Southern Illinois University’s president, a former congressman and one-time candidate for Illinois governor, is facing allegations that he plagiarized parts of his 1984 doctoral dissertation, according to a published report.

SIU’s student newspaper, The Daily Egyptian, reported Thursday that it analyzed Glenn Poshard’s 111-page doctoral dissertation, obtained from an anonymous source, and reported that it found at least 30 sections that either were not attributed to their original sources or not put in quotation marks to show they weren’t Poshard’s writing.

Poshard, a one-time Democratic candidate for governor, said he might have mistakenly left out some citations in the dissertation but didn’t plagiarize.

“I could have made a mistake,” Poshard told the newspaper. “I’m not saying I didn’t.”

On Thursday, the chairman of SIU’s board said the panel stands behind Poshard.

“We’re very comfortable with the situation as is,” Roger Tedrick told The Associated Press.

The allegations follow last year’s ouster of the university’s former chancellor Walter Wendler, who had been accused of lifting sections from a strategic plan for a Texas school where he worked, then using them in SIU’s long-range plan. Three years ago, the staff formed Alumni and Faculty Against Corruption at SIU, after a professor was fired for reportedly plagiarizing his two-page teaching statement.

David Gross, a spokesman for Poshard, said Thursday that Poshard’s comments to the newspaper would stand, and any public comment from him would come after he had a chance to fully review the assertions.

Tedrick said the issue came out “some time ago” during an ongoing lawsuit against the university by Chris Dussold, a professor fired from SIU-Edwardsville in 2004, ostensibly for plagiarizing a teaching statement. At that time, Tedrick said, the board vetted Poshard’s dissertation matter through experts, “and we deemed that it was not plagiarism.”

When asked if this is no longer an issue with Poshard, Tedrick replied, “That’s exactly right.”

“We have dealt with this in the past, and we are standing behind President Poshard because this just comes as a demand for money in litigation,” he said.

When asked if Poshard’s citations _ or lack thereof _ could have been better, Tedrick replied, “Is anything perfect? Probably not.”

The newspaper reported that 14 sections of the dissertation have verbatim texts from other sources without a citation and 16 sections have verbatim text with a citation but without quotation marks.

The dissertation was written in 1984 for Poshard’s doctoral degree in administration of higher education for SIU.

“This is not an excuse, and I would never offer it up as an excuse but at that point in my life, I had a family,” Poshard told The Daily Egyptian. “I worked two jobs. I was running for the Illinois State Senate. I was trying to get my dissertation finished.”

Poshard, who was named president of the 35,000-student SIU system in late 2005, said his dissertation committee at SIU approved his method of citing that allowed him to use long sections without quotations.

“No one on my committee said that when you reference and cite something correctly that you have to go up and put quotes around it,” he told the newspaper.

Tedrick cast the matter as old news.

“Although we take any allegations of this nature seriously, we believe this has less to do with what happened 24 years ago and more to do with the current litigation” involving Dussold, Tedrick said in a statement later Thursday. “This board remains fully supportive of the president and wishes him and the Southern Illinois University community to focus their collective energies on moving the institution forward.”

Phone messages left Thursday by The Associated Press with Wendler, now an SIU architecture professor, and with presidents of SIU’s faculty senate and the faculty association were not immediately returned.

Poshard, a Democrat, served five terms in Congress and was a member of the State General Assembly before that. He was first appointed to the Illinois State Senate two weeks after his dissertation was completed following the death of Sen. Gene Johns.

He ran unsuccessfully for governor in 1998, losing to Republican George Ryan. He subsequently served four years as vice chancellor at the SIU-Carbondale campus.