By Debbie Schlussel
It’s not just the Presidential election result, the stock market, and the economy that are out of whack. With everything, up is down, right is left, and red is blue.
Take the case of Texas A&M International University Professor Loye Young, or rather EX-Professor Loye Young. Young was fired by the school because he dared discipline and expose six students of his who cheated. They plagiarized. And they were forewarned. Young’s course syllabus warns that if students plagiarize, their names will be published on his website. I think that’s great.
But Texas A & M does not. The school is hiding behind federal privacy laws prohibiting the publication or release of students’ grades. But Young didn’t publish their grades, only that they plagiarized. That isn’t covered by the Privacy Act. It all comes down to money. The Texas A & M leadership decided it’s more important to gain more state money (which is based on student course passing rates) than to stand up for academic integrity.

The firing of people like Young is the reason we now have a Vice President-Elect who plagiarized on multiple occasions.

A professor at Texas A&M International University in Laredo was fired Nov. 5 for displaying on his course blog the names of six students accused of plagiarism.
Loye Young, formerly an adjunct professor of management information systems, said his course syllabus warned students he would “publicly fail and humiliate” any student caught plagiarizing. This would serve as an additional punishment to the standard university repercussions.
Young was fired for violating laws set by the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, said Ray Keck, president of Texas A&M International. The act is a federal law that protects the privacy of students’ educational records by prohibiting their release without proper consent.
“The university is never going to publish a student’s grades on public Web sites,” he said. “It’s a violation of federal law.”
Texas A&M International has a strict policy concerning students who plagiarize on assignments, Keck said. Faculty members can address the situation in several ways, but the university does not condone publicly announcing students’ grades.
The university’s faculty is subject to the laws and rules instituted by the state of Texas and the Texas A&M University system, he said. Any violation of these laws could result in a loss of federal funding for the university.
Young, who formerly was a practicing lawyer, said he did not violate any laws by publishing the names of the accused plagiarizers. He said he analyzed the regulations instituted by FERPA before he issued the syllabus and sent a copy of it to the college’s dean and university provost. Neither of the officials objected to the contents of the syllabus until the students’ names were published.
“It is not surprising that the provost and other faculty there – who are unwilling or unable to read the law – are defending students who are unwilling or unable to read the syllabus,” he said.
The entire situation is political, Young said. The student pass rate is directly related to the amount of state funding the university receives.

And Young isn’t getting any support from academia. “Inside Higher Education” is calling his exposure of plagiarists, “Vigilante Justice.” HUH? Next, they’ll say calling the police when a bank is being robbed is vigilante justice, too. Ridiculous.
It’s a shame there weren’t professors around like Young when Joe Biden plagiarized in law school (and again when he stole a Neil Kinnock speech) and Monica Crowley was in school.
As I’ve repeatedly noted, faux-conservative (real conservatives believe in property rights and don’t steal) Crowley ripped off several whole paragraphs from a Paul Johnson article on Nixon and passed it off as her own for a Wall Street Journal op-ed. The Journal publicly apologized and never ran her work again. There’s a strong belief that her Ph.D. and Masters theses, as well as books on Nixon, were also plagiarized (and other parts fabricated). You don’t start plagiarizing in your 30s. It’s a lifelong habit.
Maybe this is why Serial plagiarist Sean Hannity dropped out of college.
Shame on Texas A & M for firing this brave professor.
Oh, and just watch. These cheating students will sue the school for alleged Privacy Act violations, win tens of thousands of dollars, and get their grades changed upwards.
Plagiarism pays.
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Read Loye Young’s Blog.