UP leaders defer action on Law dean's resignation offer

The University of the Philippines (UP) Board of Regents (BOR) on Friday decided to suspend its judgment on the resignation offer of College of Law dean Marvic M.V.F. Leonen after being linked to an alleged case of plagiarism. "They (board members) just needed to go over the documents," said a source who is privy to the Board's meeting on Friday. The source declined to be named. The deferment of action on Leonen's offer means that the Law dean will keep his post pending the decision of the Board, which will convene again in January. The BOR is the highest governing body in the UP system. It is co-chaired by the UP president and the chairperson of the Commission on Higher Education. It has nine members. Last week, Leonen sent UP Diliman Chancellor Sergio Cao a resignation letter. Leonen admitted his failure to supply the necessary attributions in his article titled "Weaving Worldviews: Implications of Constitutional Challenges to the Indigenous Peoples Rights Act of 1997." The article was published in the Integrated Bar of the Philippines journal in 2004. Cao endorsed Leonen’s resignation letter to the BOR for approval. Author clears Leonen Leonen offered to resign after Philippine Social Justice Foundation (Philjust) noted that Leonen borrowed, without proper attribution, portions of his "Weaving Worldviews" article from at least two works by American law professor Owen Lynch. However, Lynch, who is also a visiting professor at UP Law, cleared Leonen and said both of them shared the same ideas while working closely together for 24 years. "I therefore find it unfortunate that Dean Leonen's ideas, which have found their way to the contents of my amicus [friend of the court] brief, are now being used against him. In my view, the Dean committed no act of intellectual dishonesty in relation to my works," said Lynch. Despite Lynch's statement, Leonen offered to resign. "If I were a professor looking back at my work, I would have said that's a demerit, or something which falls short of the level of excellence required in the UP College of Law. Scholarly writing means you footnote it. Two footnotes — that's what I missed," Leonen said in an interview last week. In August this year, Leonen led 36 other UP law professors in calling for the resignation of Supreme Court (SC) Associate Justice Mariano Del Castillo for allegedly plagiarizing portions of a decision that the Justice penned. The SC absolved Del Castillo of the plagiarism charges, claiming that the footnotes in the decision were accidentally deleted. On the other hand, the SC issued a show-cause order against the "UP Law 37," as the professors are now called, for calling for Del Castillo's resignation. – VVP, GMANews.TV