October-18-2013
A former Penn State mathematics professor, Mohamad Nouri, has lost his appeal of a defamation case against the university, which had accused him of plagiarism.
Nouri was a professor from 1988 to 2004 and was accused and found guilty of multiple counts of plagiarism by the university’s Standing Joint Committee on Tenure.
University President Graham Spanier decided to fire Nouri in 2004. By then, the case had passed through two committees, both of which unanimously decided he had plagiarized the work of two of his students, used another professor’s ideas in a presentation at a 2001 conference in Iran and plagiarized material for a book.
These instances were discovered when attorney James Horne reviewed a civil rights case Nouri had filed against Penn State in May 2001.
According to court documents, Nouri said Penn State defamed his character over the phone to Catholic University, and, as a result, he was not hired by that school.
Nouri filed his original complaint in 2007. The trial court agreed with Penn State and dismissed Nouri’s claims in June 2012. He appealed the decision in August 2012 and has now lost that appeal.
