Friday, March 11, 2005 | 9:04 a.m.
If the speech Rep. Jim Gibbons delivered to a Republican group in Elko on Feb. 25 had instead been delivered in a college public speaking class or turned in as an essay in a college English class, Gibbons would have received a grade of 'F' for the course and faced potential expulsion.
The Las Vegas Sun on March 4 ("Gibbons: Controversial speech wasn't his own") reported that Gibbons' speech included 15 paragraphs taken verbatim from a copyrighted speech delivered in 2003 by Alabama state auditor Beth Chapman, and that Gibbons used those 15 paragraphs without attributing them to her. That is clearly plagiarism.
In his own defense, according to the Sun, Gibbons explained that someone had sent him Chapman's speech as an e-mail message and that he simply used the words in his speech. That defense proves his guilt because he also failed to attribute those words to the sender of the e-mail message. Whether he plagiarized Chapman's speech or plagiarized the e-mail is irrelevant. Dishonesty is dishonesty, shoddy ethics are shoddy ethics.
Gibbons is frequently mentioned as a potential 2006 candidate for Nevada governor. In that office, he would have significant responsibility for overseeing the state's public schools, colleges and universities. Nevada can ill-afford to give that responsibility to anyone with such low regard for fundamental educational principles like academic honesty.
THOMAS R. BURKHOLDER
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