Dhaka University found plagiarism evidence in two teachers

The Dhaka University authorities found that two of their teachers had plagiarized content in a joint article and ordered a committee to deliberate on their punishment, a decision made during a meeting of high authority and governance after another committee submitted the report after three years of education.

On September 27, 2017, the highest governing body of DU formed a five-member committee, including Prof. Nasreen Ahmad, as chairman of the committee. Nasreen is also vice-chancellor of education at Dhaka University, where she did not mention the punishment for this illegal act for both teachers.

The pro-vice-chancellor of Dhaka University confirmed the sources that:

“The submitted report found that the allegations against the two teachers were proven true and the syndicate later ordered a tribunal to be set up to determine their punishment,” he said.

In 2017, an editor of the Chicago Journal claimed that Samia Rehman, a lecturer in the Department of Mass Communication and Journalism, and Syed Mahfujul Haque Marjan, a lecturer in the Department of Criminology, had written a duplicate article without quoting it correctly.

Using a plagiarism checker, the editor also discovered that the teachers had copied the article from an article by the French philosopher Michel Foucault entitled “The Subject and Power.” The article is 19 pages long and was written by Foucault in 1982 and published by the Press Journal of the University of Chicago.

This article was plagiarism and was published in the Social Science Review, a journal of the Faculty of Social Sciences of the DU, where it was published in 2016. When the sources concerned Samia, she said that she would follow the punishment according to the law and legal process. Furthermore, she stated that at the time of publication she was abroad and published Marjan without her decision.