Remember Madonna Constantine, the black female Columbia University professor who found a noose hanging from her door last fall, sparking an outburst of discussion as to whether Columbia was a racially insensitive place, and even prompting a slew of copycat hate-crimes? Well, she's back in the news again, under similarly unfavorable circumstances: The Columbia Spectator is reporting that the good professor has been sanctioned by the university for "numerous instances" of plagiarism in papers she published in academic journals over the past five years.

According to the Spectator, the investigation into Constantine's academic impropriety "was prompted by complaints from students and one former faculty member who said language from materials they wrote was included without attribution in the articles." The law firm conducting the investigation found Constantine's explanation for the similar language to be "not credible."

The New York Police Department has still yet to identify a suspect in the noose incident that shoved Constantine into the headlines. Ivygate is already asking what we're thinking: Did Constantine effectively stage the noose hanging in an ill-conceived attempt to take the heat off the impending plagiarism rap? The investigation began in 2006; the noose incident didn't occur until October 2007. (The possibility that the noose was a hoax was actually brought up at the time by the Huffington Post, though obviously not in the context of plagiarism.)

Then again, maybe we're just being cynical, and Constantine didn't hang her own noose, and didn't pass off other peoples' papers as her own. Or maybe she did the latter but not the former? Or the former but not the latter? Developing...