So from a post about a professor I never had, but maybe wish that I had, to a post about a professor I consider a dark stain on my experience at UW-Whitewater. I've always been a believer that your education is, in large part, what you make of it. Talented, knowledgeable, and respectable professors are good things but I think it's possible to come away with something from a course even if the professor sucked.
Doug Eamon is a dark stain on UW-Whitewater. This guy was the least objective professor I ever had. I first had him for a statistics course which I bombed. I wasn't able to overcome his crappy teaching. I later retook the course with another professor and had no problems at all with the material. I think about a year later I had professor Eamon again for a course they called "Experimental Psychology". The course was about conducting experiments, using statistical methods, and writing up papers with the results. It was a 5 credit course rather than the usual 3 credits. We had lab hours to conduct our experiments in addition to the lecture hours. During the 16 week semester we had 3 experiments to run and 3 papers to write about them. This course was essentially the "big one" that all psych majors needed to complete in order to graduate as a psych major. It must've been that he was the only professor that taught this or I'm sure I would have scheduled it some other way.
At the start of the semester he gave a real serious speech about cheating. He said he was going to do everything in his power to get anyone he perceived to be cheating expelled from the University. So this is where my story begins. About midway through the semester I got my second paper back and it didn't have a grade on it. I think it said "see me" on the second page somewhere and it had a big line on it. So I went to his office and he asked me where I got a portion of my paper from. He was accusing me of plagiarizing the entire introduction page of my paper. Since I couldn't give him an answer to his satisfaction he requested copies of all of my sources with highlighting on the areas that were pertinent.
His logic, as he explained it to me, was that my writing style was different than that of my first paper that I had turned in for his course. So my question was always this then....how did he know that I wrote my first paper? Of course neither of them were plagiarized, but I was learning first hand that logic wasn't one of professor Eamon's strengths. The fact of the matter was I had written my paper over a matter of weeks and the intro was one of the first items I had written. My writing process went from the beginning of the paper to its'end, and each day as I progressed I began by tweaking the wording around for everything I had previously written. By the time my paper was done I was very much satisfied with the beginning portions. I considered them to be very clear and concise. I had spent a great deal more time on this paper than I had my first. I agreed that they didn't have the same style. But why did that equate with being written by a different person in my professor's mind? Nevermind that he had never read any other papers of mine. Two writing samples was enough for him to come to the conclusion he had.
After I turned over all of my sources and explained how each of them did or did not relate to our experiment and what informational aspects of them ended up in my paper he still was not convinced. He continued to attempt to pressure me to confess to something I could not. At one point he said something to me like, "So I guess we've reached an impasse".
I spent some time familiarizing myself with the procedure that was undertaken when a student is accused of misconduct. I don't recall the details of it now anymore, but it involved the department head of psychology, a student representative...some sort of panel and so on. It never did get that far. Perhaps he got a second opinion and was laughed at. There was no way on earth he ever would have prevailed in such a setting. His position wasn't based on facts and since evidence simply couldn't exist, he would've had to fall back on this foggy logic about 2 papers that didn't seem to have the same writing style...and therefore must not have been written by the same person. I looked forward to the panel and to humiliating him but alas I was denied the opportunity.
Sometime before my third paper was due I requested feedback from him on my second paper so that I could proceed in proper form for my third paper. Eventually as the semester end was coming up he gave me a grade on my paper. There was something illegible written on the side near the beginning of the paper. If I had to guess what it read it may have been, "mistake". I think he said he graded my paper without regard to the portion of it he viewed as questionable. If I recall correctly he gave me a B or a B-.
I've discovered in recent years that the staff at UW-Whitewater can post webpages which I presume are hosted on University servers. The content of most of the pages relates directly to courses taught by the professors....course materials, the syllabus, etc. Some pages go further. One look at Prof. Eamon's page and it is apparent where he stands in the political spectrum. To the left would be an understatement. I shouldn't be surprised. To my recollection this was never apparent in the classroom, but then again that would have been back in 1995...smack in the middle of the Clinton era and long before Haliburton was a household name. I wonder where he stood when Ward Churchill came to speak at the Whitewater campus a few years back. Was he aware of the academic misconduct his ideological co-hort was involved in? Misconduct which ironically includes plagiarism. Only it's the real kind with evidence and everything.
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