While working in Samoa some staff from Cornell University organised a Regional Conference on agricultural education.

         On Thursday Daryle Foster the Director came to me and pleaded with me to give the opening keynote address the following Monday. The Pro Vice-Chancellor said he was too busy to give this address. 

         The conference was run by Cornell University and financed by US Aid.

I accepted the challenge.

         That weekend while sweating over my paper I had doubts that I had made the right decision.

         I realized I knew less about the topic than anybody else. Agricultural education wasn’t my field.

         The previous year I had been asked to write a paper for the Department of Rural Extension Studies at Guelph University in Canada.

          As far as I knew it hadn’t been published so I rapidly rehashed it, changing the word ‘extension’ to ‘education’. It was titled “Stimulating Agriculture – Lessons from Asia and the Pacific.”

         The morning arrived with a conference room full of educationists from many countries – all knowing more about the topic than I did.

         The Pro Vice-Chancellor, Professor Dennis F. Osbourn, rose to welcome the delegates with a lengthy address making many of the points I was proposing to make.

         After he finished he sat downwind from me and chain-smoked. The pollution was harder to cope with than the presentation.

         Shortly after while browsing in the Alafua library the Librarian handed me a copy of the Guelph University Occasional Paper No7 by Geoffrey Moss. It was the very paper I had plagiarised for the keynote address. It was the first time I had seen it –  I didn’t know it had been published.

         Sooner or later everyone gets caught out.

Geoffrey Moss(mossassociates.co.nz)

“Honesty is the best policy.”

This and many other stories can be downloaded FREE from our website in the book “Rolling On – Work Adventures in many countries”.