… [W]hy did [Stephen Ambrose] lift passages from other writers and use them without quotation marks? Did someone make fun of his lack of erudition, growing up in Whitewater, Wisconsin? Did he feel inferior to his doctor dad? A longtime smoker (who died of lung cancer in 2002), maybe Mr. Ambrose was given to tempting fate and playing with fire.
Plagiarism is suicide. It stems from envy, I suppose, or in Ambrose’s case, the rush to produce books in rapid succession, but no matter, it’s a stain that peroxide won’t lift out. All your hard work over a lifetime, blighted by the word “plagiarism” every time somebody writes about you. It’s in the third or fourth graph of your obituary, a splotch on your escutcheon…
April 28th, 2010 at 10:02PM
I have another question.
When his excuse for the plagiarism was basically, “It wasn’t me, it was the graduate students who actually wrote the books I put my name on,” why did people take the a-hole seriously, from that point onward?
April 29th, 2010 at 5:46AM
Joe Biden and Martin Luther King seem not so much tainted.
April 29th, 2010 at 6:13AM
Talking of plagiarism, a student has just handed me a report whose first page listed him as “author”, then one page was a copy’n’paste from an institutional website, then another page was a copy of some presentation material *I* had written.
Apparently he is extremely unclear on the notion of authorship.
The problem of copy’n’paste from the Internet has often been discussed with a focus on inaccuracy (e.g. copying from Wikipedia). The problem is not even there. My student did not copy falsehoods – in fact what he copied is probably more correct than what he could have written. In addition to plagiarism, the problem is that he copied things without understanding them.
Copying “authoritative” content without understanding it predates the Internet. I remember students copying literary criticism on books they were supposed to study – criticism that contained words and concepts they would have been hard pressed to explain.
April 29th, 2010 at 6:43AM
Dave S: Biden and MLK did not achieve their recognition as writers; Ambrose did. That’s a pretty important distinction. Had Stephen Ambrose led a non-violent movement that helped to lead the country out of two centuries of racism and inequality, and in the process shown the sort of courage that few of us could ever muster, then I suspect that Garrison Keillor would have given him a pass on the plagiarism.
As for Biden, I don’t know that we want to hold campaign speeches to the same standards that we hold books and scholarly articles. For one thing, if we want to get technical, nearly all prepared remarks made by candidates and office holders (including presidents) would, in the university setting, violate policies on intellectual honesty. After all, nearly every day of his presidency, Barack Obama claims the words of others (speech writers) as his own. It’s just not the same thing.
April 29th, 2010 at 11:15AM
TAFKAU: Staffy ghost-writing for academics gets just about the *same* pass that staffy ghost-writing for politicians gets.
April 30th, 2010 at 8:54PM
[…] Ambrose. He also apparently lied about his access to President Eisenhower. Oh, and I stole this from UD–check out a set of UD’s posts about recent cases. There are websites devoted to this […]