UND General Info | UND Medical School | UND Discussion | Other Sites | Look Back
UND OK's Plagiarism
A Minot woman has filed a $1
million lawsuit charging a UND professor with stealing
information from her doctoral thesis and using it as his own.
Joyce Burr alleges in a suit filed in Northwest District Court that Richard
Landry, an education professor at UND, secretly copied computer discs
containing research she had done for her doctoral thesis. Burr claims the
copying took place while she was in a Minneapolis hospital in 1989.
A lawsuit filed by a former
UND graduate student against the university and an education professor has
moved to Grand Forks County District Court.
In her suit, Joyce Burr claims that Richard Landry entered her office and
secretly copied computer disks in October 1989 while she was hospitalized in
Minneapolis. The disks contained original creative ideas, drafts and documents
she intended to use for a doctoral degree, Burr said in the suit.
Plagiarism allegations
against a UND professor and a Department of Public Instruction administrator
should be heard by a jury, the North Dakota Supreme Court says.
In a unanimous decision Thursday, the court said Joyce Burr's allegations
that the two pilfered material from her doctoral thesis may not be covered by
the legal protections normally afforded state employees.
A lawsuit filed after
portions of a UND graduate student's doctoral research was taken from her
office and used without her permission has been settled out of court.
Details of the settlement were not available, and a second lawsuit related
to the same incident still is pending in state court in Bismarck.
The superintendent of a
Wahpeton school for American Indian children may continue her plagiarism
lawsuit against a UND professor and an agency administrator, the state Supreme
Court has ruled.
Joyce Burr's $3 million lawsuit stems from her days as a UND doctoral
student more than seven years ago. Since June 1995, she has been
superintendent of the Circle of Nations boarding school.