Ex-Forestry School student sues profs for plagiarism

Five years after his theory was published in a prestigious science journal, Kris Johnson, a former graduate student at the Yale School of Forestry, is suing the professors he had named as co-authors for plagiarizing his ideas.

DAVID GEST/YH Professors at the Forestry School have come under fire recently for allegedly plagiarizing a former student's scientific theory.

On Mon., Nov. 20, more than a year after Johnson had filed an initial complaint against his professors, Osvald Schmitz and David Skelly, lawyers met in the federal case Johnson vs. Schmitz to begin proceedings on a jury trial. The $5 million lawsuit includes accusations of misappropriation of ideas, civil theft, and fraud.

The case implicates not only Schmitz and Skelly, but also various formal committees to which Johnson allegedly appealed when he thought his ideas had been stolen. Johnson's complaints led him from his advisor all the way to the Dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, John Gordon. But, feeling that the institutions set up for these kinds of investigations were not addressing his concerns, Johnson sought a lawyer to settle the issue in District Court.

Both Schmitz and Skelly have been advised not to comment on the case by one of Yale's lawyers, Pat Noon-an. Noonan himself also denied numerous requests for comment, though he did say that in his 20 years at Yale, he has never seen a graduate student accusing his professor of stealing his ideas. "I would think it is pretty rare for people to make these allegations," Noonan said.

Johnson, who also could not be reached for comment, received a B.S. and M.S. in biology from the University of Wyoming before enrolling at the School of Forestry in 1994. An advisory committee set up to help guide Johnson through his studies and research originally included Professor Schmitz. According to the complaint from last year, Schmitz's admiration for Johnson's work led him to ask the student for research help in a Yale-owned forest in northeastern Connecticut.

That summer, Johnson assembled an outline of his ideas and theories which he planned to develop into a scientific paper and then publish in the British scientific journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution (TREE). Johnson allegedly asked Schmitz to e-mail a memo to the editors of TREE with this outline. The editors responded positively, asking for development of the outline into a paper. At that point, though, Johnson no longer wanted to share his ideas. His complaint states that "Schmitz then told Johnson that if he distrusted a Yale faculty member, it would be unlikely that Johnson would successfully pass his qualifying exam and complete his work for the doctoral program."

In an apparent response to these alleged threats, Johnson submitted his paper on the "Theory and Reaction Norm Approach" to TREE in December 1995, naming Schmitz and others as co-authors, a common practice for graduate students. About seven months later, the paper was published in TREE. The following week, Johnson appeared before his doctoral dissertation committee for his oral qualifying exam. He was never formally advised of the results of this exam, though Schmitz allegedly told Johnson he had failed and that "he did not have what it took to write a thesis and be awarded a Ph.D. degree."

Throughout the next year, Johnson began to suspect Schmitz and his colleagues of taking his theory and making it entirely their own, as he was no longer invited to participate in their research. In August 1997 Johnson wrote Skelly a letter demanding that he stop using Johnson's Reaction Norm Approach. A month later, his monthly salary supplement, which helped Johnson pay for room and board, was cut off.

Disillusioned by his personal appeals to professors, Johnson finally wrote a series of letters to Dean Gordon beginning in March 1998. Though told that an Inquiry Committee would be formed, Johnson himself never met face to face with a Yale representative. Gordon appointed John Wargo, Associate Professor of Environmental Risk Analysis and Director of Doctoral Studies for the School of Forestry and Political Science, to chair this committee. Wargo also served at the time as the assistant director of the doctorate program in which Johnson was enrolled.

In August 1998, Dean Gordon stopped the investigation, claiming that Johnson's ideas of the Reaction Norm Approach in fact already existed in scientific literature. After another failed appeal by Johnson to the National Science Foundation (NSF), the source from which he had originally received funding for his theory, he began the court process.

But Noonan said, "It's conceivable a jury will end up reaching a different conclusion. There have been two prior reviews of the case."

At the same time, defendants issued a motion to dismiss Johnson's case in September, which was denied. The trial is set for the fall of next year.

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