Private university academics dismissed for plagiarism VN Express. Hoang Xuan Phuong and Vu Mong Lan, both part of the management staff at the private Van Lang university, were relieved of their positions after it was revealed that one of their published articles, titled “The relationship between PR specialists and journalists through the lens of communication ethics”, was mostly plagiarised. Phuong and Lan have confessed that their article was translated from a paper by Jim Macnamara, an Australian professor of public communication, published in the Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly in 2016. The two academics said they had translated 80% of the original article without getting the author’s permission or citing his work as the source.