Professor Tirtha Raj Khaniya, the vice chancellor nominee for Tribhuvan University, has been accused of plagiarism.

While he headed the English Education Department of TU in 2006, Khaniya had lifted section of an article written by Ferit Kilickaya, associate professor at Middle East Technical University and Mehmet Akif Ersoy University, Turkey.

Khaniya had copied a large section of the article in his own work titled ‘Use of authentic materials in EFL classrooms’ that was published in a journal of the Nepal English Language Teachers’ Association (NELTA). Bal Krishna Sharma, who was a member of NELTA editorial panel in 2010, said Kilickaya had complained to NELTA via an email after he found the article on the internet.

Khaniya has denied the claim saying there was no compliant against him. “This is just a conspiracy to defame me,” he told the Post. But Sharma said that Jaya Raj Awasthi, then editor of the journal, had consulted with Khaniya about the complaint and the issue was resolved after NELTA sent a letter of apology.  As there was no system of peer review then, Sharma said, the mistake was not traced by editorial team. NELTA started the reviewing system two years after Khaniya’s article was published. Following the compliant NELTA removed all of its journals from Internet that were published before the peer-review system was introduced.

NELTA had also Kilickaya, in an email conversation, said the NELTA team had removed the article from Internet after his complaint. He said that he did not file a legal complaint against Khaniya because he did not know if Nepal’s justice system prosecuted plagarism.

A team led by Education Minister Chitra Lekha Yadav had recommended Khaniya for the VC post at the TU on Saturday. The other VC nominees are Shyam Lal Das for Purbanchal University, Kul Prasad Koirala for Nepal Sanskrit University and Bhusan Shrestha, Ammar Raj Joshi and Akkal Dev Mishra for Far-Western University.

The nomination committee, however, could not recommend the names for Mid-Western University, Pokhara University and Agriculture and Forestry University due to differences with CPN-UML over the sharing. The VC’s position in seven universities became vacant on August 8 after the former VCs retired completing their four years of tenure.