since last year. She served as chairwoman of the university’s Enrollment Management Committee, a 14-member group of administrators and members of the campus community appointed by the school’s president.

The group met to research changes to Kean’s admissions process and set goals for recruiting, retaining and graduating students. Andriotis emailed the group’s final report to committee members and other administrators last month, according to copies of the emails submitted with the plagiarism complaint.

The report does not list Andriotis as its author, but Castiglione said it is common for a committee chairperson to oversee the writing of a final report.

According to the complaint, a paragraph on the report’s first page, outlining the enrollment committee’s purpose, appears to be lifted nearly word for word from a website for a similar committee at the University of Tennessee.

Additionally, nine pages of the report are nearly identical to a 1995 paper, titled "Parkland College Enrollment Management Model," about enrollment strategies at a two-year college in Illinois, according to a Star-Ledger review of the documents included in the complaint. The paper by student retention expert Alan Seidman appears on the website of the Center for the Study of College Student Retention, a New Hampshire-based group started by Seidman.

WORD FOR WORD

The Kean paper appears to copy entire sections, including a graphic, from the Parkland College study with minor changes to the text.

In a section on retention strategies, the Kean paper concludes: "It is vitally important to Kean that meaningful research focus on the factors which influence student decisions, to ascertain which ones have a positive influence on student retention behavior. In addition, a key to help retaining students is the ability of Kean to identify ‘at-risk’ students early enough to permit intervention strategies to work."

The 18-year-old Parkland College paper includes a nearly identical conclusion: "It is vitally important to Parkland that meaningful research focus on the factors which influence student decisions, to ascertain which ones have a positive influence on student retention behavior. In addition, a key to helping to retain students is the ability of Parkland to identify ‘at-risk’ students early enough to permit intervention strategies to work."

EXTENSIVE CAREER

Andriotis has had a long career in higher education, according to bios on several school websites. Before working at Kean, Andriotis was dean of arts and sciences at St. Joseph’s College in New York and an associate dean at New Jersey City University. She also spent five years as an English professor and academic advisement coordinator at Middlesex Community College in Connecticut.

She holds a bachelor’s degree in classics from the University of California at Irvine, a master’s in English and comparative literature from San Diego State University, and a doctorate in English and comparative literature from the University of Athens in Greece. She is the author of the 2010 book, "Walt Whitman and Odysseus Elytis: Beyond Being and Time."

While at Kean, Andriotis contributed to several major projects, including a controversial revamping of the class registration system. She also helped the university make changes to secure its reaccreditation and get approval to open its satellite campus in China.

Star-Ledger staff writers Naomi Nix and Seth Augenstein contributed to this report.



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