The flashiest method is that of Irwin, a young hotshot brought in by the headmaster (who, as played by Clive Merrison, bears a startling resemblance, physical and temperamental, to Mr. Burns, the scheming nuclear power plant owner on "The Simpsons") to add a little sheen to a class of eight senior boys swotting away in preparation for the Oxford and Cambridge entrance exams. The idea is not so much well-roundedness as to make the boys seem the equal, in cleverness, glibness and false sophistication, of competing candidates from the elite private schools.

For Irwin, education is essentially a stunt in which the whole point is to distinguish oneself in interviews and exams. His favorite strategy is to attack received opinion, just on principle, and stand it on its head. "The wrong end of the stick is the right one," he tells the boys. "A question has a front door and a back door. Go in the back, or better still, the side." He suggests Stalin as an example: "Generally agreed to be a monster, and rightly. So dissent. Find something, anything, to say in his defense. History nowadays is not a matter of conviction. It's a performance."

Irwin is in part the playwright's not-so-hidden dig at revisionary historians like David Starkey and Niall Ferguson, who have made careers out of debunking some of Britain's most cherished beliefs. Mr. Ferguson has famously argued about World War I, for example, that Britain was as much to blame for starting the war as Germany, and that Britain need never have got involved.

Americans looking for an analogy closer to home need only think of the online magazine Slate and The New Republic in the heyday of Michael Kinsley's editorship, when a routine tactic was to take some familiar item of conventional wisdom — that Wal-Mart is bad, or that magazine fact-checking departments are good — and demonstrate that it's all wrong.

But as most successful students already know, the Irwinian method is practically foolproof and works on everyone except teachers like Hector, Irwin's antagonist at the school. A fat, shambling, bow-tie-wearing eccentric, Hector believes in learning for its own sake and in turning out truly well-rounded human beings, not the fashionable Ivy League sort. His pupils are required to learn by heart great swaths of Hardy, Auden and Larkin, but also the songs of Gracie Fields. A typically rollicking class might include a re-enactment of the cigarette-smoking scene from "Now, Voyager" or, for a French lesson, a skit taking place in a brothel: "Pour dix francs je peux vous montrer ma prodigieuse poitrine."

Hector takes a very dim view of the exam process, and doesn't seem to think it matters very much whether the boys go to Oxbridge or not. "I count exams, even for Oxford and Cambridge, as the enemy of education," he says at one point. "Which is not to say that I don't count education as the enemy of education, too."

Hector belongs, in short, to the great tradition of memorable, idealistic and life-altering schoolteachers, in the same company as Mr. Chips, Miss Jean Brodie and the Robin Williams character in "Dead Poets Society." That's both his appeal — especially in our age of results-oriented education — and his limitation. He's the teacher we all wish we had, including the Oxford-educated Mr. Bennett, who has said he wrote the play in part because no such figure had ever turned up in his classes at a Leeds grammar school not unlike the one in "The History Boys."

And then there is Mrs. Lintott, who stuffs her pupils so full of facts that they invariably excel at their A-levels — the equivalent of our Advanced Placement tests. She gets the fewest lines and the shortest shrift but is also the least fragile of the characters and the most contemporary figure at an institution that seems a little otherworldly, more 50's than 80's — the kind of school where the fumbling gropes of a closeted gay teacher are genially tolerated by the students, if not the administration, and where, amazingly, no one listens to rock music.

Irwin isn't an anachronism exactly; he's just so slick that these days he wouldn't be caught dead in a classroom. He'd work for IvyWise helping students enhance their portfolios and add contrarian, attention-getting touches to their personal essays: "Why Flunking Driver's Ed Was Good for Me."

Mrs. Lintott's position is a somewhat unfashionable one both in the play and in real life these days, where mere competence sometimes seems undervalued. She is not a particularly exciting teacher, we gather, just a highly effective one. Her great virtue is the way she suggests to the boys on the stage and the grownups in the audience that education has its limitations. If you don't get into one college, she reminds us, you will almost certainly get into another, and while education may be a necessary preparation for life, it is in no way a substitute for it.

In every high school there are students who are culturally and intellectually superior but socially aggrieved. These high school culturati have wit and sophisticated musical tastes but find that all prestige goes to jocks, cheerleaders and preps who possess the emotional depth of a cocker spaniel. The nerds continue to believe that the self-reflective life is the only life worth living (despite all evidence to the contrary) while the cool, good-looking, vapid people look down upon them with easy disdain on those rare occasions they are compelled to acknowledge their existence.

These sarcastic cultural types may grow up to be rich movie producers, but they will remember their adolescent opposites and become liberals. They may grow up to be rich lawyers but will decorate their homes with interesting fabrics from the oppressed Peruvian peasantry to differentiate themselves from their jock opposites.

In adulthood, the former high school nerds will savor the sort of scandals that befall their formerly athletic and currently corporate adolescent enemies — the Duke lacrosse scandal, the Enron scandal, the various problems that have plagued the frat boy Bush. In the lifelong struggle for moral superiority, problems that bedevil your adolescent opposites send pleasure-inducing dopamine surging through your brain.

Similarly, in every high school there are jocks, cheerleaders and regular kids who vaguely sense that their natural enemies are the brooding poets who go off to become English majors. These prom kings and queens may leave their adolescent godhood and go off to work as underpaid sales reps despite their coldly gracious spouses and effortlessly slender kids, but they will still remember their adolescent opposites and become conservatives. They will experience surges of orgiastic triumphalism when Sean Hannity eviscerates the scuffed-shoed intellectuals who have as much personal courage as a French chipmunk in retreat.

Birkerts is writing some of the best criticism in America today, an assessment clearly endorsed by the [New York Times] Book Review, which publishes him, and by Harvard University, which recently hired him. Whatever species of bee it is that Marcus has in his bonnet, he should release it as soon as possible and come in from the schoolyard.

H-h-h-h-h-old up!! H-h-h-h-harvard hired him!? Boy oh boy, Greil Marcus [he who took off after Birkerts] must have totally hit his forehead with the palm of his hand and peed in his pants after realizing his terrible, terrible misjudgment. We bet three, chubby Larry Summerses and one Opal Mehta with her tail between her legs that Marcus writes a retraction next week profusely apologizing for the error of his ways.

In Washington, pork has become synonymous with congressional earmarks; in fact, most media outlets -- including The Washington Post -- define it as such. So does the new "Pig Book," which was released this month by Citizens Against Government Waste and catalogs 375 of last year's goofiest earmarks, such as the Waterfree Urinal Conservation Initiative and the Sparta Teapot Museum.

Aside from 12,000 square feet of gallery space for permanent and temporary exhibitions, the museum will have education space for adults and children; a lobby/reception hall available for the community; a multi-purpose auditorium for lectures, artist demonstrations, small performances, and film; a museum shop, a tea room/café, and administrative space.

Today political professionals - consultants, pollsters, and admen - test out every phrase [a politician might utter]. The result is a veritable Hobson’s choice: the droning inanities of a John Kerry versus the scripted platitudes of a George Bush.

Inspired by recent events, we wondered not “why does anyone plagiarize,” but “why aren’t more people better at plagiarizing?” And so we are launching a contest to see if there is a “writer” out there who can create a coherent and original piece of fiction completely made from the works of others.

(Which is about as coherent and original as modern fiction can get, right?)


The TMN “Sloppy Seconds With Opal Mehta” Contest

The Rules:
—You are limited to 750 of somebody else’s words.
—All lifted material must be cited (author, work, page number). This is the only part where you have to be honest; unlike professional publishers, we’re actually going to check.
—You must plagiarize from a minimum of five different books by as many authors as you wish. The only demand we make is that those books were published at some point, somewhere.
—You must lift only phrases, whole sentences, or passages. No single-word citations allowed.

All entries must be received by midnight on Friday, May 12, or by the time we check our email on Saturday morning, whichever comes later.

Entries will be judged on the creative use of their source material as well as the excellence of the finished story. The winner of the TMN “Sloppy Seconds With Opal Mehta” Contest will have his or her story published on The Morning News, and will also receive a TMN T-shirt and mug to remind them of this, the moment ethics in writing died.

Please send all entries to talk@themorningnews.org, and good luck!

"Like 'unintentional larceny,' the term 'unintentional plagiarism' is an oxymoron... [T]he appropriation of another's work is rarely unintentional."

The pass/low pass/fail system (a correction to Slouka’s piece) allows students to experiment and take risks with their writing, a core belief of the writing division. Slouka’s desire for excellence in advocating a letter-grade-based system is laudable. However, it overlooks the benefits of more complex methods of literary evaluation such as extended written critical feedback and the individual conference. Columbia’s faculty provides both, thus anticipating the responses we writers will receive from the outside literary community. This approach fosters a collaborative environment in which students are encouraged to help one another cultivate a variety of literary skills rather than merely competing for grade point averages.

If the program has increased in size, it is because a higher percentage of accepted students has enrolled each year.

Moreover, Slouka’s attack on “teaching the teaching of writing” to “students who have not yet learned to write” implies that there is a fixed point at which a student will have finished learning how to write.

"In my judgment, the recusal of Summers from the government case charging a senior Harvard faculty member and others with fraudulent activities while entrusted with the task of helping the Russian government privatize its state-owned utility and other companies (“HIID Dénouement,” March-April, page 67) has been swept under the rug by Summers and the Harvard Corporation. The good name of our University has been besmirched to an extent that requires that the individuals guilty of this gross breach of trust should have been dismissed.

There can be no question that a willful failure to respect their collective and individual dedication to ideals that this institution stands for, in order to enjoy personal gain, was what occurred. Who is most responsible for protecting the University’s integrity? The Corporation and the president.

Who will doubt that, in some future situation, when our government is looking for professional assistance in sensitive matters, requiring not only expertise but trustworthiness, this sorry episode will come up? In my eyes, the moral stature of the University has been inexcusably and irrevocably reduced by the action of those directly involved, the president, and the Corporation. This was the main justification for the forced departure of Summers, but the Corporation still has unfinished business, if it has the will: to revisit this whole episode and repair the damage done to the integrity of the University."

George Vlahos ’53
Byfield, Mass.

...Even if cryptomnesia is a real memory glitch that happens to all of us from time to time, however, it's hard to figure how it could lead to the involuntary swiping of 29 different passages.

...This seems like as good an opportunity as any to clear up the greatest enduring myth about human memory. Lots of people claim to have a photographic memory, but nobody actually does. Nobody.

...Viswanathan is hardly the first plagiarist to claim unconscious influence from memory's depths. George Harrison said he never intended to rip off the melody of the Chiffons' "He's So Fine" when he wrote "My Sweet Lord." He had just forgotten he'd ever heard it.

A Letter to my Students

MY DEAR YOUNG FRIENDS:

As I prepare to depart your august institution, I am aware that I will hardly be leaving a mournful group of tear-struck students in my wake. On the contrary, many of you will be glad to see me go. For, I well realize, many of the expectations engendered, and nurtured, by your previous instructors in what we call -- at times euphemistically -- "creative writing" have been disappointed, if not downright dashed, by my presence among you over the past 10 weeks.

Several weeks before the end of this quarter, I was struck by a certain "Love Letter and Thank You Note" addressed to you and my other temporary colleagues by one of the younger, departing professors of creative writing -- a warm and seemingly charming person -- in which she declared her devotion to what she described as "student-centered, relationship-based teaching," and attributed her own, self-described success (which I have come to equate, simply, with popularity) to the fact that she "love(s) my students." She "started loving my students," she went on, "because I saw such inspiring, fragile, invincible, vulnerable beauty in them." She saw, our young poet did, "the same kind of beauty in them I see in the just-about-to-fall spring petals on the trees..."

Not satisfied with providing her own encomiums to her capacities as a teacher, our young colleague -- whom many of you had as a teacher -- also furnished testimony from one of her students' mothers, who, after having sat in on her class and observed what was no doubt the unabashed praise of her offspring's work, said to our erstwhile young professor, "I wish the media would cover stories like this [class] -- we'd all feel a lot more hope about our future in this country."

This being California, our young, about-to-go-on-to-greener-pastures professor couldn't, of course, simply content herself with an outsider's praise. "When people feel loved, nourished, supported and respected; when people feel recognized, seen, and known; when people feel unique and valued," she went on, "they feel confident enough to explore their gifts, to develop those gifts, and to make significant contributions to the human community." To which I can only add: Amen.

In her defense, my younger colleague is probably a victim of what a friend of mine contends (and I wholeheartedly agree) has become, increasingly, the purpose of university life itself -- the presentation of moments of self-gratification, little assurances and narcissistic stabilizers that confirm: Yes, I am smart, I am creative, I am loved. Personally, however, I prefer Goethe's approach -- of which you will come, in time, like it or not, to see the wisdom: "If I love you," the great bard wisely asked, "what business is that of yours?"



And now, my young friends, at the risk of both dashing one of your dear mother's hopes, and relieving any of you who may be experiencing a certain sadness at my departure, let me make a terrible confession: I do not love you. While I have come to like several of you quite a bit, admire some others, feel sympathy for some, and a cool distance toward others, I must confess that for none of you have I developed that rare, precious, and deeply human feeling I would describe as love.

Nor, let me assure you, am I someone incapable of feeling that emotion we call love. I love my son and my close friends. I have loved both my wives in different ways, and several lovers before and between them. But I was not brought here -- your former professor's mushy rhetoric notwithstanding -- to love you, but, rather, to teach you, as I hope I have, something about the beauties, challenges, hardships, joys, and dignity of making, and reading, poems, I was brought here not to be an oracle of love, but because presumably I knew a bit more about being a writer than you do; so that, with some luck and application on all our parts, we might together learn something about that difficult and demanding vocation.

Several years ago, a friend of mine, a long-tenured professor of creative writing, warned me -- in a gesture both well-meaning and sincere -- not to "shit in your own backyard," an act for which my ancestors, the Germans, have a much more poignant, and efficient, term: Nestbeschmutzer -- someone who dirties his own nest, a term popular among the Nazis as well. But thanks in no small part to colleagues like the one who has showered you with her love and testimonials to "the endless possibilities of the human spirit," I have long ago ceased to think of the world of creative writing and its instructors as my "nest" (much as I would like to hope that I have a home of sorts in the world of literature), nor have I continued, except for occasional forays such as this one, to inhabit that backyard. So I can afford, as I am doing now, to take liberties, preferring to cite a line from one of my own generation's better poets, Bob Dylan: "When you got nothin', you got nothin' to lose."




On our first day of class this quarter, I told you that, insofar as I was concerned, there were three possible things to be gained from a class in creative writing: the ability to become better, more discriminating readers; a greater capacity for truth-telling and, with it, the acceptance of hard truths from others; and a greater respect for the difficulty of writing itself. If I have done my job, whether you have come to "love" me or not, you may have learned something about all three, and I can leave here a satisfied, if not universally beloved, teacher.

Which leads me to yet another confession you may, or may not, want to hear: I do not need your love. (And is there, I wonder, a more abused, and misused, word in all of the English language than "love"?) For I am, in that sense, a lucky man: I already have the love of most, if not all, of those whose love I need. What I need from you, or at least would prefer, is something more befitting our student-teacher relationship: your respect. And respect -- let me assure you, from the lofty vantage point of middle age -- is something both more enduring, and more necessary of being earned, than are the vagaries and vicissitudes of what we so often mistakenly call "love."

Nonetheless, I am well aware that you are under the impression that you have been "nurtured" and "loved" by certain teachers who have been far more popular with you than I have been. But let me let you in on yet another little trade secret: You have been neither loved nor nurtured. You have, rather, been lied to and betrayed. Though the mother's milk that flows from such breasts may temporarily satisfy your ravenous appetites for praise (and its donors' hunger for tenure), it is not, I assure you, a very nourishing brew.

You have been told that the not good is good, that the unworthy is the worthy. Rather than being commended on the hard work and noble intentions of your ambition (when it was worth commending), you have been praised for the beauty and rightness of its product (for poetry, as the poet Howard Nemerov once put it, is "getting something right in language").

And, perhaps worst of all, to paraphrase Auden, rather than being respected for wanting to learn how to play an instrument, you have been virtually handed a seat in the orchestra, endowed with a feeling of professionalism without either the hard work or genuine apprenticeship that normally precedes it. This, today, is what passes for "nurturing"; once upon a time, it went by another name: deceit. But to give you such unearned praise -- as a friend of mine, a long-tenured professor who has taught at Johns Hopkins, Stanford, and the University of Chicago, recently reminded me -- "is not only to give [you] nothing at all, it's to deprive [you] of the one thing we have to hold onto; real work and an objective correlative."

Nor has anyone, I suspect, bothered to acquaint you with the dark subtext that underlies all this nurturing and lying and love: That dishonesty -- for a writer even more than for most "ordinary" people -- is an acquired, and contagious, habit. That if you are lied to by your teachers and encouraged to lie to one another and, ultimately, to lie to yourself, the habit of lying will ultimately permeate both your soul and your work, and you will be incapable -- even if you are otherwise graced with the gifts of language, subject, time, and peace of mind -- of uttering in your work that most difficult, and necessary, of truths: the truth, as Matthew Arnold put it, "of what we feel indeed."




And so, my young friends, I leave you with perhaps not the most stellar student evaluations, but also with the luxury of not needing them, seeing as how the department of which I aspire to be a tenured member has no office here, nor at any other university. And if some day, as has happened to me on numerous occasions in the past, I should receive a letter from some -- or at least one -- of you, saying, "Although I didn't particularly like you at the time, or feel sufficiently praised by you, I realize now that I learned something about poetry, and about the struggles and exhilarations of being a writer, from being in your class" it will feel as good to me as being praised by one of your mothers, or covered by the media.

It will even -- let me assure you -- feel better than being loved.

Respectfully yours,

Michael Blumenthal

'[In 1996], Michael Tomasky published "Left for Dead," which argued that the progressive movement was being ruined by multicultural identity politics. Democrats have lost the ability to talk to Americans collectively, Tomasky wrote, and seem to be a collection of aggrieved out-groups: feminists, blacks, gays and so on.

At the time, Bernstein and Tomasky were lonely voices on the left, and the multiculturalists struck back. For example, Martin Duberman slammed Tomasky's book in The Nation, and defended multiculturalism:

"The radical redefinitions of gender and sexuality that are under discussion in feminist and queer circles contain a potentially transformative challenge to all 'regimes of the normal.' The work of theorists like Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Jeffrey Weeks, Marjorie Garber and Judith Butler represents a deliberate systemic affront to fixed modes of being and patterns of power. They offer brilliant (if not incontrovertible) postulates about such universal matters as the historicity and fluidity of sexual desire, the performative nature of gender, and the multiplicity of impulses, narratives and loyalties that lie within us all."

Duberman insisted that postmodern multicultural theorizing would transform politics, but today his gaseous review reads as if it came from a different era, like an embarrassing glimpse of leisure suits in an old home movie.'

Ambition Often Exceeds Talent: I know of very few examples in which an exceptional writer got caught plagiarizing. Sometimes writers accept jobs or assignments beyond their talents. When the deadline whistle blows, they find themselves facing this cost-benefit quandary: Shall I tell the truth and bail, damaging my career for sure, or shall I steal copy and only risk damaging my career?

Writing Is Hard Work: A corollary to ambition exceeding talent. Even prolific writers, who can toss off a thousand words an hour, complain about the difficulty of writing. Writing well is a difficult enterprise. So is writing poorly. With so many examples of good writing out there to "borrow," why suffer only to write poorly?

The Thrill Factor: As anybody who has ever shoplifted a pack of Bazooka bubble gum can tell you, people steal not only for material gain but for psychic gain. It's a gas to pad the company expense account, leave a restaurant without paying, or rifle though a friend's medicine cabinet to steal his most potent medications.

Evening the Score: If you hate your boss at the car factory, you might express your fury by sabotaging every tenth car on the line. If you hate your editor or your publication, perhaps you stick it to him by plagiarizing. It doesn't make sense, but neither does sabotaging every tenth car.

Force of Habit: If nobody catches you running stop lights in college or tickets you for doing the same at your first newspaper job, you eventually stop paying attention. One day, red, yellow, and green all mean "go."

Contempt for the Business: Show me the writer who calls himself and everybody he works with a "hack," and I'll show you a potential plagiarist.

Even If You Get Caught, You'll Probably Get Away With It: Trudy Lieberman reported in the July/August 1995 Columbia Journalism Review that many journalists caught plagiarizing paid little or no price for their transgressions. Lieberman describes a "circle-the-wagons" mentality in the news business when plagiarism breaks out. Providing a number of examples, she also notes the double standard of journalists who gave Sen. Joseph Biden holy grief when he committed plagiarism in a presidential campaign speech but cut their colleagues slack.

' "In a way it's kind of like working on a television show ," said Cindy Eagan, editorial director at Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, a sister imprint of Ms. Viswanathan's publisher, and the publisher of the "Clique," "A-List" and "Gossip Girl" series. "We all work together in shaping each novel."


…The company that eventually became Alloy was founded in 1987. It had its first hit with the "Sweet Valley High" series. The company, then known as 17th Street Productions, was sold in 2000 to Alloy Inc., a large media company that owns the teenage-oriented retailer Delia's, and changed its name to Alloy Entertainment. Since then it has become a 'tween-lit hit factory. '

The chairman of the Senate Finance Committee is expected to call for significant reforms on American University's governing board -- including the possible removal of some trustees -- after talks between the two groups failed, according to sources familiar with the discussions.

The talks, held during the past few weeks, were an attempt to quietly put to rest a review by committee staff members of the $3.75 million departure deal awarded last fall to ousted AU president Benjamin A. Ladner after the board concluded that he could be fired for cause.

Ladner was ousted in October after auditors questioned hundreds of thousands of dollars in expenditures by him and his wife, Nancy, over three years. He reimbursed the university more than $100,000 and agreed to amend tax forms to report additional indirect income from the school for services such as a personal chef.

The deal infuriated many on the private university's campus in Northwest Washington, with faculty, deans and students voting no-confidence in the board for its actions.

Sources, who declined to be identified because of the confidentiality of the proceedings, said a key reason the talks failed was that the board declined to remove some trustees who had been seen as most prominent in the decision to award the severance package.

As a result, the sources said, Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), chairman of the Finance Committee, will send a letter to the AU trustees within days recommending changes in governance. Grassley's committee has been investigating financial abuses in nonprofit organizations.

The recommendations are expected to include a request that board leaders oust certain members, as well as provide a stronger voice on the governing panel for faculty and students, according to the sources.

Because American University is congressionally chartered, Congress could formally step into issues of governance, but the sources said Grassley's recommendations would not be binding…

illustrates how a writer can - while making assertions that are, for all I know, totally accurate - expose himself … thoroughly as a pompous jackass. And in a few hundred words! I also find it rather amusing that a professor who accuses students of being barely literate is such a terrible writer.

[Slouka] … provide[s] a thumbnail sketch from an unnamed "senior colleague," who has apparently been hanging out a lot in the 17th century: "How I wish I could believe there will be some surcease, some righting of the ship in the foreseeable [future]. Alas, I fear it will not be so." My stars, will there be no surcease? Alack, what poverty my muse brings forth - O, Gods, blame me not if I no more can write!

"While colleges tend to respond very harshly to student plagiarism, when it comes to professors they often look the other way," according to Chronicle reporter Thomas Bartlett.

They did for best-selling historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, who has a new book out about Abraham Lincoln, even though she's never come clean about the passages she internalized from other authors most notably Lynne McTaggart. McTaggart wrote

"Kathleen Kennedy: Her Life and Times," which Goodwin "internalized" for her book "The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys."

Is it a coincidence that Goodwin is a former Harvard history professor and a member of its Board of Overseers?

Come to think of it, others accused of internalizing for their books have included famous Harvard law professors, including Lawrence Tribe, whose "God Save This Honorable Court" internalized parts of Henry J. Abraham's "Justices, Presidents and Senators," and Charles Ogletree, whose "All Deliberate Speed" internalized passages from Jack Balkin's "What Brown v. Board of Education Should Have Said."

So let's not be too hard on Viswanathan. In her crimson ivory tower, internalizing isn't exactly original.

[M]y response: A - fucking - MEN. The comic highlight of my year? A letter from Columbia asking me to donate money to the MFA program and its students. Are you kidding me?! I wish I could have gotten some of my money back from some of the incompetent professors who i’ve suffered classes with (including a professor who told a whole dinner party of students about my cocaine “problem” and subsequent leave of absence almost two years before, because well, everyone knew about your little problem, felicia - REALLY? THAT’S NEWS TO ME. GREAT TO KNOW I’M THE TOPIC OF GOSSIP IN THE ADMINISTRATION), half the students who were straight out of ivy league colleges, brimming with attitude and felt they knew more about everything than everyone …, so few teaching positions that you have to complete against PHD candidates for, scholarships that are laughable, and endless favoritism, networking events (i’ve only heard this because I refuse to go to one) that resemble awkward cattle calls, and boy, could i go on. I thought about shutting my mouth and saying nothing, but I’m sure the administation at Columbia couldn’t stand me anyway, so no matter.

Sometimes I wish I would have gone to New School. Then I wouldn’t be grinding my teeth to the roots in my sleep, fretting over fucking student loans.

For one high school student, it was presumably a magical prom night.

For several students at Baylor University’s law school, it was a noisy inconvenience.

Some students are still fuming that the dean of the law school, Brad Toben, allowed his son to have a high school pre-prom party in — of all places — a portion of the school’s library on Saturday evening, while several of them prepared for a hectic week of exams. A section of the library was closed for the event, and some students said the dinner was an unnecessary distraction during a stressful time of year.

Soon after the party began, some students and faculty members started complaining, and Toben quickly realized that he had made an error. He first apologized to the Waco Tribune-Herald, then forwarded his apology via e-mail to students and faculty members over the weekend.

“I exercised very poor judgment in the matter,” wrote Toben. “Many students were very angry and upset by the use of the space for this purpose, and at, as they have noted, the worst of times during exams. They are right. This was a breach of a basic principle that the law center is for the students’ benefit. I am very sorry and ask that you accept my apology.”

Courtney Hicks, a law student at the school, said that she and several of her classmates appreciate the apology, but feel that the dean has more work to do in remedying the situation.

“I think students would have appreciated a personal apology as opposed to a forwarded e-mail with a link to a newspaper article,” Hicks said. “Perhaps graduating law students will receive such an apology this upcoming Saturday at graduation.”

She added: “Although I respect Dean Toben as a person and as a contributing leader to the Waco community, I and other students feel as though this event only exemplified the lack of connection he has with the Baylor Law student body.”

Some faculty members think Toben has paid his punishment, and it’s time to move on. “The faculty knows he made a mistake, but they also fully appreciate the sincerity of his apology and don’t want to see him suffer further for this — which tangibly harmed nobody,” Brian Serr, a law professor at the school. “He is a good man.”

In an e-mail Serr sent to students on Tuesday, he wrote that he “fully appreciate[s] how upsetting it was to many that the library was set aside for reasons having nothing to do with the mission of Baylor Law School during such an important time in your legal education.”

“But apologies have now been made repeatedly and in various venues, it is now highly unlikely that such a use of the law library will ever be made again (certainly not at finals), and it is now time to move on,” he continued. “You deserved to win on this point, and you have won.”

If there is a Barry Bonds in college today — and remember that when Mr. Bonds started using steroids, as the book recounts, the substances were not banned in professional baseball — then perhaps it is someone like Kaavya Viswanathan. That Harvard sophomore won admission to the university partly through the ministrations of a consulting outfit named IvyWise, which charges $10,000 to $30,000 for its services. Then she wrote a roman à clef about the process, "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life."

Now, Miss Viswanathan has been accused of plagiarism, and, in an interview with The New York Times, has acknowledged an "unintentional and unconscious" pattern of appropriation from two other books. Of course, Barry Bonds has insisted that all he ever knowingly took were nutritional supplements.

What is the response to this blatant theft? From Viswanathan's statement: " ... I am a huge fan of her work and can honestly say that any phrasing similarities between her works and mine were completely unintentional and unconscious."

Unbelievably, the publisher of Little, Brown plans to reissue the book with "the inappropriate similarities" eliminated. Additionally, Viswanathan plans an acknowledgement to McCafferty in the new version. What could the acknowledgement possibly say? "You might want to read 'Sloppy Firsts' first"?

What's really scary is that Viswanathan did not sit down, write a book and send it to a publisher. No. She collaborated with 17th Street Productions Inc., a book packager that specializes in teen narratives and helped her develop her story.

Little, Brown publisher Michael Pietsch said he did not think Viswanathan's "inappropriate similarities" were caused by the pressures of being both a student and an author, or because of her collaboration with 17th Street Productions. Problem is, she wasn't an author. But she sure had motivation to become one when that $500,000 advance was offered. Talk about pressure. And that's in addition to her school work. Viswanathan wants to be an investment banker, not an author.

Little, Brown should pull the book, rather than revising it. Somebody here needs to acknowledge that stealing of that magnitude isn't done "unintentionally or unconsciously."

According to Kenan Professor of Psychology Daniel L. Schacter, a former chair of the department, examples of unintentional plagiarism by writers have been reported in the past.

“Psychologists refer to the phenomenon as ‘cryptomnesia,’” Schacter wrote in an e-mail. “Psychologists conceive of cryptomnesia as a failure of source memory, where one retrieves previously stored information, and attributes that information to the wrong source.”

“Various forms of source misattribution have been studied extensively—they represent a common type of memory failure,” he added.

If an allegation were made against another member of the university community, the clamor would be less, says Duke law professor Paul Haagen, chairman of the school's Academic Council.

"Somebody makes an allegation against somebody in the physics department, people think, 'OK, there's a terrible person in the physics department,'" he says. "Somebody makes an allegation against the lacrosse team, that's an allegation against Duke University. ... Athletics is the most likely place to have a major scandal in a university, and the scandals roil you in ways that just about nothing else can."

'Harvard University Assistant Dean John Ellison will investigate student author Kaavya Viswanathan, a teenage novelist who said she unintentionally took passages from other books.'

"[T]he publisher of the two books she borrowed from called her apology 'troubling and disingenuous.' ... Steve Ross, Crown's publisher, said that, 'based on the scope and character of the similarities, it is inconceivable that this was a display of youthful innocence or an unconscious or unintentional act.' He said that there were more than 40 passages in Ms. Viswanathan's book 'that contain identical language and/or common scene or dialogue structure from Megan McCafferty's first two books.' Mr. Ross called it 'nothing less than an act of literary identity theft.'"

[S]he declared… starkly in "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" that the experiment of Modernist urbanism was a thumping failure, and urged Americans to look instead to the traditional wisdom of the vernacular city and its fundamental unit, the street, instead of the establishment gurus. This was the first shot in a war that has been ongoing ever since. Decades later, her book become one of the seminal texts of the New Urbanism (along with the books of Lewis Mumford).

JHK: You hadn't gone to college, by the way?

JJ: Well, I hadn’t wanted to go to school after I finished high school. I was so glad to get out.

But I was angry at what was happening [to cities] and what I could see first hand was happening. It all came to me first hand. I didn’t have any abstractions about American culture. In the meantime I had gone a couple years to Columbia but I hadn’t been taking classes in American Culture. I sat in on one in Sociology for a while and I thought it was so dumb. [See one post down.] But I had a wonderful time with various science courses and other things that I took there. And I have always been grateful for what I learned in those couple of years.

the continued transformation of the discipline into a series of seminars where everyone sits around agreeing with one another and wondering why the rest of the world refuses to be so enlightened, where people are made to feel like they should be secretive and apologetic about the extent to which they hold beliefs that stray even-teensy-baby-steps from the orthodoxy.

It's like sociology is engaged in this campaign to purge the air in its hallways from heterodox thought as much as possible, and then it simultaneously wonders why students trained in this sterile environment have trouble articulating their ideas to the general public. I've thought about starting to pretend to be more politically conservative than I am in seminars just to feel less complicit in all this.

'D.C. Superior Court Judge John Bayly Jr. imposed new conditions for Finnerty as he awaits trial. Finnerty must obey a 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew, not be present anywhere alcohol is sold or consumed, have no contact with Bloxsom, and check in with court by phone every Friday.'

'Kaavya was my student last spring (in a section where I was a TA). I was surprised to learn she had written a book, as her writing was awful– I had given her low grades on her papers.

I feel bad for her, even though she was always falling asleep in section (as if you don’t notice a snoozing person sitting at a conference table for ten). Plagiarizing from chick lit has to be some kind of double whammy against artistic integrity.'

But Ms. McCafferty's books, published by Crown, a division of Random House, are, like Ms. Viswanathan's, about a young woman from New Jersey trying to get into an Ivy League college, in her case, Columbia. (Ms. Viswanathan's character has her sights set on Harvard.) Like the heroine of "Opal," Ms. McCafferty's character visits the campus, strives to earn good grades to get in and makes a triumphant high school graduation speech proclaiming her true values.

And the borrowings may be more extensive than have previously been reported. The Crimson cited 13 instances in which Ms. Viswanathan's book closely paralleled Ms. McCafferty's work. But there are at least 29 passages that are strikingly similar.

It was unclear whether Harvard would take any action against Ms. Viswanathan. "Our policies apply to work submitted to courses," said Robert Mitchell, the director of communications for Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences. "Nevertheless, we expect Harvard students to conduct themselves with integrity and honesty at all times."

Ms. Walsh, [her] agent, said that "obviously, I was shocked," to learn of the copying. "But knowing what a fine person Kaavya is, I believe any similarities were unintentional," she added. "Teenagers tend to adapt each others' language."

A 19-year-old Harvard student whose debut novel, [How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life], was set to become the next sensation of the American literary world has been accused of plagiarizing another US coming-of-age novel.

Written when Ms Viswanathan was still in high school in New Jersey, the novel earned her a $500,000 (£280,000) two-book contract and a film deal with DreamWorks. Largely thanks to lavish media coverage of her precocious success, the book has shot up the New York Times bestseller list. It was number 32 in the hardcover fiction list last week

Yesterday, however, the Harvard Crimson published strikingly similar passages from the new book and from the 2001 novel Sloppy Firsts, by Megan McCafferty, which is about teenage life in New Jersey.

Andrei Shleifer ’82, the economist embroiled in a fraud scandal that cost Harvard $26.5 million to settle, will return to teaching here this fall.

Shleifer, who was on leave this year, confirmed in an e-mail Thursday that he will be back to teaching Economics 1030, “Psychology and Economics,” his popular course co-taught with Professor of Economics David I. Laibson, as well as a junior economics seminar and a graduate course on law and economics at Harvard Law School.

But Shleifer will likely return with the controversy around him still swirling.

An 18,000-word article in January’s Institutional Investor magazine detailed Shleifer’s alleged efforts to use his inside knowledge of and sway over the Russian economy in order to make lucrative personal investments, all while leading a Harvard group advising the Russian government that was under contract with the U.S.

Neither Harvard nor Shleifer have admitted guilt in the matter. But a federal court ruled in 2004 that Harvard had breached its contract with the U.S., and that Shleifer and an associate were liable for conspiracy to defraud the government.

Last August, Harvard paid $26.5 million to settle the lawsuit, in addition to $2 million that Shleifer paid himself.

The controversy reignited on campus in February, as professors cast the details described in the Institutional Investor article as instances of favoritism and misconduct by Lawrence H. Summers.

The outgoing University president is a close friend of Shleifer, and the article suggests that Summers shielded his fellow economist from disciplinary action by the University.

Indeed, there has been no known action taken against Shleifer yet. But the Financial Times reported in March that Shleifer was under investigation by the Faculty’s Committee on Professional Conduct, and some professors have called on Harvard to issue a public accounting of Shleifer’s dealings in Russia.

The controversy has exposed a sharp split inside the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. While some professors outside the economics department have lambasted the University for not taking any action against Shleifer, many economists here have publicly defended their John Bates Medal-winning colleague as a vital intellectual asset.

“We think about him not as the guy who was involved in the AID lawsuit­—we think about him as the exciting, intellectually active colleague that we’ve always known,” Laibson said on Friday, referring to the U.S. Agency for International Develoment, which directed Shleifer’s group.

Meanwhile, Andrew D. Gordon ’74, the chair of the history department, last week called the defense of Shleifer on the strength of his academic achievements an “astounding” argument.

“If somebody has acted unethically or illegally, the fact that he or she is a Pulitzer Prize winner or a Nobel Prize candidate is totally irrelevant,” Gordon said. “I’m very puzzled to hear that from economists who are usually very logical thinkers.”

While Gordon said “it would be logical” for the Faculty to issue a public report if, in fact, he is under an internal investigation, Laibson said he wasn’t sure.

“I have no idea if such a report would clear the air or further inflame an already tense situation,” Laibson said.

Georgios N. Theophanous ’06, an economics concentrator who had Shleifer as a thesis adviser, called the professor a “very accurate” speaker and “remarkably energetic” thinker. He also rejected the relevance of Shleifer’s legal troubles to his standing as a Faculty member.

“He is an excellent professor and does remarkable research and those to me are the two main criteria that you should be using in deciding whether or not he’s going to be a valued professor,” Theophanous said. “The other stuff, that is for other people to worry about.”

Although there is clearly a correlation between earnings and a four-year degree, a correlation isn’t the same thing as a cause. Economists like Robert Reischauer ruffled feathers several years ago by pointing out that talented, driven kids are more likely to go to college in the first place — that they succeed, in other words, because of their innate abilities, not because of their formal education. Bill Gates, who dropped out of Harvard to start Microsoft, certainly doesn’t fit the stereotype of a low paid college dropout.

In fact, more than a couple of billionaires never graduated from college. Larry Ellison, cofounder of database giant Oracle, dropped out of the University of Illinois and is now worth $16 billion. Fellow billionaire John Simplot, inventor of the frozen French fry, never even finished high school. Neither did Alan Gerry, who built the first cable television network in upstate New York and then sold it to Time Warner Cable for $2.8 billion.

In fact, there is plenty of evidence that what really matters is how smart you are, not where — or even if — you went to school. According to a number of studies, small differences in SAT scores, which you take before going to college, correlate with measurably higher incomes. And, according to a report from the National Bureau of Economic Research, the lifetime income of high-school dropouts is directly associated with their scores on a battery of intelligence tests.

By this logic, the real economic value in a Princeton degree is not the vaunted Princeton education, but in signaling potential employers that you are smart enough to get into Princeton. Actually, attending the classes is irrelevant. [Should the comma be there? Sentence makes sense either way, I guess, but reads better without.] A few years back, we even went so far as to speculate that an entrepreneur could build a healthy businesses by charging, say $16,000, to certify qualified high-school graduates as Ivy League material. (See: “Is Yale A Waste Of Money?” ) College-skippers could invest the $144,000 savings and have a nice nest-egg built up by the time they are in their mid-30s. And they could use their formative years between 18 and 22 to learn an actual trade.