School to Kick Alleged Plagiarist Off Faculty

A week after dismissing Winston L. Frost as dean of Trinity Law School in Santa Ana, officials said Thursday that they also intend to fire him from the faculty because he “engaged in plagiarism” in an article for the school’s law review.

In a two-paragraph statement, officials at Trinity International University, the school’s parent institution, said they will try to remove Frost from the tenured teaching job he has held since 1998.

University Provost Barry J. Beitzel said in a three-page letter to Frost that the faculty Senate will review the matter and make a recommendation to the university’s Board of Regents as soon as possible.

Frost, 43, taught law and ethics classes at the law school.

Tom Borchard, one of Frost’s attorneys, said university officials apparently expect the faculty Senate to rubber-stamp the decision.

“This is merely an exercise to do what they intended to do from Day One: to remove him as a tenured faculty member,” Borchard said. “Why do they need a hearing or review by the faculty Senate? They’ve already made the decision he engaged in plagiarism.”

Frost has been suspended with pay while university officials investigated allegations that he plagiarized from two publications for the law review article, published in the fall 2000 issue. Two days ago, Frost wrote to the faculty Senate asking that his suspension be lifted.

Attorney Ken Anderson, who represents the university, said Frost alleged in the letter that he was mistreated by officials of the school, which is owned by the Evangelical Free Church of America. Anderson said Trinity will “seek to expedite the process to remove Frost” from his teaching position.

“Vigorous action is called for, because we cannot be seen as condoning activity of this kind,” Anderson said. “This has had a very detrimental impact on the school’s reputation.”

Beitzel announced last week that Frost had plagiarized and fired him as dean. At the time, the provost notified Frost that officials were also investigating whether other manuscripts he wrote were compiled from plagiarized sources.

Throughout the investigation, Frost’s lawyers have insisted that any mistakes in the law review article were made by student editors. On Thursday, Borchard said Trinity’s lawyers have failed to provide any evidence that Frost plagiarized.

Beitzel said in his letter, however, that university officials used the definition of plagiarism in the law school’s student guide to reach their findings, rather than the common legal definition.

Borchard took issue with that. “What it boils down to is that they’re using their own self-styled definition of plagiarism, not the one found in Black’s,” a dictionary of legal terms. “Theirs is not a legal definition.”

Borchard maintained that Frost never tried to take credit for work that was not his own. “We acknowledged from Day One there were footnoting errors. We acknowledged a source. It was an incorrect source, but we didn’t pass it off as our own,” he said.

Frost’s law review article, titled “The Development of Human Rights Discourse: A History of the Human Rights Movement,” and his thesis, titled “God, Justice and Human Rights,” contain whole paragraphs and copy blocks similar to text found in the Encyclopaedia Britannica and a 1983 paper by legal scholar Jerome J. Shestack, without any attribution.

In addition, none of the disputed text in Frost’s manuscripts was in quotation marks, which would have provided a signal to the reader that material was taken from another author’s work. Borchard said Frost was not under any legal requirement to use quotation marks.

“There is no legal source that mandates quotation marks or indentation to refer to another party’s literary composition,” he said.

Beitzel said the investigation also found that Frost lifted from the encyclopedia and Shestack’s article in a piece he wrote for Fides et Historia (Faith and History), a scholarly journal of Calvin College in Michigan. The article appeared earlier this year.

“The editors of Fides et Historia confirmed that you reviewed and authorized the final version. . . . In other words, you were responsible entirely for the text of the article,” Beitzel wrote.

But Frost attorney Borchard countered: “Again, we acknowledged there were footnoting errors in this article.”