Madonna Constantine - Plagiarism and Dismissal

Plagiarism and Dismissal

In February 2008, Constantine faced unspecified sanctions from the university for plagiarism. A law firm hired by Teachers College to investigate Constantine issued a report citing "numerous instances in which she used others' work without attribution in papers she published in academic journals over the past five years." Constantine denied the charges of plagiarism and claims that she is a victim of institutional racism because the University did not fully investigate the allegations. Constantine alleged that evidence she presented establishing her innocence was ignored even when independent third parties corroborated it.

College officials were reported to say that the investigation had been underway for eighteen months, which (as The New York Times noted) means that it began prior to, and was in progress during, the time of the noose incident.

According to reports, the investigation was handled by a law firm rather than a faculty committee because of administration fears that a misstep might leave the college vulnerable to a lawsuit.

The Columbia Daily Spectator (the Columbia student newspaper) reported that the noose incident sparked a renewed discussion of racism at Teachers College. The Spectator also conducted its own analysis of the 36 passages that were involved in Teachers College’s determination that Constantine was guilty of academic plagiarism, and the paper concluded that there were significant similarities between the passages by Constantine and passages by Professor Christine Yeh and two Teachers College students. A later Columbia Spectator article reported that Constantine's attorneys had presented evidence to the Columbia Spectator as well as to Columbia which the attorneys asserted proved Constantine's "prior authorship of all of the passages that...are claimed...to have been plagiarized". Columbia officials rejected those claims, saying that the authenticity of that evidence could not be verified.

On June 23, 2008, Teachers College announced that Constantine would be fired effective at the end of the year. In October 2008 Constantine filed suit against the college, alleging that her termination was "arbitrary, irrational, and unauthorized," but the suit was "disposed". Constantine filed a defamation lawsuit against Columbia in April 2009. She lost one of 3 lawsuits against Teachers College in March 2010. In March of 2012, The New York State Supreme Court, Appellate Division, First Department, affirmed the dismissal of Madonna Constantine's defamation action against Columbia University and others.