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Friday, December 17, 2004
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IDENTITY, TRAGEDY, AND AGON IN MODERN PLAGIARISM
UD is beginning to worry about herself. She has read so many stories about professorial plagiarism lately that she’s developed a shameful obsession with the lamest excuses offered by the plagiarists. But they have to be truly lame. Simply saying, like Thomas J. Woodall of Boise State University, that anything appearing on the internet is “free and clear” is insufficient (though Woodall gets points for having plagiarized a letter to the editor and sent it to the BSU student newspaper). No - for UD to offer any real credit, your excuse must be outstandingly, heart-stoppingly shameless. As in: I: MAN’S IMMORTAL QUEST FOR IDENTITY Most shameless so far is Professor Charles J. Amtzen of Arizona State University, who, on being accused by a furious graduate student of having stolen his work (Amtzen “lifted whole paragraphs of my work and represented it as his own”), said the following: “I take the blame in that I didn’t fully comprehend Dwayne’s search for identity here.” Here are Amtzen's rivals for the crown: II: THE TRAGIC VISION Roger Shepherd, a now-fired professor of fine arts at the Parsons School of Design, plagiarized freely from a variety of books for his (now shredded by the publisher) work on significant modern buildings. When cornered, he referred darkly to a naughty research assistant, and then called the incident “a tragedy.” III: SAMSON AGONISTES The prodigious George O. Carney of Oklahoma State dismissed all of the complaints his raft of plagiarees have made against him as, in the words of the Chronicle of Higher Education reporter who interviewed him, motivated by ‘academic jealousy’ or even in-state football rivalry.” |