MORE than 100 overseas students graduated from the University of New England with copied masters theses, creating one of Australia's biggest plagiarism scandals after an academic whistleblower tried to raise the alert.

Some students were allowed to graduate after UNE began an investigation that remains unfinished after more than two years. The masters program, begun with a commercial partner in 2004, turned out 220 plagiarised theses of the 230 that were checked. To date, no UNE staff member responsible for the program has been publicly held to account.

The HES can reveal that the whistleblower, mathematician Imre Bokor, was told by UNE he could face charges of academic misconduct for allegedly failing to raise the alert "immediately and directly" after he had detected suspect theses.

He told the HES he had nothing to do with the design or delivery of the program, apart from once vetting a maths exam for errors, and had made himself unpopular with superiors for opposing the program as unsound from the outset.

Former UNE chancellor John Cassidy has described the scandal as "the worst case of plagiarism in Australian history".

Last week UNE vice-chancellor Alan Pettigrew, who inherited the program when he took office in 2006, said the plagiarism case had been handled as fairly, thoroughly and quickly as possible.

"It's been very, very complex," he said. "We have taken every possible step we can and sought extensive legal advice on all the steps we have taken." He could not comment on individual cases but "allegations have been raised against a number of staff and that process of investigation is nearing its completion".

The UNE-badged masters of information technology degree, attractive to full-fee students hoping for permanent residency as skilled migrants, was taught by the Melbourne Institute of Technology, UNE's partner.

Education commentators praised Professor Pettigrew for resolute action when he went public about the scandal in August 2007.

He said UNE would not "shy away from taking the most difficult steps" and might strip students of their degrees. He claimed plagiarism had been first raised in November 2006 and in just one case. But he said UNE had quickly established that "a significant proportion" of 210 theses appeared to be plagiarised.

Dr Bokor said the final, official count was that 220 of 230 theses were plagiarised.

"When I first let them know, there were fewer than 100 theses involved. By the time they investigated, it had grown to 230," he said. He said a visiting Polish academic alerted him in July 2006 to the abysmal standard of one of the first theses to emerge from the program, begun in 2004.

"I realised, just by reading the first page, it was obviously plagiarised," Dr Bokor said.

He said most of the students were from the Indian subcontinent but their characteristic English was interspersed with polished American and British English. Material for one thesis had been lifted from The Guardian newspaper in Britain and a US business magazine. He checked several other theses and found similar copying.

"I didn't know what to do," Dr Bokor said. He said he had already approached his two immediate superiors with concerns about poor standards in the program and the risk of plagiarism. "They just pooh-poohed me and told me to go away," he said.

He decided to ask for plagiarism to be put on the agenda for the mid-August meeting of his school. "It wasn't dealt with. The school meeting was abandoned by (my immediate superiors) just before those items were raised," he said.

Even so, there was a lively debate about standards in the program and Dr Bokor's account is that he said words to the effect that the theses were "not even undergraduate standard. A high school student could have copied or taken them from the internet. Don't believe me, have a look yourself. Any reasonable person would have walked away believing that I thought those theses were plagiarised."

Four witnesses at the meeting would back this view, he said.

He said he was unsure what to do after being rebuffed in the meeting. He regarded his immediate superiors as champions of the program. He had opposed the selection of one of them on the grounds that establishment of the MIT program was bound up with his appointment. At the same time, in the winter of 2006, Dr Bokor and his partner Bea Bleile, also a mathematician at UNE, were fighting retrenchment in a case that became a symbol of a discipline under siege.

In October 2006 a group of students with suspect theses graduated. Advised to go to thevice-chancellor, Dr Bokor saw Professor Pettigrew in November, showed him a copied thesis and warned him the problem was systemic, not isolated. In February 2007, after some preliminary inquiries within the school, UNE set up a formal working group to handle the case.

The following month, another group of students graduated from the program.

Had his superiors been willing to listen in August 2006, staff would have had plenty of time to vet theses before the October 2006 graduations, Dr Bokor said.

In October 2007, a panel report commended senior managers for their resolute handling of the affair but urged that other staff closer to the program be questioned further.

Two months later the chancellor at the time, Mr Cassidy, said UNE had decided not to penalise retrospectively former students who had already graduated.

Mr Cassidy said UNE had advice its plagiarism policy might not cover former students who had graduated.

The advice had raised questions about UNE's conduct and management of the program and staff responsible for academic standards could face disciplinary charges, he said.

For much of last year, governance at UNE suffered as a result of a debilitating power struggle between Mr Cassidy and Professor Pettigrew.

Dr Bokor said he believed the October 2007 panel report had been selective in apportioning blame and senior managers had not been held properly to account.

Instead, he had been targeted, he said. In May last year, UNE put him on notice that he could face academic misconduct charges.

One allegation was that "Dr Bokor failed to immediately and directly bring the plagiarism he had identified to the attention of relevant university officers (for example, his immediate superiors)."

Given three weeks to defend himself, Dr Bokor told UNE he refused to answer the allegations because he believed they were an attempt to punish him for pointing out the inconvenient fact of plagiarism.

"I consider the whole thing to have been a case of retribution," he said.

Although he was given a verbal reassurance in December last year about the case, it was not until May this year, following pressure from the academic union, that UNE sent him a letter informing him of a decision not to pursue the allegations.

Dr Bokor believed the master's program had support at the highest levels within UNE.

In 2005, a senior manager had hailed the program as a model for academic renewal at UNE.

Dr Bokor said he was not the only member of the then school of mathematics, statistics and computer science who was apprehensive about the MIT program because similar, previous ventures had suffered from low standards and plagiarism.

He said UNE's one-year graduate diploma in computer science was more rigorous than the full-fee masters delivered by MIT. But the full-fee masters had been set up as a two-year program to meet the skilled migration rules for graduates.

"Academic standards are far more important than a quick buck," he said.

He said the mathematics department, implicated in the scandal by virtue of the UNE-MIT program, was of international standard.

"It's much easier to establish a reputation where there isn't one, than to re-establish a tarnished one," Dr Bokor said.

Professor Pettigrew said UNE had adopted new and better policies. UNE now placed its own staff with commercial providers where programs were delivered in partnership so that quality could be checked.

The last students have yet to graduate from the UNE-MIT master's program. The partners stopped taking new students some time ago and are "teaching out" those few still left in the program.