Bahman Baktiari, the director of the University of Utah’s Middle East Center (MEC), is being questioned about several articles he wrote that may in part violate copyright laws, not to mention academic standards.
One of the pieces in question is an op-ed about the recent turmoil in Egypt that was published in The Salt Lake Tribune February 5.
A professor at the University of Utah first noticed the similarity between Baktiari’s article and a piece previously published in The New York Times and brought it to the attention of his fellow faculty members at the MEC. When students and faculty members analyzed the article, they found it largely copied content from a minimum of four other sources, including The New York Times and The Economist.
In an interview earlier this month, Baktiari defended his article and said he didn’t realize he needed to attribute material written by others in opinion pieces.
David Pershing, the uni-versity’s senior vice president for academic affairs, told The Salt Lake Tribune there would be an investigation into Baktiari’s work, saying that there were still a lot that was unclear.
“We are beginning to understand more about this issue, but there is still much we do not know, and we need the direct involvement of Dr. Baktiari’s dean, Robert Newman, who is out of the country for a few days,” Pershing told The Salt Lake Tribune.
He said, “Using the scholarly work of others and claiming it as one’s own is plagiarism and is not tolerated at the University of Utah. Students or faculty who engage in this practice face serious disciplinary consequences, including possible expulsion for students and termination of employment for faculty. Integrity of one’s thoughts, ideas and expressions is foundational to our work at the university.”
Willis Orton, Baktiari’s attorney, spoke in defense of his client when he said the Iran native had not been required to give attribution in the past. “We understand there is [sic] similarities, but there was never a request for attribution,” Orton told The Tribune. “The [Tribune] opinion editor never made it clear. The policies need to be clear. What concerns me is the effort to impose these things after the fact.”
In response, Vern Anderson, the Tribune’s editorial page editor said, “I am frankly astonished that Mr. Baktiari, an academic who one supposes would be steeped in the knowledge that a scholar must attribute the words and ideas of others to their proper source, would make such a claim.”
According to the Tribune, the op-ed in question includes nearly identical passages from a January 27 article in The Economist and a June 30 posting on a CBS site. It also found that another opinion piece with Baktiari’s byline published on the MEC website about Iran and the WikiLeaks cables is actually the work of Columbia University scholar Gary Sick. Baktiari said Sick had given him permission to post the article on the MEC website, and said the use of his byline was an accident.
Baktiari received his Ph.D. from the Woodrow Wilson Department of Government and Foreign Affairs at the University of Virginia. The tenured professor currently teaches in the department of languages and literature in the College of Humanities at the University of Utah.
He came to Utah from the University of Maine, where he was director of research and academic programs in the School of Policy and International Affairs (SPIA). He currently teaches Persian language and courses in Iranian society as an associate professor.
Baktiari has been published in a variety of publications including the Christian Science Monitor, the Council on Foreign Relations’ Muslim Politics Report, Maine Sunday Telegram, and Al-Ahram weekly.
The question of plagiarism involving Iranian political figures has become a major topic in recent years as computer searches used to compare printed material in English scholarly publications has uncovered several political figures in Iran submititng documents for publication that have copied the professional work of others. The Iranian government has not disciplined any of those figures.
