Director of Paris journalism school suspended over plagiarism allegations Paris: The executive director of a prestigious journalism school in Paris has been suspended while the university investigates accusations she was plagiarising articles for her columns in the Huffington Post. A news website said Agnes Chauveau, who worked for the Sciences-Po university, was cutting and pasting chunks of articles from newspaper Le Monde and other French media and passing them off as her own. "Plagiarism is a very serious affair in journalism," said Bruno Patin, the director of the school which much of the French elite has attended, wrote in an email to staff and students. The school cannot take this sort of thing lightly. This is why, having spoken to Agnes, I am going to seek an independent evaluation of the accusations against our executive director ... In the meantime, Agnes will be relieved of her responsibilities," he said. The website Arret Sur Images said it fed about 20 of Chauveau's columns into an online plagiarism checker and found that in half of them at least one sentence, but more often two or three, had been lifted from other articles and presented unchanged and without attribution. The Huffington Post columns were based on broadcasts Chauveau made for France Culture radio station. Questioned by Arret Sur Images, Chauveau replied: "I forget to cite certain articles but this is never voluntary and I will rectify this any time it causes a problem." She also explained that she did not "have the time to cite my sources on air." Students at the school are required to sign an ethics charter in which they promise not to indulge in plagiarism and which states that they should not "pass off as their own the thoughts of others, and they must explicitly cite any fellow journalist of whom they reproduce a text or even just a few words of a text." Last year France's chief rabbi, Gilles Bernheim, resigned after he admitted to plagiarising several authors and lying on his CV. The journalism school was founded 10 years ago as part of the Sciences-Po Institute of Political Studies, which counts among its alumni President Francois Hollande and countless other prominent figures in French politics and business.