Acknowledging Sources/Destroying Evidence/Saving Face ...
But there's a more important issue here: What historian would destroy an archive, simply because it includes [at least] one incriminating document? We don't know that Bryan Le Beau would, but the University of Missouri, Kansas City, has a webpage that was an archive of the Dean's Newsletter. Not only has the UMKC website manager taken down access to Bryan Le Beau's 2003 Commencement Address that appeared in The Dean's Newsletter, #7 (26 January 2004), as Jeff Vanke points out, but as Eric Muller indicates at Is That Legal? every link on that page is now dead. Le Beau confessed to us in his cover story that he didn't know that putting the commencement address in his e-newsletter made it available on the net. But that only explains to us how he could have gotten caught. Not realizing that that isn't the critical issue, my students have explained those things to me many times. But now that he does know how he got caught ...
It's the coverup that does you in, Bryan. Ask Richard Nixon. Ask Michael Bellesiles. GoogleCache makes it increasingly difficult to destroy all traces of the evidence. When you have the inclination to do that, it's time to step back, think about who you are and what your vocation is. Undoubtedly, you believe that you have already paid a heavy penalty. You have acknowledged the plagiarism and issued a public apology. You have withdrawn from a search at DePaul University, where you were a finalist for a position as executive vice president for academic affairs. Before the inquiry at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, drags on, you would do yourself and the University a favor by stepping down as Dean of its College of Arts and Sciences.