Columbia University Suspends Prof Who Made Noose Claim

Professor Madonna Constantine made the news in October 2007 for claiming that someone stuck a noose on her door. That incident remains unsolved, but a closer look at Constantine's academic record showed that she engaged in repeated examples of plagiarism.

After a lengthy examination, she's been put on indefinite suspension by the Teachers College at Columbia University.

In a letter sent out today to Teachers College faculty, the college president, Susan Fuhrman, and dean, Tom James, said the faculty advisory committee had rejected Ms. Constantine's appeal of the plagiarism charges. They said Ms. Constantine was suspended as of today, but that she is entitled to appeal the decision or request a hearing before the faculty executive committee.

The letter, obtained by The New York Sun from a Teachers College source, said the faculty advisory committee upheld an 18-month investigation by a Manhattan law firm, Hughes Hubbard & Reed, which found that Ms. Constantine had plagiarized two dozen times works of two former doctoral students and a former colleague.

I'm still wondering whether we will learn whether the noose incident was nothing more than a hoax and/or ploy to distract attention from her concerns over her academic misconduct.

Will This Stop The Obamarama?

This story actually broke last night at Big Head DC's website, and it mushroomed from there. He's got the side by side video to compare the two and found them uncomfortably too similar to be coincidence. Hot Air points out that this is really old news, going back to 2007.

Still, if Obama got permission to use the language from Deval Patrick, it can't be considered plagiarism. It doesn't look or sound great, and it might give Hillary a short-lived bounce, but the end result will not be more than a blip in the news cycle.


Note that a plagiarism scandal never did take down Joe Biden, who has been a perennial presidential candidate for the Democrats. Indeed, he's still around - mucking up the Senate year after year.

Will Obama's camp claim that he got permission to use the phrases at issue or that one of his speechwriters simply didn't pay close enough attention to differentiate what he or she was writing from the original text?

Expect Hillary's people to begin attacking Obama relentlessly on this, even as the Clinton camp has failed to attack Obama for his stunning lack of actual achievement (probably because Clinton herself could succumb to the same line of questioning over actual achievement during her term in office).